CHAPTER 6: DISCUSSION
6.1 D ANGEROUS CHILDHOODS
chilling reflection of one another. In comparing them, I centre the racialised sexual precarity2 and dangers of female adolescence for black Zimbabwean girls and their black counterparts in the US. To better understand the possible reasons for the figures reported in Zimbabwe and the US, we can turn to Munro (2010) who explains that there are invisible macro-structures that influence the everyday ability to exercise agency in sexual behaviour. These range from “gender power dynamics, socio-economic stratifications, inter-personal relations and contradictory impulses of desire” (Munro, 2010:46). Each combine to form a complex web that constructs and constrains our “substantive decisions as well as our perception of the options available to us to choose from” (Munro, 2010:46). Basing this assertion on the findings of my study, I argue that kinship structures and sexual onset are additional mitigating factors in sexual relationships.
Further to this, the vulnerability of girls is worsened by a long history tied to the hypersexualisation of the black body3 – a hypersexualisation that is extended even to underage4 girls.
6.1.2 Normalising the black female body
This dissertation has highlighted some common experiences of racialised precarity for Ndebele women and girls. By presenting a discussion of the hypersexualisation of black girls’ bodies, the dissertation humanises the black, “non-Western girl” (Murphy, 2017:113-4) who becomes an icon of development discourse by depicting some collective experiences. The African American Policy Forum have promoted a dialogue regarding how this hypersexualisation and the silence around these statistics sweeps race and gender under the rug (AAPF, 2020). They argue that this reflects a routinisation of violence that does not warrant national, regional and global dialogues around the safeguarding of black girls and their futures (AAPF, 2020). We cannot completely separate any discussion about the work of protecting black Zimbabwean girls from male predators in communities from the plight of their black trans-Atlantic counterparts. Our histories are tied together. African Americans were trafficked from our continent to North America and suffered a long history of cultural erasure, exploitation and (sexual) abuse by their enslavers. Such parallels, in a unifying way, build solidarity and foster representation while debunking the notion of a monolithic blackness. They represent a dialogue about the status of women in a bid for global gender equality (SDG 5).
2 Listen into the “Under The Blacklight” podcast, Storytelling While Black and Female: Conjuring Beautiful Experiments hosted by the African American Policy Forum on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGS5aP5Vi7g&feature=youtu.be for a discussion around the racial precarity of African American girls.
3 See Story’s (2010) Racing sex—Sexing race: The invention of the Black feminine body for an overview of how the black female body was reconstructed through the explorationist project and centuries of colonisation and slavery.
4 The legal age of consent for sexual intercourse in Zimbabwe at the time of my writing up this dissertation is 16 years.
Towards this endeavour of humanising and normalising the black female body, I searched the internet but could not find any pubertal infographics with depicting girls of skin tones that are racialised as non-white that I could use in my study. I took it upon myself to co-produce such an infographic (see Fig. 20 below) with a black female visual artist, Lambi Chibambo. In it, we capture the biological developments of black women and girls like ourselves and the ones in this study.
Figure 20: Afrocentric 5-stage infographic of pubertal development5
5 This infographic has been adapted from a Eurocentric infographic by the Texas Children’s Hospital (see Appendix G, page 239). I was granted express written permission to modify the infographic and credit them as a source on 22 September 2020 with copyright. In this Afrocentric adaptation, I have used 8 years as the average for puberty as cited by Ndlovu and Bhala (2016:4), cf. page 35. Some girls may not go through the fourth stage at all but still reach
Stage 5 (the sexually mature body) represents a more curvaceous form typical of Southern African women and shows the hair loss which I noted among the majority of menopausal women in the study. This infographic is part of the study’s original contribution to scholarship because it texturises the issues of visibility and representation in decolonial research.
6.1.3 The dangers of adolescence: transitions from childhood into adulthood;
womanhood, motherhood & wifehood
Puberty – like adolescence – marks a transition out of childhood, and is believed to bring with it danger(s).
During puberty, a young girl’s once seemingly gender-neutral torso – untainted by sex and sexuality – begins to gradually be sexualised into a womanhood. We saw in Chapter 4 that puberty transforms a young girl’s seemingly unsexualised prepubescent torso into a sexualised reproductive body that signifies womanhood and adulthood through occurrences like thelarche and ménarche. This is further visualised in Figure 20. However, this sexualised reproductive body lies at the intersection between childhood and adulthood. Menstruation in particular is symbolic of this ambiguous, intermediate state in which a girl’s body is reproductively capable but simultaneously perceived as too young to be sexually active (Burrows
& Johnson, 2005).
As is demonstrated in Figure 20 this intersection is characterised by outward, conspicuous signs of reproductive maturity – thelarche and differentiation of hip width as well as largely concealed signs of reproductive maturity such as: ménarche, menstruation; the differentiation of pubic hair contour; ovarian volume increase; increase and change in uterine dimensions and in endometrial thickness. It is worth noting once again that menstrual leaks are a kind of ‘transgression’ that make concealed signs of reproductive maturity visible. We see this with Ntombi who spoke of how she was always careful to ensure that she was securely covered and padded up so her father would not ‘know’ that she was now menarcheal. Yet he likely already knew but she nevertheless did not want to transgress that visual boundary.
