CHAPTER 5: DOMESTIC LIFE & REPRODUCTIVE LABOUR-WORK
5.4 C ONCLUSION
In presenting the kinship structures and gender-fluid domestic division of labour among the Ndebele, it has revealed some of the localised constructions of gender and sexuality in African societies that the work of colonial anthropologists such as Hunter (1933), Leith-Ross (1939), Evans-Pritchard (1940a; 1940b; 1951) and others has failed to fully capture.31 Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 have demonstrated that the family and the State (through the formal education and the health sector) are entangled in the scripting of the body with regards to menstruation and its management. The chapters have shown how the nature of reproductive labour-work done by girls evolves, depicting sombre visualisations of adolescence and teenhood in which children begin to contribute to the domestic division of labour or household income. In this older childhood a Ndebele adolescent girl must herself evolve to be (re)productive, that is: reproductively capable and productive. At this point an adolescent Ndebele girl’s reproductive status is not centred on her reproductive capability but rather on her taking up her role as a proxy adult, a proxy mother and proxy wife so that when she steps out of this transient stage she is prepared to confidently assume these roles in imminent adulthood;
30 Also known as ukubeletha (Fig. 16, page 137). ukubhabhula conveys a more colloquial sense of carry a child on one’s back. It is also how one would describe the action to a young child, shortening it to bhabhu.
31 This is on account of measuring customary practices against a Western yardstick. Evans-Pritchard was an anthropologist who studied the Nuer people of Sudan. He and Hunter both refer to the so-called “cattle complex” of the Nuer of Sudan and the Mpondo of Africa. This reduction of the importance of cattle in African communities to a psychoanalytical discourse that categorises it as a “complex” reveals the racialised condescension to the two cultures by these two anthropologists. It reflects a failure to grasp the multivalent significance of cattle to different peoples in Africa and is a discourse that seeks to propagate difference rather than a common sense of humanity (ubuntu) that transcends culture.
marriage and motherhood. This is seen in Chapter 5 through in the participation the domestic division of labour by way of chores. In Chapter 5 we witness visualisations of young girls kept home from school in order to care for her younger kin as was the case for Karen, Gogo NaKitty and Gogo Betty. However, attention must be drawn to the fact that in this process of forfeiting on her education, her future capacity to compete in the labour market declines; but her reproductive labour-work value within the household conversely goes up. It is evident that reproductive girls are vital to the institutions of family and marriage.
They are the vessels that give it continuity. Karen, Gogo NaKitty and Gogo Betty’s narratives contribute to a blossoming literature from on “young carers” who are a legacy of the HIV epidemic in much of sub- Saharan Africa (Imoh, Bourdillon & Meichsner, 2019). In this way, the study depicts different Zimbabwean childhoods, for example: those that recognise children’s positions as powerless compared to adults, e.g., disrupted education due to caregiving responsibilities. It has also conveyed childhoods coloured by the processes influencing the decision-making around what sanitary wear to use, for example: access to disposable sanitary wear is governed by adult kin’s purchasing power as was the case for Denise, Karen Khanyi, Lindo and S’tha. This in turn influences children’s consumption patterns in MoMs.
The chapter has provided insights into the economisation of amalobolo and adds to the literature on marriage payments in Southern Africa. This economisation is a consequence of the introduction of formal employment through colonisation which brings about its own ‘a regime of valuation’ (Murphy, 2017:5-6) and is another way of understanding the westernisation of labour. The valuation of labour transforms it into (remunerable) work. This chapter has demonstrated that reproductive labour-work can be “harvested to stimulate economic value” (Murphy, 2017). However, as we also saw with Kazi and Nomvuyo, there is reproductive labour-work that generates taxable income even though it is not tax-deductible32. I have demonstrated in this dissertation that development discourse’s preoccupation with quantitative measures of development (like income per capita) results in the overlooking of informal employment. This in turn flattens the complex dynamic of women’s work in such a way as to invisibilise the work performed by women’s bodies that contributes to the sustenance of their households. The chapter has also demonstrated the different ways in which the double day of Ndebele women and girls in Zimbabwe is obscured and invisibilised. The fact that the reproductive labour-work of Kazi and Nomvuyo is performed in the informal sector, where its “second shift” nature is not always so easily discernible, means that there may not always be a paper trail for it to be traced and made visible. This reproductive labour-work is further obscured by the overall prevalence of informal employment in Zimbabwe. The reproductive labour-work of Ndebele women and girls is also obscured by the double day that they perform as part of the ubuntu-centred third
32 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42116932
shift of volunteer labour-work. I now conclude this chapter with a diagram (overleaf) summing up some of the different types of invisible Ndebele reproductive labour-work.
Figure 19: Summary of types of invisible Ndebele reproductive labour-work