CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY
3.6 D ATA ANALYSIS & STORAGE
3.6.1 Analytical reflections
On the subject of African knowledge production, Zimbabwean scholar Mavhunga encourages “Africa[n]
scholars to write a narrative [of] the keywords which are readily visible to and derived from African tongues, first and foremost, so that the rest of the world is able to learn about [Africa and Africans] through [African] keywords” (2018:xii). The findings chapter therefore incorporates Ndebele keywords and seeks to explain them in context, situating them within the menstrual narratives and unloading their meaning in broader terms. In this way, indigenous words can be used to explain phenomena in Africa, as opposed to the mindless adoption of foreign frames such as “development” and “menstruation” to understand phenomena that can even more richly be understood through an African language (Mavhunga, 2018).
Though use the word “menstruation” in this study, it only has a similitude of meaning to its Ndebele translation ukungena esikhathini, which translates more closely as entering into time: a time of adolescence, preceding adulthood. Menstruation is also described as ukukhula. It translates literally as “growing up”.
ukukhula is used more frequently by older Ndebele women who are done growing up; women who are themselves ‘grown-ups’ and perhaps understand the experience through adult eyes, who see growing up as a journey that they have travelled, and are at the (latter) end of.23 In paying close attention to Ndebele
23 ukukhula is frequently used to refer to menstruation in isiNdebele. However, it is a euphemism of the verb for having the first period (i.e., ménarche). The verb ukukhula means ‘to grow up’ and has the sense of coming of age. The exact term for reaching ménarche, is ukuthomba. It can also be used to refer to rusting or gathering a layer of film or dust.
The verb evokes the colour red. ukuthomba is, however, used interchangeably to refer to puberty more broadly. The noun intombi (a young girl or woman) is a derivative of the verb. intombi is not to be mistaken for the shortening of intombazana. intombi yinkazana esithombile (is a girl who has reached ménarche). intombazana is a girl that has not
keywords I recalled that the suffix -kazi can be used “to indicate the feminine” in Zulu and Ndebele (Werner, 1919). Given that baba means father, I translate babakazi as female father as opposed to paternal aunt in order to demonstrate her role in fostering children in the absence of a father. This translation is significant in revealing her valuable connection to a child’s Ndebele patrilineal heritage as well as a gatekeeper of knowledge about (pre-)menarcheal practices and pre-marriage preparation.
In a postlude of an era of African political decolonisation, a pondering perhaps hailed by Ghana’s independence in 1956, I began to grapple during the writing up of this dissertation with what it means to actively ‘decolonise’ my research within existing colonial and institutional frameworks such as departmental guidelines and typical academic conventions of English grammar and translation. The participants of this study are referred to by name (pseudonym24) and nickname, to humanise them and their narratives (Lister, 2015), paying homage to them as co-producers of this monograph. In particular Ntombenhle and Mandlakazi wanted to be referred to by their ‘names’ and not by their roles as ‘[so and so’s mother]’. I gave them pseudonym given in the spirit of honouring the request while respecting my ethical obligation to maintain participant anonymity and confidentiality. This way they were commemorated not just as mother but the girls that they once were and as their own individuals, just as they wanted to be. I took great care in the selection of pseudonyms in this study. I gave Ndebele pseudonyms to women and girls who had Ndebele names and, correspondingly, I only gave English pseudonyms to women and girls who had English names. I did this in a conscious effort to avoid white-washing the research participants.25 My assignment of these pseudonyms was an active decolonial engagement in the “politics of naming” (Patel, 2020:2), to humanise the participants in a manner befitting of a narrative study.
The African scholar is sometimes alienated from their work and their mother tongue language in academia through the self-fragmenting process akin to Fanonian ‘double consciousness’ (Moore, 2005) of quotation marks and the italicisation of ‘keywords’ (Mavhunga, 2018). I have opted to italicize rather than apostrophise these keywords, as I find the use of the quotation marks only serve to ‘other’ me as an African, Ndebele researcher from not only my language but also the culture and in effect, my research. I am of the
yet reached ménarche). The women and girls in the study used ukukhula and ukungena esikhathini (to enter into that time) to refer to menstruation. Hence, even the word menstruation only captures a similitude of the Ndebele term. It is for these reasons that Mavhunga (2018) encourages the use of vernacular keywords over their translation.
ukuthomba is a more scientific term, whereas ukukhula is more often used by older women who have the hindsight of what ‘growing up’ meant for them in the expression’s entirety.