A pubescent girl is not fully an adult, she is an adolescent who lays on the cusp of womanhood. Bailey (2004) and Burke (2004) help us to texturise the transient dangers of adolescence. They highlight the murky boundaries between adult sexuality and adolescent sexuality. Unlike childhood, “a period deserving –
ménarche and mature to the fifth stage of a mature adult. The original, Eurocentric infographic can be viewed at the following link:
https://www.texaschildrens.org/health/puberty. Both are in part an adaptation of Tanner stages of pubertal development in girls (Marshall & Tanner, 1969).
demanding – protection from adult sexuality, the proper relationship between adolescence and sexuality is less clear” (Bailey, 2004:743). As a result of the conspicuous signs of reproductive maturity I described above, it is widely acknowledged that “[a]dolescents are clearly sexual, but not clearly adult” (Bailey, 2004:743). Bailey’s remarks invoke another echo of Douglas (1966) who notes that danger lies in transitional states such as adolescence.
In visibilising the overlooked reproductive labour-work of rural Ndebele women, it is important to note that besides the chores that Ndebele girls do themselves is (as described in Chapter 5), there is another dimension of work that is activated by the reproductive maturity of Ndebele girls. This work consists of collective reproductive labour-work done by the kin and community to protect these girls from the dangers of early sexual debut with childhood peers or even through violation by surrounding adults. Burke explains that,
“The status of child awarded protection and acknowledged distinct limitations of personal responsibility within a context of parental or community belonging” (2004:818). However, it may also happen that this childhood transition into adolescence exposes the dangers that may exist in kinship structures, because while this work is morally expected of parents, guardians and caregivers of the child, it is sometimes these same adults who exploit this vulnerable childhood. This provides us with one last perspective of the discourse of sexuality as victimisation where sexual(ised) children are pitted as the prey and possibly the victims of sexual abuse. This discourse rests on historical and social fabrications of childhoods that are steeped in images of children’s innocence, indicating their disinterestedness and powerlessness vis-à-vis the immorality of society.
To contextually nuance this reproductive labour-work of protecting the Ndebele girl child, I will tap into the vocabulary of the vernacular. In isiNdebele, when one is referring to a pregnant woman, the expression used is uzithwele, that is: she is with child or in a literal translation she is carrying (a child in her stomach).
Outside of wedlock, there is a suggestion that a pregnant girl or woman is one who laid her self-restraint (ukuziphatha kuhle) aside and engaged in sex; therefore being impregnated. There is a kind of moral policing of the appropriate time for human reproduction in isiNdebele. Elders counsel often girls saying amantombazana bafuze ukuthi baziphathe kuhle (must carry themselves with self-restraint – preserving their virginity). This speaks to the social order of life-course events like motherhood and pregnancy.
Ménarche too is a life event. In the youth life-course, the attainment of ménarche signifies that a girl is now an adolescent capable of bearing a child. However, this reproductive capability is ideally not supposed to be activated in adolescence (Burrows & Johnson, 2005). The general belief in Sikelela is that an adolescent is not an adult and that adolescent girls should not, outside of the marital bed, become mothers – especially if they have not yet completed their secondary schooling. For the girls of Sikelela, secondary school
typically terminates in fourth form with attending and completing sixth form (i.e., Form 5/Lower6th and Form 6/Upper 6th), cf. Fig. 5 (page 23). The reproductive labour-work of rural Ndebele women is performed with the aim of keeping safe the bodies of Ndebele girls; bodies that are seen as reproductively mature but still too young to have sex and fall pregnant (Burrows & Johnson, 2005). While done privately, the benefits of this reproductive labour-work are experienced at a household, community and national level because in time, girls are successfully socialised into (re)productive women; wives and mothers. For example: by shortening menses and providing pain relief, iporridge eyophoko and umbondo respectively prevent menstruation from being prolonged and inhibiting their productivity within the home and outside of it.
Therefore this application of Ndebele medicinal grains and herbal remedies in the management of menstruation is precolonial, decolonial and anticolonial as it does not from the onset problematise menstruation as pathological but only intervenes where it is extended, debilitating and/or inconvenient. The prepositions of MHM in international development discourse that focus predominantly on sanitary wear interventions are an overstatement of MHI that largely misdiagnoses the problem and overlooks the agency of donor recipients. This study, by visibilising Ndebele MHMMMs that promote MHH (and RMNCH+A), reclaims medicine as a non-western practice. The reproductive labour-work of the rural Ndebele resonates transcendentally with international development discourse as they each seek and effectively do to influence the experience of (school)girls as they transition into adulthood.
6.2 International development discourse constructions of childhood vs localised constructions of