from Africa Today Volume 47, Numbers 3-4Learning the Facts of Life: Past and Present Experiences in a Rural Tanzanian Community
Denise Roth Allen
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This article explores the meaning and place of “traditional” forms of sex education within the cultural and historical context of the Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania. Although structured puberty initiation rituals may have been an important source of information about sexuality and reproduction for Tanzanian adolescents in the past, such rituals were not common to all Tanzanian settings. The Shinyanga Region is a case in point. Drawing upon the anthropological and sociological literature for west central Tanzania, as well my ethnographic fieldwork in a small, rural community from 1992 to 1994, I explore answers to several interrelated questions: How did young women who lived in this geographic setting learn about sexuality and reproduction in the past? Did instruction about such matters consist of practices that were uniform and structured events, or was information passed on in a less uniform, nonstructured way? Would a revival of these practices, whatever their form, benefit young women today?
On the whole, initiation rites, whether into social maturity or cult membership, best exemplify transition, since they have well-marked and protracted marginal or liminal phases.
—Victor Turner, Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites des Passage
When an African girl [c]omes of age, she is initiated into womanhood. This form of education is practiced in many parts of Africa. In the process the girl dies, and the woman is born. That is the concept behind most African initiation ceremonies, known in Tanzania as Unyago.
—Marie Shaba and Davie Kituru, Unyago
The [Sukuma] tribe is thought to be of recent origin and lacks many of the features such as initiation rites and age-sets which are so distinctive of African life.
—R. E. S. Tanner, The Sexual Mores of the Basukuma, Tanganyika
Several of the early, well-known anthropological studies of rural African life examined puberty as a culturally marked period of the life cycle in which young men and women learned about their social responsibilities, including knowledge about sexual behavior and reproduction, as adults in their communities. Some of these works paid particular attention to the elaborate initiation rituals, or rites des passages, that facilitated a young person’s transition from childhood into social adulthood (Turner 1969; Richards [1956]1982).1 Although no longer as widely practiced today as they were in the past, rituals of initiation were also common in Tanzania. They took various forms and were often referred to in the Swahili language as unyago for girls and jando for boys (Swantz [1966]1969; Shaba and Kituru 1991).2
The meaning and place of initiation in the contemporary Tanzanian context received a lot of attention from Tanzanian scholars, journalists, and women’s health advocates during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Hashim 1989; Kaijage 1989; Shaba and Kituru 1991; Ntukula 1994; Shuma 1994). Prompted to a large extent by the launching of an international maternal health initiative in Nairobi in 1987—an initiative which identified pregnancy in adolescent girls as a significant maternal health problem—efforts to understand the dimensions and underlying causes of teenage pregnancy in Tanzania were undertaken (Kaisi 1988; Tumbo-Masabo and Liljeström 1994).
Teenage pregnancy was perceived as a problem for several reasons. A significant number of maternal deaths are attributed to unsafe, illegal abortion among school-aged girls (Royston and Armstrong 1989; Mwateba 1990; Matasha 1998; WHO 1998). In Tanzania, young girls who find themselves pregnant are expelled from school, a stark reality that is seen as instrumental in a young girl’s decision to abort (Puja and Kassimoto 1994). Obstructed labor, another cause of death among pregnant girls in Tanzania, occurs when there is a disproportion between the size of the infant’s head and the mother’s pelvis. Pregnancy in girls whose bodies have not yet physically matured is often cited as a key factor contributing to life-threatening complications and, ultimately, death during childbirth (WHO 1986; Kaisi 1988).
Some Tanzanians writing on the subject suggested that naiveté, in matters related to sexuality and reproduction, was an underlying cause of teenage pregnancy in Tanzania (Alloo 1988; Matasha 1998).3 Others expressed concern that such naiveté was a result of a gradual eroding of past traditional practices that had previously instructed Tanzanian adolescents about proper sexual behavior (Ntukula 1994). Similar opinions, about the cause of adolescents’ lack of knowledge with respect to sexual behavior and reproduction, led one urban-based Tanzanian women’s organization in the late 1980s to call for a reintroduction of “traditional forms of sex education” as a means of addressing the problem (Alloo 1988).4
Recent studies of the impact of development interventions in Third World country settings, however, have cautioned that assumptions about what constitutes “tradition” can end up hindering more than they help. The problem arises, these studies note, when projects based on some generic understanding of “tradition” are designed and implemented irrespective of the particular context in which the “problem” to be addressed occurs (Ferguson 1990; Pigg 1995; Roth 1996).5
I take the above cautionary note as a point of departure to explore past and present forms of “traditional sex education” in a small, rural community in the Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania. My discussion will attempt to provide answers to several interrelated questions: How did young people living in this geographic setting learn about sexuality and reproduction in the past? Did instruction into such matters involve practices that were uniform and structured events, or was information passed on in a less uniform, nonstructured way? Would a revival of these “traditional” practices, whatever their form, benefit women, and how do they differ from the way that young women acquire such information today?
My analysis draws upon several sources of data. I discuss past studies of the Sukuma and Nyamwezi, a culturally and linguistically related people who, combined, constitute the largest ethnic “group” in northwest and west central Tanzania.6 I then present results of my study of women’s reproductive health concerns in a small, rural community in the Shinyanga Region from 1992 to 1994. My data include conversations with friends and neighbors, observations of daily life in the community, and at the home of a local healer and midwife who lived in a nearby village.7 I supplement my discussion of these observations with the results of semistructured interviews conducted with 154 women about their experiences during pregnancy and childbirth.8 What emerges is a picture of informal networks of reproductive knowledge, networks that were relevant for both older and younger women, although the structure and site of that informal learning may have changed over time. In the following section I present a brief description of my fieldsite and the sample of women who took part in my survey. I then move to a discussion of unyago, a particular form of initiation that takes place in the Shinyanga Region.
