THE SHADOWN YOU SHALL NOT STEP UPON A Western researcher at the girl's coming-out ceremony of the Nkoya Wim van Binsbergen |
to my daughter Nezjma
1.
Not until the wee hours
does the dancing die down. The special festive xylophones (as
large as a Dutch dining room table for eight) come to more and
longer pauses. The crowd, which has up to that point been
dancing, singing and chanting round the musicians, is thinning.
The guests of honour (old men in shabby clothes and some fattish
men in their forties in jeans and embroidered multicolored
shirts, or the other symbol of municipal success: a striped suit)
have been accommodated in houses not far from the dancing place.
Some very young girls, who have not yet been initiated, are still
dancing in small groups at the xylophones, the eyes turned up in
ecstasy and sometimes shut; but their teen-age boy-friends have
taken the place of the professional musicians and the music is no
longer great. Yet every now and then spectacular musical battles
develop between these amateur musicians at the various
xylophones, in which they profile themselves, through the choice
of their melodies and partially improvised wanton lyrics, as
representatives of different clans, valleys, ethnic subgroups.
Occasionally the fun-making threatens to evolve in an actual
fight. But the tendency towards such active expressiveness
diminishes strongly after three, four in the morning. Scores of
people of all ages are sitting and lying around the mens
fire and the womens fire. Those awake are still passing the
seven-days beer, but those half drunk and asleep are treated with
more consideration than earlier in the night.
The ten or twenty women who had come to sell a pail of
home-brewed beer, have long sold their ware. After having stored
their valuable empty plastic or zinc container at an address
nearby, the women have mingled with the guests, joined in with
the dancing and singing, and have finally also ended up at the
womens fire.
In the atmosphere of sexual implications with which
conversations, jokes and lyrics, were saturated earlier that
night, several have found a partner for the night, and have
(after some dealing with a befriended inhabitant) retired
together somewhere to a nearby house; this is a town and one has
to do without the bushes which in villages are always within
walking distance. The muted conversations around the fire now
mainly concern national and regional politics, tension within
kindred groups, the cost of living, but now and then one does
indeed give thought to the physical and domestic qualities of the
one teen-age girl who at this festival, before hundreds of
people, is to be promoted to womanhood.
She too lies in a house near the dancing place, and not, like she
would in the village, on a bed especially constructed for her in
the open air. But otherwise the rules are the same: she may not
utter a sound, may not move, and may certainly not leave her
place; even though she has pain from the big white bead that she
holds clutched in her vagina, made very dry by means of obnoxious
herbs. Even if she is afraid and thinks shes suffocating
under the loads of horse blankets that cover her face and naked
body; no matter how bad she has to relieve herself from the beer
which, against all rules, her mentrix has given her at the
beginning of the evening. In between her choked crying spells she
listens to the diminishing sound of revelry. She is especially
tuned to the sound of rain. For this is the celebration through
which she shall finally become a woman, after months of seclusion
in which the only manner she could set a step out of doors was in
a stooping position and covered by a blanket; after months of
rough sexual and social teachings from the part of her mentrix
and other elderly women in the evenings. If rain falls tonight,
it means infertility, no sons that will protect her in future,
when she will be old and ugly, no loin clothes, no jewelry,
perhaps even no food.
The blood spirit Kanga which at her first menstruation many
months ago had given evidence of possessing her body, will be
permanently exorcised within a few hours, by virtue of the public
celebration of her coming-out. No longer will she dwell in the
dangerous intermediate zones in which the powers that manifest
themselves through her menstruation blood are still untamed, and
cause damage to all vital processes in the community around her.
She is familiar with the sight of open, suppurating wounds,
tuberculosis, wilting leaves of maize and cassava in the fields,
and knows that these are the evil effects of Kanga when still in
a state in which the community cannot control him: not only as
menstruation blood, but also as the fruits of miscarriages, and
through children that were set up blindly
procreated without the mother having menstruated since her last
childbirth. She shivers at the thought of being the bearer of
this force. But within a few hours her coming-out as a woman will
(aside of the short periods of menstruation and childbirth) free
her from this horrid accessory. She will not have to hide herself
under a blanket any more; albeit that from now on she is to keep
her thighs covered with a cloth wrap in public. She will no
longer be kankanga, a
novice, a trainee-woman possessed by Kanga, but mbereki,
woman, member of a solidary group of women, well
informed about social and physical details of her role as wife,
daughter-in-law, mother and mistress, and well aware of rights
and duties that derive from them.
Eaten by stage fright she traces in her mind the dancing
movements that have been beaten into her over the past months.
She will have to singly perform them before hundreds of men and
women, later, after sunrise. But she will be beautiful. Her
mentrix has already shown her the stack of cloth wraps with which
she will give her hips and buttocks the volume of a matron;[2] the bright head scarfs
and the bead necklaces that her favorite sister has put to her
disposal; the strings of beer-bottle tops, that she will wear
over her cloth wraps so that they will jingle with every dance
movement, like the bells in the white fathers church; the
rattles of the ball-shaped, wood-crusted rushaka
fruit[3] which will accompany the
light metal sound with the pointed shuffle of the remaining seed
in the fruits; her uncles trilby hat that she shall wear on
her head scarf and in whose sunken top the spectators will put
their coins, as a tribute to her mentrix who has guided her up to
this point. And finally the long string of white beads, that was
once worn by her grandmother at her coming-out ceremony,
beads that were once traded for eagerly, in slaves, cooking pots,
hoes, guns and tobacco, and that will now be draped across her
chest over her shoulders and under her arms, accentuating her
uncovered young breasts in all their glory.
Through the thin pole-and-dagga walls of her uncles town
house she hears the music diminish; now and then she recognizes
the voices of her younger girl-friends, who may yet dance
carefree and sing to the music, and are calling out to each other
excitedly. Her over-full bladder causes a dull pain about to
eclipse all other sensations, but she must persist.
In the corner of the room a much younger girl is peacefully
asleep on a straw mat. As a second, almost as a bridesmaid, she
will dance along with the kankanga
the next morning, just as she has not moved from her side during
the preceding months of training. But she still has the real
childs body, is not yet menstruating, and it will be years
until she herself will be at the center of a coming-out ceremony.
At the break of day the mentrix and other women enter the bedroom
and pull the blankets off the novice. One assesses if she is
still dry, and if she has been able to hold the bead. She is
praised for her endurance. Her naked body is rubbed with castor
oil. Her crown, temples and breasts are sprinkled with white
maize meal; here in town the ceremonial white mpemba
clay is not available. Around her hips they drape the strings of
multicolored loin beads that for the rest of her life will be
hidden under her clothes and demarcate the domain of her nudity,
day and night. While the women finish her festive attire, they
sing softly the initiation songs that were imprinted on her these
months:
Listen to what we
tell you
on your coming-out ceremony, kankanga.
Turn not your back on your man
Over his shadow you may never step
Avoid the place behind the house
where your father-in-law urinates.
Listen to what we tell you
on your coming-out ceremony, kankanga.
and
The old woman told
us
They made a girl into a woman
Although she had no breasts yet
The old woman told us
They made a girl into a woman
But there was no salt for the porridge.
and others. The second is
also awakened and dressed beautifully, in a manner that only
differ in slight details from that of the kankanga.
When all is done the mentrix wraps herself in a big blanket. The
novice and her second crawl under it. In stooping position, their
hands resting on the womans back, they are to blindly
shuffle behind her, onto the dancing place, where dawn has broken
and the xylophones and drums, through warming-up runs of scales,
have once again been brought to tune.
Practically all present during the night have gathered again on
the dancing place. Aside of a few who are obstinately sleeping
off their liquor, the places around the mens fire and the
womens fire are now empty. Neighbours, and passers-by (in
town usually belonging to other ethnic groups than the Nkoya)
stop and stand in the passages between the houses. For, although
the coming-out ceremony of the Nkoya is in many ways unique, and
although no other Zambian people is as skillful on the xylophone,
practically everyone in South Central Africa is on the basis of
his or her own groups cultural tradition more or less
familiar with the institution of the coming-out ceremony, at
which a girl is to dance solo in order to be made into a woman.
One stops and stands, not because it is an exotic ceremony
performed by the rather disdained Nkoya minority, but because the
coming-out of a girl is regarded as of almost universal human
significance. The members of the family and of the ethnic group,
and other spectators are crowding up to such an extent that the
brothers and younger uncles of the kankanga
have to break off branches from the few,
scrawny town trees in order to sweep, in an exaggeratedly
threatening manner, the onlookers off the dancing place. Thus a
square is cleared in which the girl is to dance, but it silts
down again and again with onlookers.
