CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.2 M ENSTRUATION AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE
2.2.3 Contribution to scholarship
The review of related literature carried out in Section 2.1.3 highlights the role of the paternal aunt as a significant figure in African social relations. Mwenda highlights that among the Baganda of Uganda, ssenga (the paternal aunt) is responsible for counselling girls in “sexual matters, including pre-menarche practices, pre-marriage preparation, erotic instruction” (2006:341). She is also known as tete among the Shona of
26 “The World Bank defines the term fragile state as being a low-income country characterised by weak state capacity or weak state legitimacy leaving citizens vulnerable to a range of shocks. A state is also deemed to be fragile if it is eligible for financial aid from the International Development Association (IDA)” (Ncube, Chimbwanda & Willie, 2019:66).
27 See page 153.
28 See Chapter 3, page 56.
Zimbabwe (MacGonagle, 2007; Meekers, 1993; Batisai, 2013); masenge among the Tutsi of Rwanda;
wanachimbusa among the Bemba of Zambia; namkungwi among the Chewa of Malawi; kungwi among the Zaramo of Tanzania; mangwane among the Sotho of South Africa (Muyinda, 2003) and Vho-Makadzi among the Vha-Venda in South Africa (Ramathuba, 2015). Yet despite the important role she plays in menstrual preparedness and other issues, babakazi has been little researched from the perspective of the Ndebele. Research on Zimbabwean women focuses predominantly on Shona and Shona-speaking women.
Therefore, this study contributes to the dearth of knowledge around babakazi, rural Ndebele women and their role in preparing Ndebele girls for menstruation in Zimbabwe. This dissertation will also show that male kin are sometimes involved or co-opted into this work by female kin as they too share a stake in the upbringing of Ndebele girls. It illuminates the figure of babakazi as a female father, is a central menstrual knowledge gatekeeper that destabilises Eurocentric, heteronormative, “body-oriented” (Oyěwùmí, 1997) conceptualisations of gender imposed on understandings of kinship ties and the rigid divvying up of life rhythms according to these. In so doing, the study contributes to a growing body of decolonial29, scholarly literature from Africa (Ngubane, 1977; Oyěwùmí, 1997; Amadiume, 2015) that challenges Western gender binaries and assumptions. The study shows how the role of babakazi has changed generationally and is being supplemented by other actors and institutions in the preparing of adolescent girls for menstruation.
In (de)constructing menstrual preparation as reproductive labour-work in rural Zimbabwe, it also renders visible the connections between menstrual preparedness, sexual education and developmental outcomes like early unintended pregnancy. The dissertation builds on work by feminist scholars exploring gender, sex, and sexuality in Africa (cf. Tamale, 2011; Bennett, 2011; Lewis, 2008; Becker, 2004; Mama, 1996);
painting a picture of sex(uality) among the young and the elderly. This is complemented by an Afrocentric infographic that visualises sexual development on the bodies of black girls as part of the study’s original contribution to scholarship for the purpose of representation and interrogate the (hyper)sexualisation body of the black girl (see Fig. 20, page 157).
Bobel’s (2019) book, The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South resonates deeply with the scope of this study in so far as centring girls in international development discourse. In it, she identifies gaps in the literature on “schoolgirls’ sexual maturation and experiences of menstruation” in Zimbabwe (Bobel, 2019:69). This monograph makes an important contribution to a body
29 I build on this decolonial contribution in Section 3.6.1 of Chapter 3 (page 71) where I also convey my considerations around what it means to carry out decolonial research in an African language (isiNdebele) with Ndebele study participants, with the aim of making a contribution to the global project of decolonising higher education.
of literature on women and girls’ experiences of menstruation in the context of Zimbabwe, where
“significantly less research [on this topic] has been undertaken” (Padmanabhanunni et al., 2018:705).
Menstrual experiences are synonymous with adolescence and youth. The term ‘youth’ in particular is widely acknowledged as a “universal stage of development” (Jones, 1999:59). By using the body as a material unit of analysis and indexing adolescence to ménarche and menstruation, the changes undergone during this stage of development can be clearly demonstrated. There is a growing consensus that this
“transition period from childhood to adulthood now occupies a greater portion of the life course than ever before” (Sawyer et al., 2018:223) and that as time goes by it is becoming increasingly challenging to define an age range for adolescence (Brookman, 1995; McDonagh et al. 2018). The indexing of adolescence to ménarche and menstruation takes us beyond the biological facts of the age of adolescence and towards a complementary “sociological imagination” (Mills, 1959) of it. One in which reproductive maturity hails a burden of reproductive labour-work that is undertaken by young adolescent girls. This indexing also complicates our understanding of age by diffusing the dichotomy between biological maturity and social maturity. As a result, the study contributes to the sociology of the body and sociology of childhood (which neglects the bodies of older children, i.e., teenagers). Finally, adolescence when indexed by ménarche and menstruation makes a contribution to the sociology of childhood as adolescence is measured anew through a subversion of certain gender-blind dichotomies that privilege production over reproduction.
Within the sociology of ageing, little attention has been ascribed to African conceptions of age and childhood. A Cartesian approach to the studies of childhood pronounces a dualism between biological age and social age by dichotomising the body and the mind, and this is not a fitting approach for the African context. I turn to Halcrow and Tayles who remark that “polarized approaches to childhood and age
“highlight the dualistic way in which ‘biological’ and ‘social’ aspects of the body are viewed” (2008:190).
It is important to recognise that childhood is both a biological and social phenomenon. Halcrow and Tayles define social age as “the culturally constructed norms of appropriate behaviour and status of individuals within an age category” (2008:192). Refocusing childhood and adulthood through the lens of relational maturity (see page 113) is one such way of representing social age from an African perspective using the Zimbabwean context.