Representing female initiation in Namibia as a ‘harmful traditional practice’

Heike Becker of the UWC Dept. of Anthropology & Sociology comments on the link between the representation of female initiation in Namibia as a Harmful Traditional Practice (HTP) and the discourse of modernity.

“My impetus to rethink questions of popular discourse on gendered and sexualised imaginaries of tradition and modernity originated in the 1990s when I earned my mainstay as a consultancy researcher based in Windhoek. Having trained as an anthropologist and obtained my doctorate with a study of the colonial and early postcolonial Namibian politics of gender and nationalism (Becker 1995), I came to be regarded, in the eyes of many representatives of governmental and non-governmental, bilateral and multilateral organisations, as well as local gender activists and state functionaries, as a ‘natural’ expert on ‘(African) tradition and gender’.

This was a role that I found increasingly uncomfortable when, over the course of the 1990s, the agenda of sponsors as well as local governmental and NGO agents, was increasingly narrowed down to a social problem approach to matters of gender and sexuality. By the end of the decade, the focus was on reproductive health, dominated by domestic violence and HIV/AIDS, at the expense of broader social, cultural, political and economic fields. Local gender activism became progressively couched in a discourse on tradition as the underlying force of reproductive health problems as well as the main impediment to women’s ‘empowerment’. Along with this went the summary rejection of local practices.

This discourse gained currency among many local feminists as well as among expatriate consultants, and other so-called experts in the development industry. At its core, it indiscriminately redefined local practices pertaining to gender and sexuality as ‘harmful traditional practices’. Curiously enough in the Namibian context, women’s initiation occupied a central place in this discourse, which can only be explained by taking into consideration the international campaigns against women’s circumcision.* Although these campaigns are totally irrelevant in Namibia in the absence of any modifications on the initiates’ bodies in those Namibian societies that practice female initiation, when researchers from the University of Namibia were commissioned to study (male and female) initiation in the mid-1990s, word quickly made the round in the local gender activism circles that they were researching ‘female genital mutilation’ (FMG).

It was obvious that the local Namibian HTP discourse drew on the international gender-and-development jargon and the concomitant academic discourse that stresses the binary opposition of gender equity and African culture, and denounces tradition in general, and women’s initiation ceremonies in particular, as generally detrimental to women. (see Geisler 1997) I was not surprised that many prominent Namibian gender activists, and more particularly those in leading positions in the Government and the ruling Swapo party, readily subscribed to the HTP approach in sexual and reproductive health issues. After all, a discourse of modernity as African womens’ saviour had dominated the SWAPO Women’s League pre-independence discourse in exile, as well as the Namibian postcolony’s early public debates on gender. (Becker 2000, especially 171-173; 183; also Becker 1995, especially 158-159)”.

From the later 1990s, these discourses began to shift quite dramatically in line with the emerging heritage focus and a concomitant shift in what is seen as ‘culture’ (tradition-cum-ethnicity) as the basis of a reconfigured nationalism (unity-in-diversity). The fascinating story about Namibia is that this shift occurred rather rapidly over the first decade of postcoloniality - at the time of Namibian independence in 1990, cultures (in the plural) were still a no go area. “Culture” was about the (performing) Arts much more than about “heritage” (this term did not at all appear in Namibian public discourse until c.1996!). I’m currently thinking and writing some more about this process - I wonder whether it was mostly a matter of globally traveling models and discourses, and/or some direct engagement with S.A. heritage politics?

* The politics of these campaigns have been questioned by anthropologists and African feminist scholar-activists on the grounds of their implicit racism and ethnocentrism. (see Kratz 1994: 341-347; Nnaemeka 2001)