A small group of women is posted near the musicians. The mentrix
and the girls hidden under the blanket arrive at the dancing
place like a poorly-imitated giant beetle. Accompanied by the
unexpectedly pure music of xylophones and drums (you would not
say the musicians have a hangover), the women sing high-pitched
initiation songs. The mentrix pulls away the blanket and the
novice rises limp and dizzy, her eyes squinting against the
morning light. But she soon finds her balance and she begins to
dance as she has been taught: taking small steps, barely moving
from her place, but with the ankle rattles giving the rushing and
sharp tickling sound; with slight, subdued shaking movements of
her pelvis, causing the thick pack of cloth wraps to sway and the
strings of bottle tops to jingle; her arms bent at some distance
in front of her breast, her hands sometimes loosely closed to
form fists, and then again stretched out with the palms opened
and turned up, as if she were receiving a great gift, or as if
she were devotedly offering to the gathered community, in a big
half-gourd, all the food that in the course of her life will pass
through her hands. Her eyes are practically closed and her head
is inclined forward as if she were attentively listening to the
music. Humble and modest, she evades the eyes that are intensely
fixed on her.
The intense concentration in which one observes her at the
beginning of each sequence of music lasts but a few seconds. Then
relatives and friends make their way through the crowd, to put
money or white beads on the top of the hat on her head. The girl
stops her dance after every song played by the musicians and sung
by the womens choir. She stands in the same characteristic
posture (inclined head, arms bent in front of her, hands in
half-open fists) while the mentrix removes the donations from her
hat. Her second dances along with her by her side (but not by far
as beautifully) and also stops at these moments. The young male
relatives use the opportunity to clear the dancing square by
frighteningly whipping around their branches (but without really
hitting anyone); they are so proud of their sister
that they insist on maximal dancing space and attention for her.
Cheers of encouragement and other comments rise from the group of
spectators. Close female relatives are crying openly. Many a
woman, having come to the end of her small supply of coins, pulls
the beads from her own neck, makes her way through the on-pushing
crowd, and deposits them on the girls hat. Close male
relatives are loudly boasting about their sister.
Many, both men and women are moved and are shouting or singing
with a lump in their throats.
Before the girl starts her last dance, the square is once again
rid of the on-pushing crowd. At the edge of the square a chair is
placed, on which a father of the girl is seated (her actual
genitor or one of his many brothers that is to
say one of his brothers, cousins, second cousins, later male
partners of the girls mother, etc.; it is far from
self-evident which of the men present is most eligible to take
the seat, and a sharp dispute behind or even in front of the
scene often takes place in this phase of the coming-out
ceremony). The girl dances up to him and kneels down. She claps a
respectful female greeting and, with her head humbly turned away,
she offers the father all the money that she has collected. The
father can barely hide his emotion. There is a lot at stake. The
collected amount is a measure for the degree to which the
community is pleased with this new woman, and with her mentrix.
If the breasts of the girl are yet too small, if her dancing
movements are not found sufficiently subdued or musical, or if
she has to stop after a few songs, she will reap little
appreciation. There are, however, girls who dance like the Nkoya
queens of precolonial times, with large full breasts that shine
deeply in the gathering morning light; and they work not only
through the familiar Nkoya songs, but also boast quite a
repertoire of dancing tunes of the Nkoyas neighbouring
peoples in West Zambia. The coming-out ceremony of a girl like
that is long reminisced, her mentrix may expect an extremely high
fee, and the girl will be considered an ideal wife.
By the greeting of a father and the handing in of the money, she
has definitely left her girls life behind her. She is led
away under the blanket one more time, to the yard of a nearby
house, where she is seated on a mat on proud and formal display.
She receives all kinds of gifts: cloth wraps, beads, head scarfs,
kitchen utensils, a handkerchief (to clean the penis of her
partner after intercourse) and a suitcase that can be locked
for both male and female Nkoya the only private domain
from which they can exclude all others.
The second also receives a small gift and is dismissed from her
obligations.
For the first time in months the kankanga
may show her face to men. A blanket still covers her hair,
shoulders and upper body; but those who address her elder
relatives and are willing to donate a small coin, may fold away
the blanket and thus inspect a large part of her physical beauty.
Traditionally this is the lovers market but in fact
nowadays most girls have a steady boy-friend by the time they
celebrate their coming-out ceremony. Fact remains that the kankanga
shyly but as matter of course undergoes this inspection by the
few men who still show an interest. Most of the guests leave
right after the dancing is over; habitually moping about the
quality or quantity of the festival beer, or disappointed in the
performance of the kankanga.
Those who stay on finish the beer. A few male elders (up to this
point everything has been in the hands of women) are preparing to
finish the girl puberty training with a stern talk about her
duties and obligations as a grown woman. It is impressed upon the
mentrix that she will be held responsible if in future the girl
fails to fulfill her duties towards her husband, father-in-law
and other in-laws.
After this talk the coming-out ceremony is over, and the girl is
prepared to go through life as a grown woman. Within a few years
her relatives will arrange a first marriage for her. There will
almost certainly be other marriages after that first one. But
never again will a celebration be so dramatically centered around
her, as was her initiation or it would have to be her
funeral, that is, if she reaches a ripe enough age for her
funeral to leave room for fulfillment and not only for grief.
2.
All maturing Nkoya girls
have to go through the training period and coming-out ceremony as
described above. Women as well as men, villagers and urban
migrants alike, consider this form of initiation (ku
tembwisha kankanga: to make the kankanga
come out) as the most specific and valid aspect that the Nkoya
culture has to offer. The day that she finishes her training
period by coming-out, is the most beautiful one for every Nkoya
woman. In telling her life story it is a calibrating point in
time, for all other events and occasions. In the months April
through July one can witness a Nkoya coming-out ceremony
practically every weekend, either in the rural areas where the
Nkoya form the majority (Kaoma district and its surroundings in
Western Zambia) or in the towns of Central and Southern Zambia
where the Nkoya immigrants form a small minority. In the years
that I did research amongst these people, I visited many of these
coming-out ceremonies. While in the beginning I was moved merely
by that which was outwardly perceptible, the public aspects of
the event, I gradually acquired more insight in its background
and meaning. On the one hand, it is the threshold to adulthood,
on the other, it is the most comprehensive and compelling
expression of the complex of representations, symbols, norms and
patterns of behaviour through which, among the Nkoya, the
relationships between the sexes is structured and carried over to
the next generation.
It is remarkable that there is no male counterpart to the
coming-out ceremony. There are strong indications[4] that the Nkoya did
practice: from the middle of the previous century up to around
1920 a form of boys initiation, a variant of the Mukanda cultural
complex (of circumcision, secret teachings, masked dances etc.)
which are practiced by many peoples of East Angola, Southern
Zaïre, and Northwest Zambia. Today however, Nkoya boys are no
longer circumcised and (except occasional, hunting camps in the
depths of woods that last for weeks) not exposed to any kind of
traditional, formal training. The Nkoya even make fun of the
surrounding peoples that do practise circumcision. The
disappearance of the boys initiation has further emphasized the
meaning of the girls initiation as characteristic for the Nkoya
culture, and as a concentration point of their cultural heritage.
Elderly men and women, who have in modern times have rather lost
their grip on the youngsters, emphasize the fact that (as
compared to girl even though nowadays even the latter have
grown somewhat rebellious) it is the boys who are really
barbarous, unmanageable and uncivilized: for the boys miss the
detailed knowledge of and respect for social and sexual rules
which are hardhandedly imprinted upon women during the
girls initiation, but which of course concern both sexes.
3.
Every time I witnessed a
coming-out ceremony, I was moved in my innermost being. As the
girl danced, the female relatives burst out crying and also the
men showed their enthusiasm and emotion, tears would run down my
cheeks. I have written several poems about the coming-out
ceremony, and a long story situated in a Nkoya environment of a
century and a half ago. For years I played with the thought to
have my own daughter, Dutch as she may be, undergo the initiation
and coming-out ceremony, when her time would have come.
