Imbalu runs on a biennial cycle, held only in even numbered years, and the months leading up to the operation are themselves ritual time: candidates are danced from home to home by male kinsmen and age-mates, smeared with substances including millet paste, mud and yeast said to strengthen or purify them, and paraded to drumming and the kadodi and inemba dances that mark out the whole community's participation in a rite that is never a private family matter. The circumcision itself is performed standing, in the open, before an audience of kinsmen and often the wider village, without anaesthetic, by a specialist circumciser, and the entire performance is built around the candidate's composure: showing pain, flinching, or crying out is remembered as a permanent mark against a man's courage, repeated in memory and gossip for the rest of his life, while enduring the cut in silence and stillness is the act that actually confers basani, adult male standing.
An uncircumcised man, however old, is basinde, treated socially as still a boy, excluded from full participation in adult male affairs regardless of his age or achievements elsewhere; Suzette Heald's fieldwork describes the practical social cost of remaining basinde as severe enough that men who left the region as children have returned specifically to undergo Imbalu as adults rather than carry the status home.