The Setting
Bulangwa, the pseudonym for the setting in which I conducted my fieldwork, is best described as a small rural settlement—larger than a village but not quite a town, with an approximate population of 4,000. One of the defining characteristics of Bulangwa was its cultural and ethnic heterogeneity. Although the Sukuma people were the largest ethnic group in the area, a variety of other subgroups in the community gave Bulangwa a distinctly multicultural feel. These subgroups were acknowledged by all and often referred to in terms of their ethnic or religious distinctions, for example, Sukuma or non-Sukuma, Arab or African, Muslim or non-Muslim, and so on. The result was often a blurring of ethnic, cultural, and religious boundaries, and a fluidity in everyday social interactions. Given the historical context of west central Tanzania, this blurring of boundaries is hardly surprising. From the Bantu migrations into this area several centuries ago, to the infamous nineteenth-century trade caravans that passed through the area with their cargoes of slaves and ivory, to the cattle-raiding skirmishes that have taken place between the Sukuma, Maasai, and Taturu peoples, to the impact of colonial rule, this geographic setting has long been a site for a coming together of different peoples, for a fluidity in social and cultural interactions, and for incorporation and assimilation (Abrahams 1967; Roberts 1970; Holmes and Austen 1972; Koponen 1988).9
Part of my discussion of women’s access to information about reproduction is presented in the two broad groupings of “older” and “younger” women. Ideally, exact age should be a factor in my analysis. This was a problem, however, because some of the women did not know the date of their birth. As a result, some of the women’s ages I recorded were estimated or guessed ages, based on the timing of specific life events, such as puberty, marriage, first birth, etc., taken in the context of local historical events. Because many women did not know their exact age, I defined women as “older” (n=50) if they had already reached menopause, and “younger” (n=104) if they still experienced their monthly menses. Ninety-four percent of the ages listed for older women were guessed ages, producing an estimated average age of 62.5 years, and an age range of between 45 and 90 years. None of the women in this group had ever attended school. The education level among the younger group of women falls into three categories: (1) never attended primary school (n=43); (2) attended some years of primary school (n= 20); and (3) completed primary school (n=41), three of whom had attended secondary school for a short period of time. Seventy percent of the ages of younger women with no formal education were guessed ages, with an average age of thirty-five years, and a range of between twenty-three and fifty. Women with some years of primary education had an average age of thirty-three years, with a range of between seventeen and forty-seven years. Thirty percent of their ages were estimated. The average age for younger women who had completed primary school was twenty-eight years, with a range of between nineteen and forty-five. Only 5% of the ages in this latter group were estimated.
Learning the Facts of Life: Past and Present Experiences
Although sex education was an important component of puberty rituals for Tanzanian adolescents in the past, it is nevertheless important to note that such rituals were not common to all Tanzanian settings. The Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania is a case in point. The anthropological literature for this geographic setting, as well as the results of my interviews with women in 1994, reveals that information about the facts of life was not necessarily acquired through structured rituals of initiation. Given the limited practice of such rituals in west central Tanzania, how did young women acquire knowledge about sexual behavior and reproduction in the past? If, as I will suggest below, young girls learned about their bodies and about the reproductive cycle in an informal, nonuniform way, how does this differ from how subsequent generations of young women living in this rural community acquire similar knowledge today? To begin to answer these questions, I turn to a brief discussion of the unyago initiation ceremony. Although such ceremonies existed in the past and continue in the Shinyanga Region today, participation in unyago is not universal. The reasons for this are discussed below.
Unyago
Several Tanzanian authors have written about the educational value of initiation rites, often referred to as unyago, in the Tanzanian context. Shaba and Kituru (1991), for example, contextualize unyago initiation ceremonies within three ethnic groups in Tanzania—the Wapare, the Wamera, and the Wakaguru of Tanzania. They suggest that initiation functioned as a traditional institution of social and moral education in that young girls were taught about their sexual and reproductive lives, as well as their social responsibilities as wives and mothers. Ntukula (1994: 98) makes a similar point, noting how in the past, “the aim of initiation was to integrate the youth into the moral order.” She places the blame for the rise in the number of teenage pregnancies in recent years on the effects of the modernization process in Tanzania, which “has taken instruction on sexuality out of the social and cultural context” (Ntukula 1994: 118).
Leila Hashim provides insight into two forms of unyago that take place in Tanzania: unyago wakiarabu and unyago wakiafrika (Hashim 1989). Drawing upon research she conducted in the coastal region of Tanga, Hashim notes that unyago wakiarabu is a form practiced mainly by Arabs and Afro-Arabs, once a young girl has begun menstruating:
[A] young girl who has just got her first menstrual period is taken to her aunt’s (somo’s) house and kept in seclusion for seven days. During those seven days she is taught about how to take care of herself during her period, she is taught manners, that she should always be polite to her elders, that she should be hardworking and diligent, that she should not allow boys/men to touch her and that she should be clean at all times. (Hashim 1989: 2)
According to Hashim, unyago wakiafrika, which she refers to as the “African type,” is similar to the initiation process described above, with the added component of the ngoma (dance):
The [initiate] who goes through this type of unyago is taught dancing techniques firstly so that she may be adept at dancing during weddings and others functions, i.e., after she gets married; and secondly to prepare her for her role as a wife. (Hashim 1989: 3)
The unyago initiation ceremonies to which these authors refer also took place in Shinyanga town, the capital of the Shinyanga Region, although not on a regular basis. Participation was not limited to any particular ethnic group per se, nor was participation necessarily limited to unmarried young women. According to one initiation leader (somo) I met in Shinyanga town (an older Tusi woman who had moved to Tanzania from Burundi as a child), the only stipulation was that the participants had to be Muslim.10
I learned about this “requirement” when I inquired as to whether or not I could undergo the initiation ceremony myself. At first she was quite enthusiastic, even offering to be my somo (instructress). But when I returned to Shinyanga town a couple of weeks later to ask when the next initiation ceremony would take place, she informed me that she had bad news. It appears that she had agreed to be my somo too hastily. After consulting with some of the other older somo in her group, they informed her that I could not be initiated unless I was Muslim. They apparently had never initiated a non-Muslim woman before, nor had they “ever heard of such a case.” “What religion are you?” she asked me, as if hoping that perhaps I was Muslim after all. I replied that I had been raised a Catholic. Well, she told me, if I agreed to convert to Islam, there would be no obstacle at all. As I am almost certain they had anticipated, I declined to convert.
