CHAPTER 4: MENSTRUAL PREPARATION AS REPRODUCTIVE LABOUR-WORK
4.2 M ENSTRUAL PREPAREDNESS : FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH MENSTRUAL KNOWLEDGE
4.2.3 Wawubaleka ngasekhaya: ‘running away’ from home to get menstrual
In answering the central research question, What is the scope of preparation that Ndebele girls undergo for ménarche/menstruation, I sought to understand what the girls and women in the study perceived as menstrual preparedness. Ntombi shares that she knew that when you reached ménarche as a Ndebele girl you had to “‘run away’ from home (wawubaleka ngasekhaya)” and go to your grandmother’s homestead where you would be taught what to do from there. “Traditionally, when a girl begins to menstruate, she tells her grandmother” (McMaster, Cormie & Pitts, 1997:534) and when Ntombi shares her account of ukubaleka ngasekhaya during the first FGD – in the company of 4 other mothers and Gogo Betty – her narration is met with murmurs of dissent expressing that this had not been the experience of the other when they reached menarcheal age. Another mother in the FGD, NaAnita (aged 55) remarks that Ntombi was
“truly Ndebele”. I come to learn that NaAnita’s cultural identity as a Ndebele has always been contested because her father was not Ndebele. She views NaClive’s claims to the culture as legitimate, unlike her own. She shares that she too had heard that “when you were menstruating, you were also supposed to stay away from home during this time”. The mothers and Gogo Betty went on to lament that there was once a time wherein girls would receive this information from the paternal Aunt, that is: father’s sister, traditionally referred to as uBabakazi but now more commonly referred to as uAunty25. This takes place through a process of lexical borrowing from English. Grant (2015) explains that lexical borrowing is “[t]he
25 I have capitalised the words “babakazi” and “aunty” here to denote that the vowel “u” (pronounced as “ooh” in isiNdebele) is prefixed to indicate personhood, differentiating a(ny) paternal aunt/female father from the specific paternal aunt/female father as a figure in the Ndebele family and social relations.
transmission from one language to another of a label with which to name a concept […] and it constitutes the commonest form of contact-induced linguistic change”. The first contact with English in Zimbabwe is arguably through what Jeyifo calls a “violent colonial-imperial conquest” (2018:134). Part of this violent encounter consists of the erasure of practices and socio-cultural beliefs associated with menstruation held by Ndebele girls and women in Zimbabwe before colonisation – as the shift from calling her babakazi to calling her “Aunty” suggests. This violent colonial conquest heralded the adoption of English as an official language and the widespread conversion to Christianity, forever reshaping the memory and role enactment of ubabakazi. The modern Zimbabwe education system (cf. Fig. 5, page 23) that arose out of colonisation also signified the rupture of oral tradition as a mode of knowledge transmission; a mode through which Ndebele culture was preserved from generation to generation before coloniality. This rupture gave primacy to literacy and numeracy as pedagogy over oral tradition.
However, one thing Ntombi, the 5 other women in the first FGD and Lindo do have in common is that they received their menstrual preparation after ménarche. In this way, women are often poorly prepared at the onset of ménarche. For Ntombi, the menstrual preparation she received was not just about addressing her immediate concerns of managing the bleeding; it also entailed being taught about what ménarche would mean for her going forward. Gogo Betty responds to Ntombi’s account of menstrual preparedness (gained by running away to her grandmother) by saying that she did not know of this. This is striking given the generational gap between the two. It suggests a break in the transmission of Ndebele socio-cultural practices associated with menstruation. Gogo Betty adds that she only knew that “When a girl reaches ménarche that girls could also be sent to ubabakazi to gain knowledge menstruation before ménarche.” After Gogo Betty’s comments, the women in the FGD go on to lament that this pre-menarcheal practice no longer happens as consistently as it once used to. To help everyone in the FGD put things into perspective, Gogo Betty asks Ntombi why she specifically had to run away to receive the menstrual preparation to which she refers.
Ntombi’s response to this question is, “That’s just the way it was done. This also ensured that knowledge of you reaching ménarche filtered back through the correct channels. This is how he came to know that you had started menstruating”. Upon hearing this, Gogo Betty chimes in and the following exchange ensues:
Gogo Betty: That’s what was a taboo – father was not meant to know. At least not like that.
Ntombi: Even now I’m still embarrassed. It took me a long time for it to be normal for my Dad to know that I was menstruating. The worst thing I
could imagine were to be if he were to see my menstrual blood. The thought of it… it would bring me shame. I wouldn’t ever want that.
NaAnita: I would take a blanket and tie it securely around me on top of whatever else I was wearing, like a skirt.