But what then makes it so beautiful and sacred? What does this
exotic initiation ceremony, that in its musical, dramatic,
physical and public manner is so completely different from the
way my own culture deals with the girls becoming adult have to
offer, so that it could time and time again be a highlight in the
participant observation of a western, male, researcher? At my
first introduction to the Nkoya coming-out ceremony, fifteen
years ago, I did not pose these questions in terms of
self-analysis, but tried to control my emotion as a confusing
by-product of what I held to be the purely scientific, objective
pursuit of knowledge. In the meantime I have experienced dozens
of coming-out ceremonies, and after the first years I could rely
on a certain knowledge of the Nkoya culture, language and social
relationships. My interest developed from the so-called
scientific registration of an alien culture, to trying to acquire
insight in the political, symbolic and esthetic implications of
the interaction between cultures, social classes and sexes
including my own. My profession as an anthropologist aims at
purposely bringing about such interaction, as a main source of
the acquisition of knowledge. I have come to doubt more and more
the value of the distant, ephemeral and instrumental methods,
which are considered to constitute the conditions for a
professional approach. Much of my literary work contains the
overflow of contents, images and emotions resulting from that
approach; I have come to realize more and more that one word or
gesture easily understood and answered in the field, implies
knowledge of greater validity and range than most formal
social-scientific discourses. The question I raise is not a
scientific one, and when seeking to answer it, science can be of
mere indirect aid. Self-examination, and reconstruction of
emotions and experiences of informants, hardly fit
within the framework of current social sciences, and demand a
more personal approach.
In my question, two problem areas intermingle. In the first
place, the contact between the researcher and Africa engenders up
complex emotions that we cannot fit into our scholarly reports,
but that are nevertheless worth analysing, if only to relativize
our scientific findings. In the second place however, in the
present case, this North-South confrontation of cultures is
crossed by the fundamental confrontation between men and women
a confrontation which since the revival of feminism is no
less politicized. The researcher is, in this case, both a
westerner visiting Africa, and a man visiting a womens
ceremony.
In a first attempt to trace the source of my emotion at the
coming-out ceremony, a number of additional explanations should
not be overlooked.
By the time the solo dance in the morning is performed, the
receptivity and emotional susceptibility of the spectators,
including my own, is heightened by the use of alcohol and the
lack of sleep; the joy, excitement and emotion of the scores of
onlookers is highly contagious.
Then there is perhaps a certain pin-up effect. A woman
breast-feeding her child is a everyday sight in the streets of
urban Zambia, and certainly within the larger intimacy of village
life; but for the rest womens breasts are only occasionally
shown: at nocturnal healing rituals and at funerals
occasions at which woman publicly seek contact with a supposed
extra-sensory world. I always found it shocking to see the upper
bodies of little girl at the coming-out ceremony suddenly
stripped of their neutrality and presented as ostentatious female
nudity, accentuated by the crossed white string of beads and the
heavy layers of cloth wraps. Only a few months ago they were
still were carefree in their underpants, lugging their little
brothers and sisters about. Nevertheless the dancing kankanga
is by no means a provocative sight, not to the African men
present (for whom female breasts are hardly erotic) nor to the
western male spectator, who may come from a breast-obsessed
culture, but for whom the girl is too young, and her dancing too
reticent (her upper body practically motionless) to rouse any
other than fatherly or brotherly feelings.
And thirdly, the coming-out ceremony is indeed a condensation of
the Nkoya group identity: what they consider most essential for
their own culture is here visibly performed. The few potbellied,
socially fairly successful townsmen who exuberantly indulge in
dance, song and drink, who shake the hand-rattles and are
crowding up for a turn at the xylophone, at the coming-out
ceremony noisily compensate for the fact that in everyday urban
life they tend to conceal as much as possible their belonging to
the Nkoya minority. The few of the Nkoya people who have acquired
a position in the wider Zambian society, are here (because of
their leadership malgré lui) just
as essential here as the average participants: the many not yet
initiated teen-age girls, too young for the role of kankanga,
who rock to the music in ecstatic trance and could not be kept
away from the xylophones; or the adults who are passionately and
hardly secretively taking care of their love-affairs as if the
coming-out ceremony were a fertility cult in the first place.
All this contributes to the total effect, but does not seem to
reach the core. The most profound explanation for the emotion is
perhaps the one based on the universal aspect of so-called rites
de passage. They are to be found in all
cultures. Everywhere they have the dual function of emphasizing
and safeguarding the normal order of social life on the one hand,
and of offering on the other hand to selected
individuals the opportunity, against a set high price, to effect
their own personal boundary transition from one life sphere to
another as demarcated (by means of prohibitions, privileges,
anxieties) within that order: from foetus to human being, from
childhood to adulthood, from the status of an outsider to that of
a member, from life to death. The drama of growing up, the hope,
the yearning and the inevitable disappointment connected with it,
is universally felt, and thus as emotional as the
spectators personal projection can possibly make it.
Experiencing life and death in a foreign community, during
field-work, is recognizable in a similar manner, even though the
cultural forms in which these rites of
passage are cast, usually differ greatly
from those at home. The courage, the tests, the promises, the
glory of the Nkoya during her solo dance bring up typical
adolescent issues that are also widespread in North Atlantic
society, through pop music, literature and film. The Nkoya women
who burst into tears during the solo dance of their youngest
sister the kankanga,
explain that it makes them think of their own coming-out
ceremony, and of their many beloved agemates who died before they
could witness the coming-out of the present
kankanga. Over and above this aspect, I
suspect that they, like myself, are overcome by the infinite
grace and tenderness of the moment, through which the kankanga
for a little while becomes the incarnation of all human potential
at self-realization, beauty and integrity, which for them (for
us) has long been lost. Surrounded by the ruins of older female
bodies (very often not much older than thirty) the kankanga
is an almost unbearable symbol of transitory perfection, that
saddens because it is so fleeting, but also gives pride because
the unattainable, for one moment, becomes attainable.
The extent to which I can identify with the kankangas
boundary transgression, is thus closely linked to the extent to
which the boundaries between my own culture and that of the kankanga
dissolve in an awareness of universal recognizability of human
themes.
This answer may be partially relevant, but is not sufficient. For
this universal aspect might by definition yield an infinite
number of condensation points for my emotion: among the Nkoya, in
Western Europe, anywhere in the world. Why then precisely here
and now? Undoubtedly because there is an additional
autobiographical aspect, which converts that universal aspect to
my very specific situation of researcher confronted with this
specific other culture.
But before this personal aspect becomes accessible, I want to
assess whether perhaps some other universal factor is perhaps the
decisive one. While the initiation ending in the festive
coming-out ceremony of the kankanga
settles the transition from child to adult, it at the same time
expresses an equally sharp distinction which is central to the
ceremony and the preceding training, but which is absolutely not
transgressed, conquered or neutralized: the one between male and
female. Undoubtedly, this distinction, so prominent precisely at
the coming-out ceremony, contributes to the experience you have
as male anthropologist amongst the audience. And it is here that
my emotions, matter of course and universal as long as they
concern the passage to adulthood, suddenly become problematic. Is
it due to identification based on my being a fellow human being,
or rather due to an emphasis on my being male and by implication
fundamentally different, that I as a man am so moved at this
womens celebration?
Is then the beauty that I experience a liberating one (even
although I am a man I may take part in womens
affairs) or an oppressive one (because
I am a man, I enjoy this womens affair in which the
subordination of women is the main theme)?
Am I crying of pride over this new woman, human like myself, who
after a painful learning process, and with a whole life full of
economic, social and emotional uncertainties yet before her, may
nevertheless manifest a proud identity as a woman? Or are they
crocodile tears, and is my emotion partially caused by the fact
that I, as a man, again see a woman being imprisoned within a web
of oppressive rules and representation that make her subservient
to male interests with which, across cultural boundaries,
I can perhaps identify even more than with the transition to
adulthood that the girl goes through?
Specified as above, the answer to the question concerning the
roots of my emotion at the coming-out ceremony will have to
entail a statement about relationships between the researcher,
the culture being researched and his own culture, particularly in
so far as the structuring of gender relations is concerned. Since
the optimistic days of Margaret Mead, Clyde Kluckhohn and other
humanistic American anthropologists, anthropology has
often claimed to hold up a mirror to North Atlantic society. Only
by showing how comparable matters are structured differently
elsewhere, would one acquire an explicit awareness of structures,
rules, presumptions of our own culture. Our own puberty seems
even more tumultuous and conflictive in contrast with the image
of the harmonious puberty on Samoa, etc. Recent doubt has been
cast on the validity of Meads analysis: according to a
contemporary critic, girls life on Samoa was not at all as
harmonious as she claimed it to be on the basis of allegedly
faulty material.[5]This suggests that this
mirror effect can work two ways: perhaps the anthropologist only
finds what he or she is looking for; perhaps we merely project,
onto the cultures to be researched, our own experiences as shaped
by the western culture, and mainly report about ourselves under
the cloak of writing about exotic others. This effect is probably
inevitable and perhaps capable of being compensated, but that
does not make it less relevant.
