Participants in a female circumcision ceremony line up in Ubangi-Shari (Oubangi Chari), a French colony in central Africa, now part of the Central African Republic. Female circumcision (now often termed female genital mutilation) which is the partial or total cutting away of the external female genitalia, has been practised for centuries in parts of Africa, generally as an element of a rite of passage preparing young girls for womanhood and marriage. The procedure is often performed without anaesthetic by lay practitioners with little or no knowledge of medicine or anatomy and can cause death or permanent health problems, and severe pain. The adolescents in this photograph wear beaded veils to cover their faces. The image is by Casimir Zagourski, a pioneering photographer of Central African people and customs, who settled in Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1924. His postcard series L'Afrique qui disparait! (Disappearing Africa), of which this card is one, gained him renown.