When I told some of my Arab neighbors who lived in Bulangwa what happened, that I would not be able to go through the initiation process after all, they told me that being Muslim was not really a requirement for participation. They guessed that this particular group of women had probably been afraid that as a westerner I would reveal the secrets one learned during the initiation ceremony. They suspected that the somo in Shinyanga town had just not wanted to voice their reservations so directly. During my subsequent visits to Shinyanga town, two other somo whom I had not previously met approached me, telling me that they had heard of my “problem” trying to find a group that would initiate me. Like my Arab neighbors, these women also told me that being Muslim was not a requirement. One of them offered to serve as my somo instead. But by that time I had learned about the experience of an American colleague of mine who had undergone an initiation ceremony in the Kigoma Region. She told me that her own initiation had resulted in rivalry among different women’s groups at her fieldwork site.11 She also told me that she thought the initiation ended up being fairly expensive. Remembering her experience, I made the decision to just drop the idea, and so, after thanking them, I declined.
Arab women in Bulangwa viewed unyago ceremonies with mixed reactions. Although none of these women had actually undergone the initiation ceremonies themselves, they had heard about it informally from others through the grapevine. Some expressed a desire to take part in it; they heard that unyago initiates learned various techniques that would help enhance their sexual relationships with their husbands (Shaba and Kituru 1991). Others thought their husbands would be opposed to their participation, afraid that the lessons learned would turn their wives into wahuni, a term which, roughly translated in this specific context, conveys the meaning of sexual renegade or nymphomaniac.
Only 3 of the 154 woman who took part in my formal survey had been initiated into unyago as young girls. All three of these women were African Tanzanian Muslims.12 Two were older women who had not experienced their menses during the last ten years. The other was forty-one years old and still experienced her monthly menses. All three belonged to a small group of women in Bulangwa who had been initiated into unyago upon reaching puberty. Similar to what was described by Hashim above, these now middle-aged and older women often sang and danced at Arab weddings and other social functions in the community.
Although unyago may still be providing some young women in the Shinyanga Region with information about the facts of life, such ceremonies were not very common nor were any held in Bulangwa. One explanation as to why this was the case could simply be the dearth of suitable candidates. The somo who had refused to initiate me did so on the grounds that I was not Muslim. Very few of the women who took part in my formal survey were Muslim either: 19.2% (n=20) of the 104 younger women and 9.8% (n=4) of the older women. Another explanation as to why “traditional” forms of sex education, such as unyago, are not very common in the Shinyanga Region may have something to do with the cultural and historical context of the area, as I discuss below.
Rites des Passage among the Sukuma People
Anthropological and sociological studies of the Sukuma and Nyamwezi peoples of northwest and west central Tanzania consistently note that puberty initiation rituals were never a part of Sukuma or Nyamwezi culture (Bösch 1930; Blohm 1933; Cory [1953]1970; Tanner 1955a; Reid 1969; Varkivisser 1973). Swantz’s 1966 review of the available literature on the religious and magical rites of Tanzanian women is notable for its rather short section on the Sukuma and Nyamwezi peoples (Swantz [1966]1969: 118).
Although there was an absence of formalized rites des passages surrounding puberty, Hans Cory, a Tanganyikan government sociologist who wrote extensively on Sukuma culture in the 1940s and 1950s, notes that initiation into secret societies among the Sukuma and Nyamwezi did take place in the past (Cory [1953]1970: 5). An individual could belong to more than one of these societies, and they counted among their members “pagans, Christians, and Muslims” alike (Cory 1946: 160). There were male secret societies of snake handlers, of elephant and of porcupine hunters, and even societies of thieves. According to Cory, initiations into such secret societies “take the place of the initiation schools found among other peoples, in which the young receive formal instruction in behavior toward elders, social unity, and, to a certain extent, a moral code” (Cohen and Middleton 1970: 1–34; Cory [1953]1970: 5). Initiation into secret healing societies, which is not restricted by either age or gender, is still quite prevalent today.13
Despite an apparent absence of formal puberty initiation ceremonies among the Sukuma and Nyamwezi peoples, several studies do make reference to the existence of village dormitories where young people slept upon reaching puberty. Rather than the formal instruction offered through puberty initiation ceremonies, informal education took place in the maji house, the Sukuma word for such a dwelling. In the following section I take a closer look at the maji house and its past role in the sexual and moral education of young Sukuma girls.