What kind of mirror, then, does my description of the Nkoya
coming-out ceremony hold up to us? Is it the umpteenth image of
female oppression, a variation of the almost universal
patriarchal syndrome, even more deceptive because it leads to
concentrated expressions of great beauty and drama? In that case
the man delivering the description is either naive, or a partisan
of a male chauvinism surpassing cultural borders. Or does the
Nkoya coming-out ceremony indeed contain something that rises
above female oppression, and may the man who enthusiastically
reports on it flatter himself that his emotions spring from
admiration for and solidarity with women? As a man and as a
researcher I feel the profound need to formulate this dilemma, to
supply the ethnographic material towards such an answer, and
attempt to give the answer itself as far as I am concerned. I am
aware of the fact that my argumentation will rouse irritation
with certain exponents of the feminist movement: they will
possibly detect a suspicious eagerness to please, and explain my
positive assessment of gender relations among the Nkoya as
expressions of a hidden sexism, all the more dangerous because of
its good intentions.
The extent to which the Nkoya coming-out ceremony is a ritual of
female oppression, can only be traced against the background of
gender relationships amongst this people in general. I apologize
for the ethnographic detail required in this case; it is the
necessary penultimate step in the self research on which this
essay revolves. I realize moreover that in order to tighten my
argument not only the ethnography also the autobiography of the
researcher should be dealt with in greater detail than I am
prepared to do here so that also in this aspect I have no
defence against the obvious reproach of projection and distortion
on my part.
4.
Looking at the Nkoya
culture from the viewpoint of womens oppression, one gets a
rather negative impression at first sight, which however, when
taking a closer look requires many positive corrections.
In a humiliating training of months, during which the girl is
frequently beaten and scolded. Going naked indoors except for a
flimsy symbolic cover of plant fibres,[6]she acquires all
knowledge and attitudes which she needs as an adult Nkoya woman.
Besides specific sexual functioning, the initiation teachings
relate mainly to two other subjects: dancing, and daily life from
cooking and agriculture, via all subtleties concerning the
dealings with relatives and relations, up to ritual taboos
concerning female pollution. Many of these teachings are embedded
in aphorisms and songs which condense the material in a rather
cryptic, emblematic way. The initiation into the mystical
solidarity of all women entails the learning of an esoteric
language, in which key words of everyday life are substituted by
secret womens words. Furthermore the emphasis lies on the
impressing of a certain female behaviour considered ideal, in
which the focus is unconditional respect for elders (regardless
of sex) and for men.
Daily teachings are given by the mentrix, who is in charge of the
girl. The mentrix is a woman between thirty and sixty years old,
who is generally known as someone who successfully lives up to
and propagates the rules of womanhood. She should not have strong
family ties with her pupil; she is expected to inculcate the
Nkoya rules and representations in all objectivity, and to
underline these forcefully where necessary, without the danger of
preferential treatment, and avoiding the risk that specific
sub-cultural peculiarities such as exist in all distinct families
and all distinct villages should get the upper hand.
After practical work in the fields (to which she must make her
way blindly, stooped under a blanket) in the daytime, follows a
more formal training session in most of the evenings. The mentrix
is assisted in her task by other adult women. They take on a
distant and unfriendly attitude; a hard-headed or impudent pupil
gets a beating. Little wonder girls experience their formal
training period as a harsh trial.
Great emphasis lies on the acquisition of an adult female sexual
role. The girl is taught to enlarge her vagina till three fingers
can go in; she is taught to wiggle and incline her pelvis during
the coitus; and acquires knowledge about secret herbs that
(unfortunately at the cost of damage to her fertility) prevent
vaginal secretion to serve the Nkoya male ideal :
penetration in a bone-dry vagina. She has already been setting
herself to make her labia larger than nature provides: starting
in her ninth or tenth year up until her coming-out ceremony, the
girl spends hundreds of hours, by herself or in company of
girl-friends, indoors or somewhere in an open spot in the woods,
stretching these parts of her body until they have reached an
extra length of some centimeters.[7]
Nkoya women take pride in their sexual skills. As long as their
claims are made on the abstract, formal normative level of
expressing their own culture in general ideal terms (the level
that every good anthropologist tries to break through in search
of a statements that are closer to real life) those skills are
solely judged as their contribution to the satisfaction of male
desires. Women are taught to always take male sexual advances
seriously; if you nevertheless do not wish to oblige, it is
better to make up an excuse that leaves the male Ego intact:
simulating menstruation is the easiest solution, and you can
always put a bulging, but unnecessary sanitary towel in your
underpants. To sexually refuse your own steady male partner is
hardly possible at all. On the other hand, a woman must oppress
all manifestations of her own excitement let alone orgasm. Having
an orgasm is a right of men, and women that show that they
feel something (the euphemism I seek to conveyed here
is the Nkoya, not the English one) stand a chance of getting a
beating: the man feels insulted, as if it is not he trying
to make her pregnant, but the other way around. Nkoya women
believe that they have less need of sexual delight than their men
have; and such pleasure they occasionally hope to derive not so
much from their marital partner, but at the most from a lover
and preferably without even him noticing it.
Considering the fact that sexual delight among Nkoya women
usually remains latent, it is not the prospect of orgasmic
ecstasy that drives them into the arms of their partners. Among
women, the threshold to sexual activity is likely to be lowered
by their awareness of a male steady partners sexual rights
(as conferred, and confirmed, by kin groups through formal
agreements and payments), and by the hope for the gifts (clothes,
money) which lovers tend to dispense. Moreover, every woman wants
to give birth to as many children as possible: basis for respect
in the present, and a stake in the future, when the children will
be adults and will support and defend her. As the main incentive
for sexual intercourse however, Nkoya women mention that they,
especially during the formal training for kankanga,
were taught that male sperm is an extraordinary strong medicine,
indispensable for the proper functioning of the female body. A
man who gives you his seed provides you with something of unique
value, not only for your descendants but also for your own
well-being in the present; and this is the main conscious reason
why a Nkoya woman, after intercourse, kneels down before her
partner and claps her hands respectfully, genuinely pleased that,
of all women, the man has chosen her to manifest his manhood, and
has been able to do so. The gesture does not differ from that by
which a woman in any other situation thanks a higher ranked man
or woman; and only in clapping rhythm and position of the hands
does it differ from formal greetings between men (women clap more
monotonously and their hands are more cupped).
This is just one aspect of a whole complex of behaviour by which
the symbolic subordination of a woman to her male partner is
accentuated. Many other examples could be given. A woman may not
go to sleep before her man, and not rise after him. She may not
leave the bed without his explicit permission; and for this she
has to wake him up: he has to sit up in order to allow her to
crawl behind him from her appointed spot the furthest from the
outside door where he can best protect her. If she cannot step on
his shadow, it is even more unthinkable that she would step over
his very body. A night pee thus becomes quite a formal
enterprise. She must prepare and serve out his food, then kneel
before him and by hand-clapping invite him to come and eat it;
but she may not eat with him from one dish. She must heat his
bathing water on the fire, and wash him according to strict
rules, which explicitly stipulate which hand she may use when and
in which sequence the parts of his body may be washed. She must
keep his bodily hair shaven. Above all she is the keeper of
the house: hidden diseases, defects, shortcomings,
weaknesses, fears, passions, distasteful consequences of
excessive drinking all that is wrong with her husband she
must intercept without moping and without speaking about it to a
third party.
Many elements of what we could call the universal patriarchal
syndrome are thus also present in the Nkoya culture: older women
who pass on to the younger women, practically without direct
interference of men, their own internalized values and
representations of female submissiveness and male superiority;
sexual servitude; absence of an explicit right of sexual
enjoyment; the belief that the normal physiology of the healthy
female body, in menstruation and childbirth, is repulsive and
dangerous; male privileges that have no female counterpart etc.
Nevertheless, when taking a closer look, the picture will prove
to be much less negative, and in many ways not more oppressive
that the situation of women in Western Europe until the fifties
of this century.