24 To uphold confidentiality and anonymity in the study; no real names were used in this study.
25 Bulawayo brings out what it means for Zimbabwean names to be white-washed in her novel, We Need New Names (2013:254). See also Nyathi (2018).
view that quotation marks, by virtue of their starkness, within a dissertation written in the universal medium of English (which is both my foreign and first language) perpetuate the notion that African theories can only serve as ‘pseudo’ ontologies. My conscious choice to incorporate Ndebele keywords in my analysis and write-up (as opposed to simply indexing them in a back-end glossary or footnoting them) is one that signifies my own imaginings of a decolonised dissertation that ‘re-Africanises’26 processes in daily, lived experience – from the exceptional to the seemingly mundane. This is my own act of linguistic activism as I resist grammatical traditions and conventions engrained in colonialism, and a patronisation of indigeneity through juxtaposition and inferred ‘subordination’ (Grosz, 1994) of isiNdebele to English. There is also a certain impoverishment of true meanings invoked by translations (easily recognisable to Nguni speakers).
By incorporating Ndebele keywords, I am attempting to diminish the paucity of translated meanings. In another act of decolonial defiance and subversion of typical academic writing conventions, I have also opted to include the Ndebele glossary at the beginning of the study (page XII) rather than in the study appendices, to prime the importance of the Ndebele keywords and names used in this study.
Also, in adhering to Ndebele grammatical rules, and not subordinating them to those of English, you will find that in this dissertation there are some sentences that intentionally begin with lower case, as they would in isiNdebele. It is for this reason that I use a small case for the philosophy of ubuntu and the value system it espouses. While ubuntu is relatively well-known and was iconified by the charismatic (South) African leader, Nelson Mandela, I opt to use small letters27, 28 so as not to establish it as something separate from myself as the researcher, who is both African and a Zimbabwean Ndebele woman, but also as an extension of who my research participants are as Ndebele women and girls.On one level, these appropriations of lower case are actively decolonial acts of linguistic resistance and verbal activism (Kemmerer, 2006)29 but, at another level, I am simply being true to Ndebele grammatical rules (which are themselves by no means rigid). For example, I do this with great intentionality in the subheadings of Section 4.2.8, because lower case indicates common nouns, which bare different importance to a person, for whom personhood (ubuntu)
26 I first heard this term used by Mavhunga at the First Series “Theory from Africa” Mellon Workshop hosted by the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg South Africa on 20-26 August 2017 that I attended. Mavhunga was a guest lecturer at this workshop. He proposed it as a substitute for decolonisation, which places the process of colonisation at the centre of Africa studies through suffixing it to periods such as post- or pre-colonial Africa. I do not, however, use the two interchangeably in this study, as they have different underpinnings.
27 This choice also resonates with that of bell hooks, who opted not to capitalise her name so as to draw attention to
“her work rather than her name, on her ideas rather than her personality” (Quintana, 2010).iz
28 Whereas I am of the view that capitalising it would other both the value system and those like myself and my research participants who subscribe to it.
29 Kemmerer defines verbal activism as “using language with intent to bring social change” as it is part of raising
“with regard to how terms that refer to particular groups of people – such as ethnic groups – unintentionally can be discriminatory” (2006:12). See further discussion on 190.
is evoked with capital letters, as I will explain below. It also uses Ndebele expressions and keywords in- text, to capture the essence of a situation or fact that is not fully translatable. This is a decolonial rhetorical choice that gives voice and visibility to my own double consciousness as a Ndebele researcher mediating a dissertation on the Ndebele people through the medium of English. On this issue, it is also worth stressing that information technology is not always accommodating of non-Western knowledge. Checks on the Microsoft Word Spelling and Grammar tool present their own invisible labour-work. This is because (at the time of writing and submitting my dissertation) the tool did not have an isiNdebele dictionary or multilingual support. I therefore had to decolonise the English dictionary by adding Ndebele vocabulary30 to the Spelling and Grammar tool in order for it to correctly detect errors in isiNdebele otherwise all isiNdebele keywords being identified as errors in the document.
Inking some of these analytical reflections was often coloured by what I once heard described as
‘subconscious resistance’ in the African American Policy Forum’s (AAPF) “Under The Blacklight”
series.31 My subconscious resistance in this dissertation was itself ‘an internalisation of the policing of my own possibilities’32 vis-à-vis what a person of colour (PoC) like myself can ponder, let alone articulate in academia. It was a resistance based on the fear being micro-examined about my epistemology and dismissed because of my positionality in this monograph. This feeling finds resonance with the fact that “critiques voiced by students in both the Global South and North have turned attention to the ways in which higher education practices have been informed by, and continue to perpetuate, a series of assumptions that favour particular epistemological perspectives” (Morreira, Luckett,Kumalo & Ramgotra,2020:133).
30 This is in the event that it allows you to make such additions. A researcher conducting research in a language that is not available in the pre-programmed languages for the dictionary function may also have to confront notifications around addition saturation, as I did.