The Maji House
According to Cory, living arrangements associated with the maji often took several forms:
Girls do not sleep in their parents’ house after the first menstruation. They have their own maji (ibanza), which is established in the house of an old married couple of the village.14 No special arrangements are made by the villagers for opening a maji. Often a girl goes to sleep in the outer room . . . of her grandparents’ hut where she is joined by a few girls of her own age, if the grandparents agree. Some old people like to have the maji in their house, because they like the laughter and liveliness of the young folk; others refuse because of the noise and the responsibility involved. If there are many girls in a village ready to join the maji, a special hut may be built for them, close to the homestead of a father with several daughters. Sometimes an empty hut in the village may be turned into a maji. (Cory [1953]1970: 39)
In contrast to what Cohen and Odhiambo (1989) have noted about the instruction that took place within the swindhe, a similar form of communal living among Luo young people of western Kenya in the past, no formal sexual or moral education took place within maji.15 Instead, young girls learned about the facts of life informally from their peers. Cory characterizes this informal means of sex education in the following manner:
In the maji there is no leader, no special discipline, and no teaching. . . . The inhabitants of a maji are free to leave it at night, and not only the young men of the village, but married men also call at the house and frequently invite the young girls to dances (mbina). It is not good form for a man to enter the maji at night, but the evenings are spent in conversation and flirting. . . . The maji time, especially during the first few years, is a very happy phase, but sexual intercourse is in no way its sole purpose. In many cases the state of semi-virginity is retained for a long time. The behavior of the girls is not criticized by the community as long as they observe the conventions of their position which demand not chastity but discretion. . . . The ideal behavior for a girl while living in the maji is to have a few lovers, so as to gain sufficient experience for a good wife, and to marry at the age of about 18 to 20 years. (Cory [1953]1970: 39–40)
R. E. S. Tanner, a district officer in colonial Tanganyika who wrote extensively on the Sukuma in the Mwanza Region to the north of Shinyanga, also remarks on the absence of formal sex education among the Sukuma:
There is no formal sexual instruction given to either sex prior to marriage probably owing to the absence of initiation rites, although a certain amount of general knowledge is picked up from their contemporaries in the dormitories and fields; however, mothers usually give some instruction on sexual techniques to daughters about to marry as a means to satisfying their husbands and thus preventing them from wandering off elsewhere to find pleasure, as well as in other aspects of married life. (Tanner 1955a: 239)
Cory makes the additional observation that neither chiefs nor headmen allowed their daughters to live in maji, noting that wives, daughters, and sisters of the royal class lived rather secluded lives and were “never allowed to leave the residence without an escort of other women and courtiers” (Cory [1953]1970: 63). This was in contrast to the freedom enjoyed by the wives, daughters, and sisters of commoners.
The Decline of the Maji House
Lang and Lang (1973) have noted that the influence of Christian missionaries led to the decline of the maji house in contemporary society. Missionaries apparently frowned upon the maji as an immoral institution because it allowed young people to experiment with sexual intercourse prior to marriage. Austen (1968: 139), in contrast, credits a British colonial official working in Mwanza in 1923 with abolishing “certain local customs promoting disorder and disease,” the village dormitories for young men and women being one such custom.
Although very few of the older women I spoke with had ever heard of maji, I did speak with three women who had. One was a seventy-nine-year-old woman whose paternal uncle had been a chief. She characterized the maji as a place where young girls, who had not yet married, lived. Although there was a maji house in the community where she lived while growing up, she herself had not lived in one. This seems to support Cory’s statement regarding the nonparticipation of female relatives of chiefs and headmen, an observation that suggests class relations determined the level of local participation. Another woman, who appeared to be in her late sixties, told me that although she had not lived in a maji, her older sister had. By the time she herself had reached puberty, her father refused to let any more of his daughters participate in maji. Apparently, he was irritated with the fujo (disturbances) caused by the young men who visited the maji late at night. Similar to what has been recorded by past ethnographers of Sukuma culture, these women also told me that no formal instruction took place in the maji. Rather, the maji functioned as a place to sleep; upon waking up in the morning, the girls returned to the homes of their parents. According to one of the women I spoke with, young girls rather enjoyed sleeping overnight in the maji because of the opportunities it provided them to take lovers. When I asked what happened in cases where a young girl became pregnant as a result of a particular liaison, she told me that a long time ago parents did not become angry if their daughter became pregnant during her stay in the maji. In those instances where pregnancy did occur, the young girl’s lover brought the girl’s parents a goat, which they slaughtered and ate together. Cory wrote about similar attitudes toward pregnancy among unmarried Sukuma girls:
Sometimes, though less often than might be expected, the sojourn in the maji ends with pregnancy. In such a case, the “lady of the house” can probably help to ascertain the father of the legitimate child. . . . Nowhere in Sukumaland is the human value of a female depreciated by an event which proves her ability to bear children. (Cory [1953]1970: 40)16
Tanner (1955b) paints a slightly different picture of the maji than do Cory or the women with whom I spoke. Tanner suggests that young girls began sleeping in the maji even prior to the onset of their menses. Moreover, Tanner specifically states that premarital pregnancy was frowned upon. He also noted that the institution of maji was still quite widely practiced during the period of his own research in the 1950s, a fact which appears to contradict Austen’s assertion that village dormitories were abolished in northern Sukumaland in 1923. The differences in these four accounts of the maji—Cory’s, the women I interviewed, Tanner’s, and Austen’s—could simply be a reflection of the difference in some of the cultural practices of the “northern” and “southern” Sukuma as they related to the status of women. One such example was the succession to chieftancy. Among the southern Sukuma, succession to chieftancy was matrilineal, i.e., it was passed to the children of the chief’s sister, whereas succession to chieftancy among many of the Sukuma living in northern Sukumaland was passed from father to son (Austen 1968; Holmes and Austen 1972).
Despite the apparent absence of puberty initiation rituals among the Sukuma, can we still speak about young women’s participation in the maji of long ago as a rite de passage? Although I believe we can, I think it is important to stress that it is a rite de passage in a very loose sense of the word. Participation in the maji did provide young women (or girls) with insight into their future role as adult women in the community, albeit in a very informal, nonuniform way. As we learned above, the informal networks of information available to young girls included discussions with each other, practical experience gained through interactions with young men who visited the maji late at night, as well as information passed on to them by their mothers, rather than from formalized instruction undertaken by a designated elder.
In what ways are these past methods of acquiring information about sexual behavior and reproduction different or similar to how young women acquire access to similar kinds of information today? To begin to answer this, I turn to the results of my formal interviews with women. Although the interviews explored many aspects of women’s reproductive lives, particularly their experiences during pregnancy and childbirth, and their reproductive and maternal health concerns, my discussion in this next section will focus on one aspect of their knowledge about sexuality and reproductive health, namely menstruation. The answers women gave when I asked them how they first acquired information about their menstrual cycle, the form that information took, and whether or not they learned about the menstrual cycle’s role in reproduction are examined in the next section.