As far as a womans acceptance of, pride in and control over
the integrity of her own body is concerned (which is something
very different from access to the capitalistic market
although the two viewpoints often merge in modern feminism) we
cannot fail to appreciate that many of the recent achievements of
the sexual and feminist revolution in our parts have been matter
of course to Nkoya women for centuries.
Not much different from the Western European women under the
Victorian ideal, the restraint of female sexuality is brought
about through social and psychological mechanisms, and not by
physical mutilation. Clitoridectomy does not occur among the
Nkoya, and my information that this does occur elsewhere
horrifies them.
The symbolic subordination that exists between man and woman does
not appear to be incompatible with a pattern of mutual respect,
born by the realization that man and woman belong to two mutually
irreducible, yet basically equal categories of mankind. This is
most strikingly expressed by what the Nkoya consider the ideal
position for sexual intercourse. The missionary position, where
the woman is on her back and the man on his belly on top of her,
is considered a recent innovation. What is seen as the
traditional Nkoya position is free of connotations of female
subordination: man and woman are on their sides, facing each
other, arms around each other, as equals that are well up to each
other. The term that is used for conjugal partners and steady
lovers regardless is also telling: man and woman are muntu
wenji, each others person.
And the ideal conjugal partner is the karembo,
the man who, as a teenager, was marked to be the fiancé of a
certain girl and, up to some decades ago, in that role played an
important part at the coming-out ceremony as the main supplier of
firewood for the mens and womens fires. Amongst the
aged Nkoya one sometimes still finds karembo
marriages that were contracted with practically no bride price
some forty or fifty years ago (a practically inconceivable term
of marriage, in the face of current marital conditions); and
these partners can still delightedly recount the tenderness and
the patience with which, over a period of months, the boy
gradually ushered in the girl to an adult sexuality.
But these have become exceptions, if they were ever more then
that. Nkoya women generally have but little benefit from their
husbands when it comes to sexual satisfaction. After their
explicit physical training so shockingly explicit to us
they do however command enough sexual knowledge to find
such satisfaction with a lover. The Nkoya are very aware of the
difference in role behaviour between husbands and lovers. Among
unwed lovers, there is indeed room for tenderness and excitement.
As restricted and bound to rules, almost ritualistic, as physical
intercourse is within wedlock, so free is it between unwed lovers
one boasts that there is not a single spot of each
others body, not a single copulating position, that is
forbidden; but, as said, it is best that even your lover does not
notice it when you come.
Nkoya women have wide opportunities to acquire lovers; they are
relatively mobile, they can (especially in the context of
visiting relatives, particularly in case of funerals) spend weeks
and often months away from the house that they share with their
husbands, and their sexual escapades are certainly registered by
the public opinion, but seldom condemned.
Since the second decade of this century the formal Nkoya marriage
is confirmed by an ever-increasing bride price. Nevertheless, the
rights that the husband acquires are limited: the right to the
wifes culturally-defined activities within doors (in bed
and in bath), in his yard (where the kitchen is located) and to a
certain degree in his field; and paternity rights over the
children that she will bear during the marriage. If the bride
price has not yet been fully paid (and this may take years, even
decades), a man cannot insist on these rights. The bride price is
not seen as purchase money, but on the contrary as
acknowledgement of the human value of the wife; and as a
guarantee for the husbands good behaviour. By paying the
bride price, the man and his family acknowledge that the woman is
a free person, the opposite of a slave that could be bought for
money. The image of the slave, over whose person the master has
absolute command at all times, is brought up in many arguments
between married couples and between in-laws: should the man go
too far in his matrimonial claims, or should he dramatically in
fulfilling his matrimonial duties, then he is steadfastly accused
of treating his wife like a slave, and he is reminded of
the fact that he has only limited, specific rights, that can
easily be undone if his behaviour give further cause for such
action.
The leading idea behind the marriage ceremony itself seems to be
that the man is made aware of the conditional nature of his
rights. Through a hedge of brothers-in-law to be, he has to
literally fight his way into the room where the bride is with her
mentrix or older sister. Upon arrival, he must
through bribe the chaperon to leave the room (after she has given
her last sexual instructions to the couple), and once alone with
the bride, he has to pay money (formerly beads) before she takes
off her clothes, and then again before she allows him to
penetrate her body. Early the next morning the chaperon returns
to the bridal room ask the couple if all went well:
whether penetration took place and semen flowed. These are
expectations where the obligations and the chance of failure are
at least as large for the man as they are for the woman.
Admittedly, at the wedding also the sexual skills of the bride
are for the first time submitted to the scrutiny of the wider
society (as represented by her chaperon), but virginity for
example is by no means a demand. (The historical information in
regard to the question whether such a demand was made in the
nineteenth century, is contradictory.)
The payments made on the wedding night are part of an elaborate
circuit of ceremonial payments, to which also belong the bride
price itself, the donations in cash at the dance of the kankanga,
and payments made at childbirth. The
transfer of money marks the individual crossing of boundaries
between social groups (sexes, generations, bride-givers versus
bride-takers), and defines or redefines the rights of each of
these groups and of their individual members.
If a first marriage is concerned, the girl is rarely free in the
choice of her marriage partner: the choice is strongly determined
by existing or desirable alliances between villages and clans,
and a possible pre-marital boy-friend has to make way. However
the chance that this first marriage will be dissolved through
divorce within a few years, is quite considerable. Personal
grievances of one of the partners (often the woman) then tend to
outweigh village political considerations though elders
will try to keep up a marriage that is politically beneficial for
them as long as possible, and only reluctantly dissolve it.[8]
All this contributes to an awareness of balance and relative
equality between the sexes, such that the patriarchal syndrome in
the attitudes and representations as found among Nkoya women, is
often mitigated on the mens side by a rather considerable
loyalty of which the karembo
marriage is considered to be the highest expression. When
menstruation or childbirth make it impossible for the woman to
light the fire and cook (due to the anti-social connotations of
female blood), it is normal that the husband relieves her from
these tasks especially in urban situations normal, where
sisters of the wife tend to be less available. A
heavy taboo forbids the husband to commit adultery when his wife
is going through childbirth (which is of course something very
different from continuing to fulfil his marital duties towards
other wives in a polygamous situation). In general men are
loyally committed to the well-being of their wives, and besides
the medical interventions (collecting medicinal herbs, having
diagnostic dreams, officiating in ancestral rituals) which are
expected from them as head of the family, they often spend
enormous sums as sponsors to healing cults in which their wives
are active. A womans rights to her activities in the
economic and kinship domains are usually acknowledged without
fuss, even if they entail her long absence and the resulting
inconvenience for her husband. It is part of the accepted manners
that a wife speaks freely with other men (in the familys
own yard but also outside, for instance at parties and
funerals, at the market or in working situations ), jokes
with them, and touches them in socially accepted parts of their
bodies when such is appropriate during the conversation; a
husband who would object against this would make himself
ridiculous. Even much further, bordering on sexual liberties, may
go the recognized rights of a womans male joking partners
from the clan with with her own clan is traditionally paired; and
the same would apply to her mufwala (cross-cousin),
whose ideal marriage partner she is after all, even though the
actual incidence of cross-cousin marriages is relatively low.
Awareness of acknowledged male needs indeed make it a normal case
that a woman in long periods of absence looks for a temporary
substitute for both her domestic and her sexual tasks: a
sister or a friend, who will not threaten her
relationship with her husband. The sexual and the domestic
domains are obviously much less sharply distinguished than in
North Atlantic cultures. For both the woman can fall back on the
normal domestic assistance that women lend each other in cases of
menstruation or childbirth.
The man is aware that his wife is rather well protected by a
total of rules of law and social standards, and that he can
easily be divorced if she is dissatisfied with the treatment she
gets from him. If she can come up with an actionable shortcoming
or offence on the part of her husband and win a divorce on that
basis (for example, inability to supply her with clothes and
housing; or complaints in the sexual sphere: having intercourse
with her in her sleep, or suffering from a venereal disease, or
from impotence), the man loses the bride price he paid for her.
Moreover, his reputation will have suffered such a dent that it
will be difficult for him to find a new wife in his immediate
social surroundings. The man accepts rather resignedly the fact
that his wife in many ways leads her own life. He does insist
that she keeps to the public etiquette between man and wife as it
was imprinted upon her during her initiation training: the man
does know the outlines of these rules, although he misses insight
in the details and in their symbolic background. Offences against
this etiquette, he discusses with his in-laws in the first place;
they will call the woman and her mentrix to task and will, in
case of continued complaints, have no other choice than to
dissolve the marriage and return the bride price.
