CHAPTER 4: MENSTRUAL PREPARATION AS REPRODUCTIVE LABOUR-WORK
4.2 M ENSTRUAL PREPAREDNESS : FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH MENSTRUAL KNOWLEDGE
4.2.6 Relational maturity
knowing is empowering because it enables us to understand and articulate experiences, which helps us describe and explain phenomenon.
I contrast Gogo MaMoyo with Gogo NaNambitha. Gogo NaNambitha remarks self-deprecatingly that, “I am uneducated, so I do not know my age now or how old I was when I first started menstruating or when I first got married”. She is still knowledgeable, however. She has ‘known’ a man, and while she does not know the exact year, she reached ménarche; married; or had her first child she is still able to delineate these with paperwork such as her ID card and her first-born son’s birth certificate. Gogo NaNambitha also speaks of how she would track her period using the lunar cycle. Time, and with it the transition from childhood and adulthood, pre-dates the Greco-Roman calendar. Societies measure time, and in turn adulthood, in different ways, for example by the waxing and waning of the moon or the changing of seasons. Through Gogo NaNambitha’s narrative we see that the modern and traditional are not such distinct categories as we would like to imagine. On one hand, Gogo NaNambitha used the ‘synodic cycle’ (Steele & Allen, 2004) to track her menstrual cycle through her life. Yet on the other hand, she is still able use modern alphanumeric bureaucratic documentation to discern time. Though Gogo NaNambitha is in many ways a traditional rural woman who was not allowed to attend school by her father, her insights make it possible to reclaim rural African women in a narrative of knowing and knowledge (re)production that they have been excluded from for centuries.
Zimbabwe can be contextualised by an examination of social relations and the continuity of one generation from another. According to Southern African tradition, childhood is also not a phase that you definitively grow out of; indeed, there are also ‘adult children’ in Southern African culture. The Xhosa-speaking Mpondo54 people of South Africa serve as a good illustration of this argument. As far back as the 1930s, anthropologist Monica Hunter (1936) grasped the nuances of age among this ethnic group in her research.
Hunter explains that “as the child grows older he is taught respect and obedience […] There is no age at which he is regarded as free from parental control” (1936:25). As I highlighted in the positionality Section 3.3 on page 62 of the Methodology chapter, even as an adult you are a child in relation to someone older than you (either biologically or socially). I call this ambiguous relativity of ‘age’ and adulthood relational maturity. In order to buttress my propositions around relational maturity, I turn to Zimbabwean agriculturist scholar, Mandivamba Rukuni. Rukuni captures the nuance of relational maturity in the Zimbabwean context when he states:
To all my mother’s sisters and cousins, I am their child. Therefore, it does not matter if one of my mother’s cousins is twelve years old, while I may be 53 years old. I still treat that twelve-year-old child as my mother and I still play a role as a child to her – even in my late adult[hood] (Rukuni, 2007; cited in Mangena & Ndlovu, 2014).
What Rukuni describes here is an Afrocentric conceptualisation of social age. From this perspective, one can be either a child or an adult in relation to others; and this is regardless of embodied physical maturity (e.g., ménarche, menstruation, motherhood, menopause), (il)literacy and/or ‘knowing’.
During a ‘deep hang out’ (Geertz, 1998) with Gogo Betty there is an instance when she is explaining a traditional Ndebele neonatal practice and says to me “You are going to learn things that are uncommon at your age”. She is not referring to my biological age but rather to my age in relation to her. To Gogo Betty my chronological age along with my nulliparity at the time makes me a child in relation to her – an older adult who has born children and even has grandchildren.55 Relational maturity has multi-layered concept and is not without contradictions in practice. I witness this with Thandazo who refers to me as mamomdala56. Strictly speaking, she should refer to me as gogo but because I am relatively close to her in
54 whom she misnamed the “Pondo”
55 My relational maturity in the study served as an advantage because like Batisai – a Shona, Zimbabwean researcher, who found during her doctorate that as a “relatively young Shona woman”, interviewing elderly Shona women, she was perceived as the ideal candidate for coaching (2013:74); cf. page 64.
56 i.e.: older mother; mother’s older sister; Aunt
age (I am six years her senior) and the fact that she is a mother (whereas I am not yet). On top of this is she is even a babakazi who lives with her 12-year-old niece and is her niece’s primary caregiver. Thandazo thereby uses these markers of adulthood relativise the generation gaps between us. Relational maturity is thereby a subjective social construct because though she is a mother and past the legal age of majority at 24 years of age, to me Thandazo is a child – umntanami (my child) – as she refers to me as mamomdala (older mother).
Diallo (2004) and Khau (2012) refute the notion of ‘African culture’ that portrays the continent and its indigenous people as static in the face of modernity. The conception of relational maturity helps give vitality to Afrocentric conceptions of childhood and adulthood. It nuances (mis)conceptions that interpolate African cultures as a homogenous, singular culture. Amadiume (2015) also contests the misconception when she admonishes the work of Leith-Ross (1939) who entitles her work – a work riddled with misunderstandings and superimpositions of Western ideology on the Igbo women of Nigeria – African Women. The title generalises her ethnography with one ethnic group in one country on the continent to the whole continent.
It is important to recognise the multiplicity of heterogenous cultures and lived experiences in Africa if we are to meaningfully debunk specious notions of a universal ‘African culture’. Alanamu et al.’s (2018) argument that the definition of childhood cannot be generalised helps to centre this debate from Afrocentric perspective. The authors unseat some of the essentialised and essentialising notions of African culture as often conveyed in much of the literature produced by European and North American scholars (Alanamu et al., 2018).
This is not to say that none the nuances and the heterogeneity of Africa can be grasped by non-African scholars (cf. page 114). Jeremy Jones (2009), for example is a US anthropologist who raises a critical discussion around African youth and African culture in his work on elopement practices in Zimbabwe. He begins by problematising the notion of Africa in his writing on African youth and their mediation of their youth identity through marriage (Jones, 2009). He goes on to consider how it is not possible to divorce the
“land mass” that is Africa’s material existence from the “colonial, neo-colonial and experiences [that] are mapped onto its face” (Jones, 2009:2). Jones (2009) cautions against fixating on youth as a category in such a way as to presume offhandedly that some other way of dividing the social sphere (e.g., race, social class, gender) is not equally or more relevant (Jones, 2009). He also contests the comparability of an ‘African youth’ because youth groups in Africa are as diverse as they can be homogenous. Jones (2009) therefore concludes that age may not always be the best qualifier. He contrasts youth studies to a lesser studied demographic – the elderly (Jones, 2009). Batisai adds to this when she asserts that “the dearth of historically based literature about discourses of gender and sexuality is noteworthy” and that, “[t]his is especially true
of research that involves the elderly in post-colonial Africa” (Batisai, 2013:3).57 In the above section on menstrual literacy (cf. page 112), I put forward ménarche as an index for maturity in order to better understand the transition into adulthood and the responsibility heralded thereof. Relational maturity blurs the distinctions between biological age and social age, and in so doing, the study takes us “beyond the apparent links to biological facts of age” (Jones, 2009:2) by centring adolescence and the social significance of biological graduations into adulthood for Ndebele girls.