Learning about Reproduction in Bulangwa
Knowledge about the Menstrual Cycle and Reproduction
Women in the community paid a lot of attention to their menstrual cycle—to its timing, duration, flow, as well as to any physical discomfort associated with it. Any irregularities were seen as an indication that a woman’s ability to bear children in the future was in jeopardy. Exceptionally long menses—for example, those lasting more than seven days—were talked about as being able to destroy a woman’s eggs, and thus inhibit her ability to conceive (Allen 2000). The importance attached to women’s menses was also reinforced in the divinations local healers used to diagnose the source of their clients’ problems. Regardless of whether or not the problem for which a woman was seeking treatment was related to some aspect of her personal life, or to her health in general, healers usually started off their divinations with a female client by commenting about the current state of her menses. Menses that lasted more than three days, that occurred too early, too late, or that were characterized by a heavy flow were all cause for concern. Herbal remedies were usually prescribed to return menses to their normal state.
TABLE 1
How women learned about menarche and its connection to their reproductive cycle.
Presented by age category and years of primary school education.17
Learned from
WhomOlder Women Younger Women (0 years) (0 years) (< 7 years) (7 years) n % n % n % n % Mother 27 54.0 17 39.5 5 25.0 15 36.6 Grandmother 4 8.0 7 16.3 3 15.0 6 14.6 Sister -- -- 2 4.7 1 5.0 5 12.2 Paternal Aunt -- -- 2 4.7 2 10.0 2 4.9 Maternal Aunt -- -- -- -- -- -- 2 4.9 Mother-in-law -- -- 1 2.3 -- -- -- -- Sister-in-law -- -- -- -- 3 15.0 1 2.4 Taught self 14 28.0 14 32.6 5 25.0 7 17.1 Neighbor 2 4.0 1 2.3 -- -- -- -- School Teacher -- -- -- -- -- -- 2 4.9 Friend 3 6.0 -- -- 1 5.0 1 2.4 Told how menstrual
Cycle related to
Pregnancy?Yes 25 50.0 19 44.2 11 55.0 21 51.2 No 21 42.0 18 41.9 8 40.0 19 46.3 Given the amount of attention that women and healers paid to various aspects of the menstrual cycle, I began wondering how women initially acquired that knowledge. In Table 1, I present the women’s responses to my question about how they acquired their initial knowledge about their menses, as well as whether they had been told about the connection between their menstrual cycle and pregnancy. I analyzed the data in terms of a woman’s age category and years of primary school education.
Although the numbers are small, the results of the above analysis provide additional evidence for an absence of formalized ritual surrounding puberty in this part of Tanzania. We see, for example, that neither older nor younger women learned about the reproductive process in a uniform way. Although a woman’s mother was the most often cited person responsible for teaching a young girl about menstruation for both the older and younger groups of women, we also see that other women provided this type of information.
Most of the women who answered this question spoke in terms of who first showed them how to use a menstrual cloth, or who first explained to them what the blood was. Further discussion along these lines revealed some interesting information. The majority of the older and younger women I spoke with had not heard about menstruation prior to the onset of their first menses. Several women mentioned feelings of embarrassment or fear when they first saw the blood.18 One woman told me that when she first saw blood in her underwear, she thought that she had been pierced by a twig while playing outside (nimechomwa na miti) (Hadija 1994). Another woman recounted how her brother’s wife, who lived in the same compound as she did, noticed that she kept going to the river throughout the day and confronted her about her frequent trips. She replied that she had burst open (nimepasuka), and thus kept returning to the river in order to wash the blood away. Her sister-in-law explained to her what was actually happening and how to use a cloth to absorb the menstrual flow (Luhende 1994).
The percentage of women in all categories who say they taught themselves about the management of their menses is also striking: 28% for the older women, 32.6% of the younger women with no formal education, 25% of the women with some, and 17.1% of young women who had completed primary school. Although the actual numbers are small, they may be suggestive of a larger trend. These women told me that they learned how to take care of themselves either by trial and error on their own, from general talk among peers, or from watching what female relatives living with them at home did.
Furthermore, the table reveals that while more than half of the older women I interviewed learned about the care of their menses from their mothers, this was not necessarily the case for younger women. Although the numbers in all groups of younger women for the category “mother” were also high, we also see that the younger groups of women looked to other female relatives not mentioned by the older women: sisters, maternal and paternal aunts, mothers-in-law, and sisters-in-law. Moreover, only two of the younger women who had completed primary school stated they learned about menstruation from a teacher. In other words, formal structures of education, whether they be “traditional” or “modern” in nature, are apparently still not significant sources of reproductive knowledge available to women in this rural community today.
When I asked these same women if they had been told about the connection between their menstrual cycle, sexuality, and pregnancy, at least half of the older women, as well as half of the younger women with some level of formal education, had been told about the connection (50%, 55%, and 51% respectively), while a smaller percentage (44%) of the younger women without formal education had. Two of the younger women who had completed primary school said they had learned about the connection between their menses and pregnancy through their science classes in school. But instruction by a science teacher does not necessarily guarantee correct information. One of the women who had been told about the connection between menstruation, sexuality, and pregnancy was also told that the most fertile period of a woman’s cycle were the days immediately following the cessation of menses. This particular woman told me she continues to use this information today: she waits one week after her menses have ceased before resuming sexual relations with her husband.