As shaped, in part, by of an entire set of explicit, formally
taught and sanctioned rules, the daily association between man
and wife among the Nkoya can best be described as a rather
distant mutual manifestation of respect (shishemi)
between people who see each other, not as unique lifelong
partners predestined for each other, but rather as more or less
coincidentally bound together and representing two fundamental
social categories: husband and wife. The respect shown to the
mutual in-laws is an extension of this attitude. The marital bond
is not a continual strife fed by the quest for by authenticity,
originality and the desire for individual psychological and
sexual fulfillment, and informed by obscure, eminently personal
viewpoints and motivations. The possibilities for negotiation and
intimidation on both sides are limited. The womans
viewpoints and norms are firmly set, especially through being
rooted in the initiation training that she shares with all other
women. The outside world has the right and the duty to test the
day-to-day state of affairs within the the marriage against these
criteria, and actually does so. Complaints about mutual
functioning within the marriage may be expressed without
reticence that is as long as the domestic
secrets remain untouched; and if redress does not come
about, divorce is simple. A high degree of erotic and
psychological fulfillment is thus just as exceptional as sinking
deeper and deeper, over the years, into a swamp of strictly
personal conditions and aspirations, which so often characterizes
marriages in our Western society.
Judicial authorities (villages moots and Local Courts of justice
created by the government) contribute to this configuration.
Their accommodating
attitude towards women is clear from the in the ease with which
women are granted a divorce if need be against the
political interests of the village elders; or in the degree to
which women find redress with the court when they feel sexually
abused by men. Not the right of orgasm, but indeed the right of
self-determination over ones own body is judicially
acknowledged. A woman may go along with a man, be married to him,
sleep next to him; but as long as she has not given her explicit
permission for every single coitus, sexual contact with her is
considered rape and she will meet much sympathy from the judges
as expressed by judicially enforced compensatory payments
and easy conditions for divorce.
The fact that most Nkoya women, in spite of all this, find
neither social nor sexual fulfilment in their marriages (nor do
men for that matter, but that is another story), is not easily
admitted in everyday life, but it is indicated in artistic,
mythical and ritual expressions. Many traditional songs
(recognizable by their archaic language) sing of the murder
between married couples. Numerous are the rumors about women who,
in the forest away from the village, breed a snake with a human
head (jirombo), a
terrible form of sorcery; the snake waylays and kills on
assignment of his mistress the villagers that she hates,
but in the first place her husband and his other women if any. It
is indeed so in real life that every death of a man is followed
by an inquest within his kin group, whereby his wife must be
cleared of guilt from his death; only after acquittal (which is
usually, but not always pronounced) can she be ritually cleansed
and return to her own relatives. In connection with this it is
significant that Nkoya women see no good in a law change recently
propagated in Zambia, which (within the confines of customary law
as acknowledged by the state) would finally enable women to
inherit from their husbands: any suggestion that a woman could
materially benefit from the death of her husband must be avoided,
for even under current customary law (which excludes such
benefit) she is the one who is blamed for his death in the first
place.
In the hunt for lovers, Nkoya women are obviously often each
others rivals. But even so it is matter of course that
sisters and girl-friends, to enhance their own amorous fortune,
ask each other for a drop of sperm from their lovers, or agree to
substitute each others sexual tasks in absence.
Especially in the frequent case of several women having to share
one husband, they are competitors as far as his sexual and
material favours are concerned. The built-in tension that exists
in such relationships, again have a particularly mythical
expression: sorcery beliefs, sorcery accusations, and the oblique
insinuations of sorcery through divination. Ideally however,
co-wives are each others sister, and in many
cases the bond between each of them is indeed closer and more
positive than that between each of them and their husband.
Forms of female solidarity can thus have a focus in shared
interests in the same man or men, but they are especially created
by the initiation process and the coming-out ceremony. Not only
do these bring about a strong potential identification between
female agemates who were matured in the same year they are
automatically best friends; but also between the novice and her
mentrix, who (once her strict role during the training period has
found its crowning in the coming-out ceremony) remains her
lifelong counselor and confident. Such mistrust and hate as often
exists between younger and older Nkoya women, does not seem to
originate during the initiation training, but mainly in daily
productive activities, whereby young women have to work hard
under the tyrannical assignments of an old woman (a senior
co-wife or a mother-in-law) who from the viewpoint of the younger
women is trying to avoid the heavy work herself.
The economic tasks of the Nkoya woman naturally have a great
influence on her relationship with men. At a very young age she
learns to provide for her own food and that of her children. The
Nkoya consider themselves primarily as a people of hunters, and
for a man agriculture is not a source of great honour. In the
past, agriculture was primarily associated with slaves,
tribute-paying commoner villages, and women. Nowadays this
association is gradually changing as primarily men have begun to
explore the possibilities of cash crop production.[9] Besides the hard labour
(the partial clearing, and the firing, of the fields) the men
leave the cultivation of food crops for food to women. Until very
recently his society has no or hardly any land shortage, and
women who can mobilize the necessary manpower clear an
agricultural plot, acquire the personal rights to that plot and
its harvest. Also the preservation of the crop and its processing
to become digestible food is womans work. Women manage the
daily cooking-fire (as far as they are not in a state of
pollution) and fetch water. They know their way about in the
forests and continuously supplement the diet by gathering wild
fruits and roots: especially in the annual famine period around
the beginning of the rainy season. All this is a great source of
pride and security for them. Meat is a much coveted article, and
a man who can supply (as a hunter or as earner of a money income)
is the ideal lover. While meat is thus a preeminently male
contribution, it is only women who are able to produce a complete
meal without intervention of the other sex, even though
meat relish will then be lacking. This independent dealing with
nature is of enormous economic importance, but goes much further:
it forms the practical side of a complete world-view. The
forests, the fields, the river where (in shallow wells and sandy
banks) drinking water is found, are all filled with mythical
representations, symbols, prescriptions and prohibitions. The
competent dealing with these elements, with food as the result,
gives womans work a tranquil self-fulfillment which is
fundamental for the identity of Nkoya women. They are at home in
their world and need not squander their birthright to men for a
plate of food. This grasp on the food production however gives
Nkoya women hardly access to the distribution, for whatever
cultivation of market crops exists is mostly in hands of men.
Nkoya women are furthermore hardly active in market trade, in
contrast with the women of the more dominant ethnic groups in
Zambia. In the villages, the women have no other ways of making
money than beer-brewing, a practice as healer or diviner, and
some furtive prostitution; the need of money is, however, limited
here. In the towns, where a considerable money income is
necessary for survival and little opportunity for agriculture
exist, the Nkoya woman becomes actually dependent on a man or
men. Here, deprived of a productive basis, and with practically
no access to paid jobs in the formal or informal sector, women
can economically be blackmailed by men.
Easy and frequent divorce; a considerable age difference between
spouses, and therefore a considerable chance to become a widow;
the relatively detached attitude of relatives regarding the
married and amorous life of a woman after her first marriage
(which was usually arranged by the relatives); the relative
economic independence of women in rural areas; all these
factors contribute to the fact that Nkoya women go through a
typical career: once, or more then once, a woman after her first
marriage chooses herself a more loved matrimonial partner, but in
the course of years she attempts to liberate herself from the
burden of obligations as wife and daughter-in-law, and relying on
her capacities as a mistress and on the increasing contribution
of her growing-up sons, she often succeeds in realizing
considerable independence. In the last analysis her freedom is
threatened more by her fathers and brothers (for her obligations
to those she can not shake off) than from the part of actual or
potential sexual partners.
In cases of concrete assault on her female identity the Nkoya
woman knows her rights and is supported from all sides. Because
she knows she has been taught how to handle a man, the woman also
takes on a certain manipulative, often ironic attitude towards
men. In this respect the secret initiation training is of great
support to her: she is aware of the fact that she knows a lot
more about men, and can toy with them physically and in socially
much more subtly than the other way around; to women it is often
the men who appear as helpless and ridiculous. To counteract the
unmistakable forms of symbolic subordination which uphold the the
ideal of male superiority, the Nkoya woman is taught a very
strong female identity which offers her great security in
practically all situations of her adult life, on which she can
reliably fall back and to which she can publicly appeal. Not the
man, but the culture (interpreted by elder women) sets the
standards to which the woman directs her whole further life.