31 This particular instalment was titled, Storytelling While Black and Female: Conjuring Beautiful Experiments in Past and Future Worlds and took place online on 5 August 2020 at 8 to 9 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT). The stream can be viewed on the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGS5aP5Vi7g&feature=youtu.be
32 Kimberlé Crenshaw, ibid. Crenshaw is the Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum. She refers to thinking about and confronting these challenges as part of the “struggle for intersectional justice” (AAPF, 2020).
33 In referencing according to the Harvard (Author-date) method, the University of Cape Town (UCT) Fakalthi yezoLuntu (Humanities) Reference Guide recommends that when there are four or more authors, an in-text citation should list the first author’s surname followed by et al. in-text. In this case, this would subordinate and invisibilise the Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) or Black, Indigenous, People of Colour (BIPOC) authors to the white lead author of this article. As a result, I have opted to list all of the co-authors for this reference. This is my own conscious effort to visibilise their contribution to this journal article on the ‘decolonising curricula and pedagogy in higher education’. There are limitations in using Western theory and practice to decolonise or de-Westernise knowledge and pedagogy (Adebisi, 2019). One example of such a limitation is the contradiction that would arise from observing the aforementioned in-text referencing guidelines for this article, which has four authors. For in abiding by these guidelines, the BAME/BIPoC scholars who contributed to this paper are invisibilised in a work that sets out exactly
In Ndebele culture, once a Ndebele woman has a child and leaves her childhood home to go to her husband’s home,34 her name becomes a reference to identity as a mother and Na (meaning ‘mother of’ in Ndebele) is prefixed to the name of her first child. This underscores the importance of parenthood in Southern African culture. All of the elderly women in the study are referred to as gogo35 (grandmother/granny) because rural life especially is a fabric woven by the fine threads of community and family. Hence, while you may not be biologically related to an elder, you would still relate to them as ‘grandmother’ if they are around the same age as your grandmother. A grandmother is also a mother and so, sometimes, I refer to some of the elderly participants as Gogo Na[...] (Granny, mother of [insert name of first born]) or Gogo Ma[insert family name]. This a mirrors the colloquial way of speaking, which stresses a woman’s role as a grandmother, a mother, the daughter of [family namely]. Similarly, girls and nulliparous women are referred to simply also as Ma[insert family name], for example I am MaNcube (see page VIII). The closest translation of this prefix into English (albeit with implications regarding high status and prestige) would be
“of the House of (family name)”. Rather than grasping for a sometimes-unattainable similitude, I have maintained these colloquialisms in the dissertation in order to capture the spirit of ubuntu in my portrayal of the participants, because family bonds are an essential thread to the fabric of rural life in Zimbabwe. I also would like to highlight that throughout this dissertation there are instances win which I use the word
‘woman’ where ‘girl’ is also applicable. This is done to convey a sentiment underpinning the study; that of the women we36 are raised to be through (invisible) reproductive labour-work.
This dissertation has drawn on a number of different sources to enrich the analysis in the study. Apart from scholarly and grey literature, I have also included social media posts (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter37). I have done so because development discourse is not just mediated through official websites, policy documents and booklets of UN Family. It is all around us, including in the social media we consume.
I am of the view that part of decolonising higher education involves using social media as pedagogical tools
to illuminate the persisting “systems of coloniality” (Morreira, Luckett, Kumalo & Ramgotra, 2020:3) entrenched in pedagogical and higher education practices that mute BAME/BIPoC voices and invisibilise their academic contributions. These considerations represent remedying past injustices and visibilising the BIPOC at UCT that sees UCT’s iconic Jameson “Jammie” Memorial Hall renamed as to Sarah Baartman Hall in 2018.
34 See also Mchunu (2005).
35 I use capital letters for “gogo” to denote the appropriate level of respect that should be accorded to elders (like grandmothers) in Ndebele culture.
36 Ndebele girls (myself included).
37 See Appendix F on page 237-8.
while fact-checking information rigorously in this post-truth era.38 As in Appendix F (page 237-8), I have drawn on posts that were from a personal Twitter account. I sought the permission of the Twitter account user. I did this even though the account was a public account, because of what I call reflexive consent.
Reflexive consent, unlike the bureaucratic informed consent I described in Section 3.2, is a consent that ensures that even where information is circulated in public domains, when utilised elsewhere besides original the source platform (e.g., in this doctoral study), the user is made aware and consents to such use.
The intention behind reflexive consent is to critically engage with the act of seeking consent in decolonial work by confronting the legacy of extractive colonial research, which in many cases consists of non- consensually obtained knowledge from indigenous groups. It allows for the participant to change their mind and say ‘no’ at any point of the research and/or publication process, even after the consent forms have been signed.