When I asked some of the other women when they thought the most fertile part of a woman’s cycle was, i.e., when she was most likely to conceive, they gave a variety of responses. Some thought that the most fertile time was the last day of a woman’s period, or just a few days after, when the menstrual blood was still “close.” Such definitions seem to suggest that the menstrual blood itself is perceived as being charged with life-giving properties; sexual intercourse right after the cessation of menses enhances the possibility of conception. According to these women, if they wanted to avoid becoming pregnant, the safest time to have sex was halfway through their cycle when the menstrual blood was “farther” away. According to published methods of natural family planning, however, this is actually the most fertile period of a woman’s cycle, and thus the time when she is most likely to conceive (WHO 1995). Women who thought that the third or fourth week after a woman’s cycle was the safest time to have sexual intercourse if they wanted to avoid pregnancy gave similar reasons, i.e., the menstrual blood was farther away (Varkevisser 1973).19 Overall, these responses suggest that much misinformation about the fertile period of a woman’s cycle has been passed on to both the younger and older groups of women. Results from the 1996 Tanzanian Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) reveals similar evidence of misinformation about reproduction in other parts of Tanzania. For example, only 16.4% of the women who took part in the DHS correctly identified the middle of the cycle as the most fertile period; 10.5% of the women said “right after her period,” 2.2% said “just before,” 22.4% said “at any time,” and 47.6% said they didn’t know (Westoff 2000).20
But as results from studies in the Gambia and the US reveal, confusion about the menstrual cycle is not limited to women living in Tanzanian settings (Westoff et al. 1969; see also Martin 1987; Bledsoe et al. 1994; Hockenberry-Eaton et al. 1996). The study in Gambia, for example, found that only 7% of the women in the study who practiced periodic abstinence as a method of birth control identified the middle of the ovulatory cycle as the fertile period (Bledsoe et al. 1994: 84). Studies of American women’s knowledge about the timing of ovulation also found evidence of misunderstanding. One study in the US that explored knowledge about ovulation among women who used the pill found that only 58% identified the most fertile time as falling between the thirteenth and fifteenth day of a woman’s cycle, as opposed to 48% of women who used other methods of birth control (Westoff et al. 1969). A more recent US-based study found that 52% of the mothers and 75% of the girls who were asked about their knowledge of sexual development were not able to adequately define ovulation (Hockenberry-Eaton et al. 1996: 45). What I find particularly surprising about the results from the US studies is that misinformation about reproduction persists even in a context where literacy is high and information about reproduction is easily accessible. This suggests that neither literacy nor structured sex education classes in school are conveying information about ovulation and reproduction. In the following section I turn to a more general discussion of some of women’s concerns with regard to menstruation. In doing so, I hope to highlight what women in Bulangwa do know about menstruation, irrespective of whether that information is right or wrong. As will become evident below, women’s concerns about issues related to menstruation indicate that despite an absence of formal instruction, knowledge about reproduction is being exchanged and retained.
Informal Networks of Information about the Menstrual Cycle
Women calculated their menses in one of two ways. Women who did not know how to read usually kept track of their menses by noting the position of the moon at the onset of bleeding; they spoke about their menses as occurring when the moon is to the west, to the east, or directly above (Buckley and Gottlieb 1988). This is how they knew if they were pregnant, or if their menses were irregular. Women who knew how to read, or who were familiar enough with numbers to calculate their menses by calendar dates, used a different method of keeping track of their cycle. For these women, a “normal” cycle was supposed to occur on the same date every month. If a woman’s menses began on the twelfth of every month, they should begin on the twelfth of subsequent months, although a difference of one or two days was not cause for great concern. When I asked women in the formal survey how they kept track of their menses, 62.7% (n=95) said they looked at the moon, while 37% (n=57) said they looked at the date. One woman said she used both methods, while another woman told me she could not calculate because her menses were irregular.
Irregular menses were often spoken about as a sign that a woman was suffering from the illness mchango. Mchango, the Swahili word for a category of health problems experienced by many in the community, is defined as “worms” in a Swahili dictionary, whereas the Sukuma language equivalent of this same condition is nzoka, or “snake.”21 The concept in either language covers a range of health problems that affect both males and females of any age. These health problems include, but are not limited to, colic in newborn infants, general digestive problems in the old and young, epileptic fits in young children, menstrual irregularities or discomfort in women, and impotence in men. A key characteristic of mchango is that it is spoken about as having physical as well as spiritual origins, and as being more responsive to local cultural (as opposed to biomedical) interventions.
Pain associated with the menstrual cycle was seen as indication that a woman was suffering from mchango. Several of the women I interviewed referred to this particular category of mchango by its Sukuma name, buhale. Women who had experienced buhale themselves or knew others who had characterized its defining features as sharp, stabbing pains in the lower abdomen, vagina or rectum (inachoma mbele; inachoma matakoni in Swahili). Buhale is apparently one of the most dreaded forms of mchango because of its perceived negative effects on fertility; it is seen as able to cause miscarriage, turn a woman’s uterus around, or “explode” a woman’s eggs (inapasuka mayai). A woman suffering from buhale might also experience very light menses, a condition believed to decrease her chances of conceiving.
When I asked a Tanzanian physician who worked at the regional hospital if he had ever heard of the illness mchango, he told me that he had, but that in his opinion it was one way that women spoke about the symptoms of pelvic inflammatory disease, a condition that can result when sexually transmitted diseases are left untreated. He also suggested that mchango (i.e., pelvic infection) was a result of the unhygienic practices women followed during menstruation. He told me that he had seen cases in which women had inserted a menstrual cloth into their vagina to absorb the menstrual flow, and had left it there for several days. This conversation took place toward the end of my fieldwork period, after I had already completed the majority of my formal interviews. Up until that time I had never heard of such a practice. Nevertheless, I subsequently asked some other women whether or not they managed their menses in this particular way. A few said they did, while others told me that they placed the menstrual cloth on the inside of their underwear and changed it periodically throughout the day. That practices associated with menstrual hygiene may, in fact, be associated with subsequent infections requires further investigation (Dixon-Mueller and Wasserheit 1991).
Sorcery linked to a woman’s menses also emerged as significant cause of concern, particularly for its perceived ability to negatively affect a woman’s fertility (Sargent 1982; Renne n.d.). Ten women specifically mentioned that care needed to be taken with regard to a woman’s menstrual cloth. Some women noted that after washing her menstrual cloth, a woman should not leave it to dry out the open, as anyone—male or female—could steal it. If a woman’s menstrual cloth was stolen, it could be used in sorcery against her and result in her future infertility. Another woman explained that a person could also block a woman’s menses, and thus her fertility, by stealing the woman’s menstrual cloth and burying it in a place where grass would not grow.
