More evidence for the Under-development of Africa by Non-African Invaders.

"Here we have asked how male circumcision has come to have its particular distribution among Bantu-speaking peoples. The result has been the suggestion that male circumcision was an ancient practice amongst the Bantu and that non-circumcising Bantu groups have abandoned the practice."

"Lack of male circumcision among Bantu speakers is a real phonomenon: at the time of the earliest relevant European description, the non circumcising Bantu groups had abandoned the practice through a contiguous area. In an ultimate sense they had abandoned it because their neighbours had, and differences in sexual risk behavior for HIV transmission cannot be expected to sort according to those same boundaries. Still, there may be some hope of isolating significant differences when it is observed that the core whih have also abandoned male adolescent rites of initiation and, except in the south, age-grades. But these are a kind of 'package' of interrelated institutions and cannot presently be shown to have anything to do with differences in heterosexual risk behaviour."

"The only material seen in the present work to suggest different risk behaviour between circumcised and uncircumcised persons was for individuals within the same group and concerned men leaving their traditional lands for wage labour in cities or at mines before they were of an age to be circumcised, including men who specifically left for such employment to avoid circumcision. Then, commonly, the uncircumcised men had wages to avail themselves of prostitutes while those who remained in traditional lands were circumcised and availed themselves of prostitutes less frequently or not at all."

"The model proposed here suggests that the tendency through Bantu-speaking areas in prehistory was for more and more groups to abandon this practice. Presumably this is accelerating, especially amongst the fringes of the non-circumcising areas, as male circumcision is now sometimes simply emblematic or traditional, although still signifying adult status, and commonly lacks the wider social significance it once had."