Objectively, the subordination is there perhaps, but subjectively
it is hardly felt as humiliating because the symbolism by which
it is accompanied, is internalized and compensated by a great
measure of independence and self-esteem. Different from many
other cultures, the Nkoya woman does not derive her status
primarily from the power and riches, or the income, of a man with
whom she is associated as wife, sister or daughter. Besides she
grows up in the realization that her grandmothers and
great-grandmother, as princesses and queens of the precolonial
Nkoya states were peers or even superiors of men even in
political aspects and the loss of that political status
has, in the course of the past hundred years, to a certain
degree, been compensated for by healing cults dominated by women,
in which much of the old leadership ritual has been absorbed and
transformed.[10]
A Nkoya woman does not owe her value to a man, and a man cannot
really deprive her of that value. She is not defenceless against
men. The female identity which she possesses is so strong that
men do not form a direct threat to it. Hence her ability to
reconcile to and even rejoice in, symbolic forms of
subordination, which for western women (with an identity, which
was up to recently much more male-derived, and
therefore revocable and liable to destruction by men) would be
unbearable.
5.
Of all of this the
coming-out ceremony, the glorious public presentation of one new
woman according to this standard, is the most complete
expression. It is the moment that a woman is permitted to present
herself to the society and to confront the society, , with her
recently acquired skills and grace. The coming-out ceremony is
the celebration of an individual, who may thus take pride in her
own unique value. It is not primarily the celebration of a group
or of the community in its total: the group shares the
celebration, creates the conditions for it, ensures its
persistence as a society (in such crucial aspects as the
succession of generations, and the arrangement of gender
relations) via this celebration but the individual is
permitted to be the focus of all of this. The fact that this
individual is yet a very young woman, at the beginning of a
career in which she will have to prove herself as woman and
mother and in which she is bound to fail in many aspects, makes
it even more moving. Precisely through this acknowledgment of the
own individual value of the girl and the potential that she
carries within her, the subordinate position she holds as a woman
and as a teenager is to a considerable extent compensated, or
better: relativized and rendered somewhat irrelevant.
In this respect, it is of great importance that girls are not
initiated group-wise (for example per age group, per clan, or per
village) but separately. Only in exceptional cases do two girls
of the same village have their coming-out ceremony together. Also
the moment of initiation emphasizes this individuality. It is not
determined by any impersonal cycle of years (such as the
succession of male age classes in many cultures of West and East
Africa, with steady cycles of about twenty years), but
exclusively by the physical maturing of the girl: every
coming-out ceremony takes place in the first dry season (March
August) after a girl in question has begun to menstruate
and her breasts have taken on fairly adult shapes. The second,
herself being before menarche and with a real childs
figure, emphasizes this accent on the individual development of
the kankanga.
Anthropology has often dealt with kinship rituals or state
rituals in which social and political order as a whole is
supposed to be expressed and glorified. The coming-out dance of
the Nkoya girl is however at least as much a ritual of
individuality as it is one of community. Incidentally, this
applies not only to the coming-out ceremony; within Nkoya culture
there are other, comparable ceremonies in which one individual is
celebrated in a special way even if partly as a
realization and culmination of group interests. In healing cults
scores of bystanders witness how one patient is brought to
ecstatic acceptance of the special bond with a spirit whose
presence (as manifested by the disease) is thus publicly
acknowledged for the first time; in this case the referral to
social groups who determine the non-ritual life, is even
practically missing the cultic group does not coincide
with everyday kinship or residential groups.[11] In name-inheritance
rituals an even larger audience witnesses how the village elders
appoint one member of the village community to be the unique heir
of a recently deceased, who thus reincarnated confirms the
integrity of the village, which as a historic entity possesses
and transmits to later generations a limited number of set names
and neo-traditional titles. Succession to a position as village
headman, chief or cult leader are special applications of the
pattern that the name inheritance ritual is based on, just as the
pattern of
exorcismacknowledgmentvenerationinitiation into
the group of initiated, underlies both the healing cults and the
coming-out ceremony: for the uninitiated kankanga
is considered the carrier of, or possessed by, the harmful blood
spirit Kanga. Another special case is the glorification of a
great hunter after he has killed an elephant; also in this
ceremony the focus is on the individual hunters greatness
albeit that his greatness is also considered as the
incarnation of former great hunters of the kin group, and part of
the ritual revolves on exorcising the dangerous spirit of the
animal killed. The highest ritual of individuality is funerary
festival, where hundreds of people from the town and rural areas
gather for ten days to in order to make up the balance sheet of
one human life. also literally, through improvised mourning
songs referring to the biography of the deceased.
In the light of an inveterate stereotypical image within
anthropology, of the African as one with and submerged in his or
her social group, as carrier of a status acquired by birth rather
than personal effort, and as slavishly subjected to standards and
rules that barely foster the development of an explicit
individuality, these rituals of individual glorification
are somewhat unexpected. At the same time they offer all the more
grip for the personal projections of a member of our Western
culture a culture in which assertion of individuality has
been of such central value that one of its central archetypes was
to be found in the character of Prometheus: the demiurge who, to
his own destruction, defied the gods, introduced fire and thus
created the condition for human culture.
6.
Womens affairs are
my affairs too, for I am a son, brother, friend, colleague,
lover, husband and father of a woman or women. In writing this
text I am continuously thinking of the women in my life and I
catch myself hoping to redeem myself in their eyes.
There is a meaningful parallel between on the one hand my
relation as a man with these women, and on the other, my relation
as an anthropologist with the culture that I study. Also as an
anthropologist there is the confusing awareness that you stem
from a certain culture (compare: woman), have kin relations with
it, and (based on a combination of positive and negative
experiences with your own culture) can be fascinated, tempted,
cherished, confirmed in your value, and also rejected, by another
culture. On second thoughts, ever since my first field-work my
relation to the culture that I have set out to study has been a
form of scientific eroticism:
the esthetics of the other brings about a longing
which on the one hand strenghtens that own identity, on the other
hand makes a painful but delightful assault on it. The researcher
goes back and forth between attitudes and forms of behaviour from
which he explicitly takes his distance (with as typical image the
field-worker clutching his notebook and pen, and, as an observer,
continually rendering account of what is happening around him,
and to him), and on the other hand attitudes and forms of
behaviour in which he gives up that distance and is absorbed by
the alien social field that extends before him speaks,
dances, sings, eats, makes offerings and so on, as if he hopes to
stay there for the rest of his life. It is something you can
cultivate, as I did in my field-work in Tunisia and particularly
in Zambia; my more recent research, among the Manjaks of
Guiné-Bissau (1983), suggest however that as a researcher, one
can also adopt a more mature attitude, by which that longing is
kept in check, even dropped. More important in this connection is
the fact that here, under the disguise of scientific research, a
ritual is being performed of at the same time boundary definition
and boundary transgression (of self-definition and loss of self),
a ritual that is preeminently characteristic of the
situation of the participant field-worker, but that finds its
archetypes in universal human endeavours such as eroticism and
mysticism. Anthropology is the intellectual
eroticism that exists between our own culture and the other one
that we are studying. In the game that I
play as anthropologist in the field, it is of eminent importance
that I incorporate, internalize the other, , can imitate it to a
certain degree in my bodily stances, behaviour and speech, yet am
not absorbed by it. If I am too afraid of crossing boundaries,
nothing will come of my participation and I could have just as
well limited myself to the mechanical and blind collection of
observational data, without knowledge of language, culture,
institutions, collective representations and emotions among the
research population. On the other hand, if I were to cross the
boundaries definitively and shake off my own culture, then I
would loose my role as an anthropologist (whose temporary
participation in the stranger culture is in the final analysis
only justified by the fact that he will escape, and will report
back to a scientific subgroup of his own society in terms derived
from the latter society and largely meaningless to the studied
society under study); should I stay (and the temptation to do so
often all-overriding), then I would become like the many other
strangers who, in the course of centuries, have been incorporated
in African cultures (or whatever other cultures).
Crucial here is the parallelism between the two situations of
boundary definition and boundary transgression: that between
cultures, and that between sexes. The anthropologist does not
(lest he ceases being an anthropologist) become a member of the
culture under study, just like a man does not become a member of
the group of women by whom, in all kinds of roles and capacities,
he is surrounded his whole life. The two situations are not
necessarily separate ones. The longing that is engendered by one
situation, can communicate itself to the other, and either
strengthen or dissolve such passion as is generated there.