What is important to note here is that this regular use of nonbiomedical forms of preventative treatment occurs in the absence of any formal means of instruction encouraging them to do so. Women gain access to knowledge about what does or does not work through informal networks of reproductive information: from talking to each other about their own personal experiences, or hearing third and fourth hand about what other people did. Women talking to women in nonstructured settings continues to be an important source of information about sexuality and reproduction, one that should not be discounted when national efforts to address maternal and reproductive health problems are undertaken.
Conclusion
In this article I have tried to show that calls for a revival of “traditional forms of sex education” could benefit from taking a closer look at what those practices consist of within specific cultural and historical settings. My interviews with older and younger women in a rural setting of Tanzania showed that formal instruction about matters related to sexual behavior and reproduction was not a widespread practice in that setting. Given the nonuniform way in which both older and younger women in the Shinyanga Region learned about such issues, what would a call for a return to “traditional forms of sex education” mean in this particular context? As noted above, the anthropological literature for northwest and west central Tanzania, as well as the results of my interviews with older women suggest that formalized puberty initiation rituals were not that commonplace in the Shinyanga Region in general, nor in the community of study in particular. It seems instead that some young women in the community learned by trial and error, some from each other. Although structured initiation rituals such as unyago do take place in pockets around the country, they do not appear to be widespread in the Shinyanga Region, nor can they be characterized as an ethnically specific initiation ritual. We also learned that the long since abandoned practice of the maji house was an important source of informal knowledge about sexual behavior and reproduction in the past in that it provided young people with a space to exchange information with their peers, as well as opportunities for premarital sexual encounters. A call to return to “traditional” sex education in a community where formal instruction about the facts of life was never a tradition would raise the question as to whose ways of knowing would be considered relevant and beneficial for contemporary Sukuma women.22
What the results of my interviews with women in Bulangwa do show is that informal networks of knowledge about sexuality and reproduction are an important source of information for these rural women. I have argued that despite an absence of structured forms of sex education in Bulangwa in the past, women acquired information about sexuality and reproduction from talking to each other, a process of knowledge sharing which continues in the present. As Matasha et al. (1998) point out, informal structures of knowledge sharing among peers can be successfully drawn upon to pass on correct information (WHO/UNFPA/UNICEF 1995). I have suggested that the existence of these informal networks for sharing reproduction information should be explored and tapped when new efforts for health education campaigns are being designed, rather than developing new “traditional” ceremonies that may never have been part of a community’s tradition in the first place.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research on which this article is based was funded by a grant from the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Sciences with funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Training Grant. I am particularly indebted to the women of “Bulangwa” who shared their stories with me and without whom this research would not have been possible. I also thank Elisha Renne for her helpful comments on different versions of this article, and Charles Westoff for bringing the unpublished data from the Tanzanian Demographic Survey to my attention. The assistance I received from Maryann Belanger at Princeton’s Office of Population Research library, and from Tsering Wangyal Shawa, the Geographic Information Systems librarian at Princeton, is also very much appreciated.
NOTES
1. Audrey Richards’ ([1956]1982) study focused on girls’ initiation ceremony among the Bemba in Zambia, whereas Victor Turner’s (1967) analysis focused specifically on initiation rituals among the Ndembu. Due to space limitations, a detailed examination of both of these important works is beyond the scope of this present article. See also Carol MacCormack’s (1982) discussion of young women’s initiation into the Sande society in Sierra Leone. For the Tanzanian context specifically, see Swantz’s overview of initiation rites among several ethnic groups in Tanzania.
2. Ranger and Kimambo (1972: 12), citing Swantz ([1966]1969), note that jando usually refers to the rites that specifically involve the circumcision of young men.
3. A recent study of sexual and reproductive health among primary and secondary school pupils suggests that lack of knowledge continues to be a key causal factor in teenage pregnancies as well as the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases among Tanzanian adolescents today (Matasha et al. 1998).
4. Calls for a return to “tradition” in times of crisis are not uncommon, as demonstrated in a New York Times article about the impact of AIDS in a rural Bemba community in northeastern Zambia (Perlez 1990). According to Perlez, AIDS first became evident in the community in 1987. In an effort to address the “promiscuity of the modern era” (which, Perlez notes, both the anthropological literature and elders in the community maintain was never a part of Bemba culture), a Zambian mother hired a professional midwife to reenact the long since abandoned initiation ceremony for her daughters. Her daughters, some of whom were already wives and mothers themselves, were apparently quite happy to have the opportunity to take part in the “traditional” ceremony. They were hopeful that the lessons and techniques they learned would help keep their husbands faithful. But according to Audrey Richards in the preface to the second edition of her study Chisungu: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony Among the Bemba of Zambia, by the time she observed the above mentioned Bemba initiation ritual for the second time in the early 1950s (the first time was in 1931), it was already dying out (Richards [1956]1982). That the Bemba “tradition” reenacted by a professional Bemba midwife over thirty years later may have been quite different from the original ritual is a very likely possibility.
5. UN-sponsored campaigns to retrain “traditional” birth attendants in hygienic birthing practices are a case in point. In an effort to address the problem of maternal mortality, programs to retrain “traditional” midwives or birth attendants in hygienic and safe birth practices were promoted. UN-sponsored training of “traditional” birth attendants in the Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania began in 1986. My interviews in 1993 with forty-four of the fifty-eight women who had attended such trainings revealed, however, that no distinct “tradition” of lay midwifery existed among the Sukuma. As a result, very few pregnant women were using the services of these newly trained “traditional” midwives (see also Allen 2001). Stacey Pigg’s study of programs to train “traditional” birth attendants in Nepal revealed similar findings (Pigg 1995). According to Pigg, many of the women selected for training had no interest in midwifery at all, nor did they assist with many births once the training was completed. In fact, there was very little evidence to support the assumption that a uniform “tradition” of indigenous midwifery existed in Nepal at all.