The focus group discussion reveals that ukubaleka in this context involves at first keeping the fact that one is now of menarcheal age hidden from your father and other male members of the household. This distinctly Ndebele menstrual etiquette of ukubaleka ngasekhaya at ménarche to receive menstrual education away from the home nuances Western conceptions of “menstrual taboo” (White, 2013:65) and the idea of a seemingly universal “menstrual etiquette” (Laws, 1990) that dictates the concealment of menstruation and menstrual products (Laws, 1990; Houppert, 1999; White, 2013; Fahs, 2016; Bobel et al., 2020). This Ndebele menstrual etiquette of ukubaleka ngasekhaya at ménarche suggests that the concealment was from the male gaze. This is Gogo Sinini’s account of being isolated from men and boys during menses and Gogo NaKitty’s memory of being pulled out of sight by her mother in the home when she began her first period and was not at first aware that she had stained herself. Ntombi stresses the fact she still continued to feel ashamed of menstruating. She adds that she grew up knowing that “someone of the opposite sex, besides our husband, was never supposed to know about you menstruating”. Even though Ntombi’s grandmother had normalised menstruation as a natural process of ‘growing up’ (ukukhula), Ntombi professes that “I would even wear tights.” Ntombi makes special mention of not wanting her father to know she was menstruating. Gogo Betty replies pensively, “And yet your father probably already knew by then”. This part of the focus group discussion indicates that through this Ndebele menstrual etiquette there are specific channels through which information about your coming of age by way of ménarche was meant to filter to your father and/or other men of the house. This is likely because by conscientising the male head of the home to this development, while observing cultural protocol and not inappropriately transgressing the appropriate gates of gender26 around menstrual preparation, male guardians could be co-opted into protecting a young post-menarcheal girl and being vigilant of any wandering eyes in (and outside of) the household in a bid to prevent early or coerced sexual debut and early unintended pregnancy. A Ndebele girl is Ndebele only if her father is Ndebele27. In this way babakazi is a proxy for baba (the male father) in gendered matters like menstruation, marriage and reproduction. In this role she blurs the lines of heteronormative gender binaries as a female father. Furthermore, this communitarian way of alerting a
26 See page 108 for further discussion of other kinsmen who serve as gatekeepers of menstrual knowledge, governing Ndebele menstrual etiquette in different ways.
27 See footnote 23 on page 147.
(male) father about menarche uncovers the stake that fathers had in the upbringing of Ndebele girls. We find that male kin are not excluded from this ecosystem of growing up. They too are involved in the reproductive labour-work of protecting girls and promoting the reproductive success.
The stigma menstrual taboo is not a blanket experience of external judgement by the wider society. Ntombi helps us to understand that the shame and stigma is equally a personal internalisation. Hence, we see that it is not that men have no role in menstruation or its management but more so that the role that they play is a very specific and particular one. This role is evolving as we find that men are now openly involved in menstruation28 matters. Gogo Betty points out how “now we even give them pads through our intervention [referring to my initiative29 other development programmes30] and tell them to give it to their girls.” Gogo Betty’s critique suggests that the work of development agencies in the menstrual health space is visibilising the reproductive labour-work of menstrual preparation. Ntombi applauds this and saying “But there is nothing wrong with that. Even in the store, your husband will buy it for you.” In this way, men can be an access point to MoMs as we also with Karen’s malume (see page 108). This is because men may sometimes have a higher purchasing power than their female counterparts. By this account, technical aspect of menstrual preparation becomes a collective, familial responsibility.
Ntombi’s menstrual narrative destabilises “a heteronormative order [that] legitimis[es] the ‘men-active- penetrators’ and ‘women-passive-penetrated’ oppositional binary (Epprecht, 2009: v)” (Batisai, 2013:27).
This Ndebele menstrual etiquette enables us to appreciate Ndebele women as actively agents in sex and sexuality (as opposed to passive penetrants), which subverts the discourse of sexuality as victimisation. In this narrative we see the agency in abstinence. Ntombi’s memory of ménarche also enables us to peep in through a window to see that older female kin ideally31 work alongside male kinfolk to protect newly menstruating girls from the advances of others who may possibly be enticed by a Ndebele girls’ newly realised reproductive maturity. The home is thus fortified in this way as male and female kinfolk are unified around protecting the Ndebele girl child from sexual abuse and early sexual debut, through this very private household-level inter-gender reproductive labour-work. Once again, we witness reproductive labour-work related to menstruation as a collective familial responsibility.
28 and reproduction as we see with the male mother who joins the second FGD to discuss the issue of early unintended pregnancy in the village
29 cf. page 60-1
30 cf. page 91
31 I use adverb “ideally” because I do not, however, take for granted that sexual violations are also perpetrated by family members. This is an issue I discuss in Chapter 6 (Section 6.1). Nevertheless, it was ideally performed in solidarity, in the spirit of ubuntu.
Ntombi realised that after ménarche, she not only had a responsibility to manage her flow but “to be constantly mindful” (Prendergast, 2000:116) that her menses remains invisible to the male gaze. This is indicative of the two strains of invisible reproductive labour-work that Ntombi is performing. Ntombi’s double weighted invisible reproductive labour-work (itself constituting differing dimensions of menstrual preparation) is a product of the reproductive labour-work done by Ntombi’s grandmother during this time of seclusion from her family. Though the other women in the first FGD did not receive their menstrual preparation by observing the Ndebele socio-cultural practice of ‘running away’ to their grandmothers, they were nevertheless prepared for menstruation by other female relatives such as mothers, older sisters and obabakazi. These female kinfolks are also supporters in managing the societal stigma around menstruation.
It is important to note that though it is cognisant of the social stigma around menstruation, the reproductive labour-work done by female kin does not shame girls about menstruation.