The eroticism that I am speaking of here, is something far
different from sexuality, though it may lead to it. When I, as a
twenty-one year old, was doing my first field-work in Tunisia, it
simply did not enter my mind that the longing which I had fallen
a prey to, by which I was torn to pieces (and which I
except at the end felt mainly as confusion and
frustration), was perhaps not only caused by what I had left
behind me in Holland, but also by the new society in which I was
finding my way.[12] The thought that I could
try to solve my longing with a love affair with a woman of that
culture was so taboo, that it could not even enter my most
celibate dreams. My girl-friend had stayed behind at home, I was
heavily in love with her. The gender relationships in the
Tunisian village (as far as I could get sight on then, through a
haze of youth, defective language mastery and dependence on my
interpreter) seemed to be so strictly standardized, and the
sexuality therein so latent and suppressed, that nothing
suggested such a solution. But I did research an aspect of the
culture (the veneration of saints and sacred places) in which
women played the leading role. In contrast to general stereotypes
about anthropological research by men in an Islamic society,
women were quantitatively and qualitatively my main informants:
and with one of those married women, under the eyes of her
husband and relatives and in full observance of all the chaste
codes of the local culture, such an understanding came to blossom
that it became a matter of course that my girl-friend and I named
our daughter, who was born some years later, after her.
That both tension areas (manwoman;
anthropologistculture) would be short-circuited was much
more to be expected in a culture in South Central Africa, where
sexuality is much opener, where all strange men are potential
lovers for all women, and where men in the same age group strive
establish fleeting or a more permanent brother-in-law bonds with
each other via their many sisters. Here too
womens topics dominated my field-work: healing cults in
which women are the most important leaders, followers and
patients; girls initiation; attitudes toward illness, especially
as borne by young mothers concerned about their diseased
children; the political role of women in precolonial states. In a
manner that was unthinkable in the chaste North African culture,
the human body was emphatically present here, but because of that
largely freed from stereotypical sexual references and
implications. Men and women would touch in conversation, women
would nurse their children, the doctor's consultations of the
native healers would be more or less public, one would retire
when nature called but would offhandedly explain what one was
going to do, etc. Here my knowledge about gender relationships
could be derived from the very intimacy it referred to. It is
therefore that my own report on this subject among the Nkoya is
partially obscured under the veil of domestic secrets
I myself drew around it in a manner that is meant to link
up with the Nkoya rules about intimate relationships, more so
than with bourgeois professional codes of the Western social
researchers (according to which making love to, let alone loving,
your informants, would be the most effective way to fall off your
scientific pedestal). At the same time my report, in so far as it
is not bound to specific persons, could be enriched because, once
acknowledged and accepted in my role as researcher, I was
occasionally let in on womens knowledge which they (that is
according to my impressions) would not dare to share with any
man, not even a lover, from their own culture; even so, it is
only by sleight-of-hand that one can try to describe the
coming-out ceremony (as in the beginning of this essay) as if it
made no difference that I was present as a researcher.
I have sketched a positive image of the identity of Nkoya women,
and of initiation and the coming-out ceremony as its most
important ingredients; I hope I have not betrayed their
confidence. In spite of my autobiographical reticence in this
essay, it will be clear that this piece could only be written
after I had definitely given up, after many years, my attempts to
cross boundaries from Western anthropologist to Nkoya
villager and husband as too confusing and too bent on loss
of self or self-destruction; just as the fact of my own daughter
reaching the age of kankanga,
in a positive sense formed the incentive for the finishing of
this piece.
7.
I think it has become
possible to now expose the true roots of my emotions about the
Nkoya coming-out ceremony. It is not a celebration of female
subordination, and in this respect my enthusiasm over it seems
above suspicion, after all. It is primarily a celebration of
boundary transgression and of acquisition of identity, and as
such a dramatic and non-cryptical metaphor of what occupies me
most as a researcher and as a man.
Witnessing the glorious boundary crossing of the kankanga,
from child to woman, in a liberating manner coincides with my own
longing for boundary crossing, from foreign researcher to
fellow-Nkoya, and from man to woman; just like the acquisition of
an adult identity by the kankanga
is a image of hope for someone who, as a researcher, risks his
own identity, and as a lover also longs for loss of identity. In
view of powerful force, at the same time mobilizing and
narrowing, of eroticism in our own society, it is obvious that
the longing that exists between cultures, may tend to focus on an
attempt to penetrate into the sexual secrets of another culture
and to internalize them. But it is not unthinkable that under
this sexual penetration symbolism lies (because of its projection
towards faraway lands) a typical imperialist aspiration to reduce
the other to an object, to appropriate and to overpower the other
an additional reason why the boundary crossing had better
not succeed after all.
Nevertheless the kankanga
helps me, for one single moment, across to the other side of the
shadow which she herself, as has been imprinted upon her, must
not step over. As long as her dancing lasts, she seems to be
dancing only for me, she sucks up all the longing of my
field-work and love-life, and she allays the impossibilities
built in that longing. For eye-to-eye with her I am no longer
just a Western man, nor does she remain just a Nkoya girl. It is
however an image of short duration, dramatic, moving, but (once
her dance is over and the feasters scatter quickly, much the
worse for lack of sleep and abundant use of liquor) relentlessly
referring back to her own primary identities as a woman and as
Nkoya, my own primary identities as a man and as Western
researcher.
Anthropology is the science of what would happen if you would
take the step. Life is the science of not taking that step, or,
once taken, retracing your steps. Neither was I allowed to step
over that shadow, and after the tears of this realization I
console myself, and perhaps others, with this essay.
[1]
Translated from the Dutch by Juultje Heymans and Wim van
Binsbergen. Originally published as: De schaduw waar je
niet overheen mag stappen: Een westers onderzoeker op het Nkoja
meisjesfeest, in: Wim van Binsbergen & Martin Doornbos
(eds), Afrika in Spiegelbeeld, Haarlem:
In de Knipscheer, 1987: 139-182.
[2]
On a less conscious level one might interpret this accentuating
of the behind as an imitation of Khoisan steatopygia,
a memory, enshrined in ritual, of the Nkoyas
predecessors as inhabitant of Central Western Zambia; cf. van
Binsbergen, in press.
[3]
Nkoya believe that it is from this fruit that the name of Lusaka
derives, a headman in Central Zambia who, in his turn, gave his
name to an early railway siding where, in the 1930s, Northern
Rhodesias new capital was built. As from the second half of
the nineteenth century, various pockets of Nkoya hunters have
existed in what is now the Lusaka area, and the interpretation
may not be too far-fetched.
[4]
Van Binsbergen, in press.
[5]
Mead., M., Coming of age in Samoa,
New York: W. Morrow; Freeman, D., Margaret
Mead and Samoa. The making and unmaking of an anthropological
myth, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University
Press, 1983; Kloos, P., Door het oog van de
antropoloog: Botsende visies bij heronderzoek, Muiderberg:
Coutinho, 1988, ch. 8.
[6]
Another evocation of what, from the point of view of contemporary
Nkoya historical awareness, must be considered prehistory
a time when human life was less divorced from nature.
Interestingly, most food taboos to which the kankanga
is subjected during the months of her
seclusion, relate to species of fish; fishing has been a very old
and originally more prominent element of the economy of the
well-watered region of Central Western Zambia.
[7]
Could not this custom, which in Bantu-speaking Africa seems by no
means unique to the Nkoya, again be interpreted as an attempt to
imitate another physical feature of the pre-Bantu Khoisan
inhabitants: their enlarged labia? Cf. van Binsbergen, in press.
[8]
Cf. van Binsbergen 1977.
[9]
Here as elsewhere in this essay, reference is primarily made to
the Nkoya under the chieftainship of Mwene Kahare the
group also known as Mashasha, in the eastern part of Kaoma
district, Western Province, Zambia. In the central and western
parts of that district, cash crop production and the attending
changes in attitudes towards agriculture goes back to the late
colonial period, the 1950s.
[10]
Cf. van Binsbergen, in press.
[11]
Cf. van Binsbergen 1981.
[12]
The process is described in an essay Eerste veldwerk:
Tunisiè 1968, Wim van Binsbergen & Martin
Doornbos (eds), Afrika in Spiegelbeeld, Haarlem:
In de Knipscheer, 1987: 21-55; manuscript translation First
field-work: Tunisia 1968 available. Barely disguised, it
has formed the subject matter of my novel Een
buik openen, Haarlem: In de Knipscheer, in
press.
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