6. A recurring theme in the anthropological and historical literature on the Sukuma and Nyamwezi ethnic groups is whether or not these are in fact two distinct peoples. Brandström (1986), for example, has noted the similarities between the Nyamwezi (the predominant ethnic group in the Tabora Region) and the Sukuma (the predominant ethnic group living in the Shinyanga and Mwanza Regions) with respect to language, cosmology, and cultural institutions (e.g., healing, and other secret societies) as well as aspects of social and political organization during the precolonial period.
7. Although she was not Sukuma herself, many of the women who sought treatment for their fertility-related health concerns at her home were. My observations of her work enabled me to identify categories of reproductive health concerns that emerged in her healing practice.
8. In order to test the generalizability of my informal interviews and observations, during the last few months of my fieldwork I interviewed 200 women about general aspects of their reproductive lives, and their experiences during pregnancy and childbirth. Of these, ninety-four were randomly selected from a list of households in the community in which I lived, while forty-six women were randomly selected from a list of households in the village where I conducted my observations of births at a local healer’s home. The one exception to the randomness of my sample is a subset of fourteen Arab women, all of whom lived in the center of the larger community; therefore, they might not have been represented in a purely random selection of households. I also interviewed an additional thirty-five women attending the regional family planning clinic in Shinyanga Town, as well as ten women who sought treatment at the local healer’s home. As neither of these last groups of women were residents in the larger community or of the healer’s village, they are excluded from the present analysis.
9. The cultural heterogeneity in Bulangwa was reflected to a smaller extent in the sample of women I interviewed. One hundred twenty (78%) of the 154 women I interviewed for the study identified their ethnicity as Sukuma, three said they were Nyamwezi, seventeen women identified themselves as belonging to a non-Sukuma African ethnicity, and fourteen women stated their ethnicity as Arab.
10. Abrahams has the following to say about Tusi as an ethnic category:”[T]he name ‘Tusi’ is used somewhat loosely in Unyamwezi to refer to both Tusi in Ha country and to the related Hima, Huma, and Tutsi from such countries as Ankole, Buzinza, and Ruanda. Such peoples also tend to describe themselves as Tusi when in Unyamwezi. In addition, it appears that the name ‘Tusi’ is occasionally used by and to refer to people who, although they come from ‘Tusi’ areas, might nonetheless not normally be classed as Tusi, Hima, and the like in their home territory” (Abrahams 1970: 101).
11. See McCurdy (1996) for a discussion of the tensions that emerged between women’s initiation groups at her fieldsite as a result of her own initiation.
12. Two of the women were Nyamwezi who had moved to Bulangwa from the Tabora Region as young girls. The third was a Zanaki. She had been born in an eastern part of the Shinyanga Region and had lived in Bulangwa for ten years.
13. Mention is also made in the literature of the Sukuma communal work associations (ilika) that were organized along the broad categories of age: young men (basumba), young women and/or divorced women (bang’hya), married women (bashike) and old men (banamhala) (Vergnes 1944; Cory [1956]1970; Juma 1960; Jassey 1978). According to Vergnes (1944: 1): “All the men belong to the ilika of the basumba from their sixteenth year to their forty-fifth year, thereabouts. To this ilika, the young girls also belong about from their [fourteenth] year up to their marriage. The continuation of the ilika of the basumba are the ilika of the banamhala (seniors) and that of the bashike or married women. These two malika are distinguished from the malika lya basumba only by the kind of work they do, in consideration of their position.” Participants in this system of communal work associations were paid for their labor, whether it entailed assistance with farming, house building, the construction of dams, etc. Although younger and middle-aged men and women (unmarried, married, divorced, and widowed) still engage in paid communal work in Bulangwa today, the distinct associations of married women and older men (bashike and banamhala) are no longer in existence.
14. Although Cory uses the terms maji and ibanza interchangeably, an older Sukuma man I interviewed told me that ibanza among the Sukuma living in the Shinyanga Region referred exclusively to the village dormitories occupied by young men.
15. Cohen and Odhiambo note that formal instruction of boys and girls did take place in the swindhe under the tutelage of the pim, an older Luo woman. See also Cohen (1985).
16. See Cory ([1953]1970: 87–92) regarding Sukuma law as it relates to payment and “illegitimate” children.
17. Numbers do not add up to 100% due to missing data.
18. These emotions have been reported by adolescent American girls as well (Whisant and Zegans 1975; Rierdan et al. 1986).
19. Varkevisser (1973) describes similar findings in her study among the northern Sukuma in the Mwanza region during the late 1960s. According to Tanner’s research in Mwanza during the 1950s, the fertile period was thought to be within the second half of the period between two menstruations (Tanner 1955b: 240).
20. These answers were in response to question #231: “During which times of the monthly cycle does a woman have the greatest chance of becoming pregnant?” Although results from this part of the survey were not written up in the final DHS document, Charles Westoff, Professor Emeritus in the Office of Population Research, Princeton University, provided me with this information.
21. This latter definition belies the complexity of the term. See Reid for a discussion of nzoka in terms of Sukuma notions of illness in general and with regard to pregnancy and infertility problems specifically (Reid 1969: 68–80). See also Renne’s discussion of the connection between menstrual disorders, “black blood,” and worms among the Ekiti Yoruba of Nigeria (Renne n.d.).
22. A 1998 study of sexual and reproductive health among primary and secondary school students in the Mwanza Region of Tanzania provides evidence that naiveté in matters related to sexuality and reproduction continues to pose problems for Tanzanian adolescents (Matasha et al. 1998). The study found that by the age of fifteen, 50% of the girls and 46% of the boys in the study had already had their first sexual experience. Although the authors note that there was a good awareness of the sexually transmitted diseases and infertility, less than half of the students mentioned pregnancy as a consequence of sexual activity (Matasha et al. 1998: 575). Research on adolescents’ knowledge of sexual and reproductive health issues in the U.S. suggests that similar levels of misinformation about sexual and reproductive health issues exist among American adolescents (Hockenberry-Eaton et al. 1996; Carrera et al. 2000). Informal means of acquiring information such as discussion about sex and sexuality among peers were mentioned in both the Tanzanian and American settings.
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