Re-visiting ‘African Tradition’, Re-thinking Gender and Power: Learning from Fieldwork in Northern Mozambique

Abstract

This article takes its point of departure in the author’s research experience in matrilineal northern Mozambique in the early 1980s as an employee of the National Women’s Organization, the OMM (Organização da Mulher Moçambicana). Confronted with female war veterans of Mozambique’s liberation struggle, who insisted on celebrating traditional rituals of female initiation – rituals banned by the Frelimo party (the previous liberation front, which transformed itself into a ruling party) – the author was prompted to embark on a long process of re-thinking issues of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ from local women’s points of view. After failed attempts at understanding matriliny through the use of classical anthropological tools, the author found help in decolonial African feminist thinking in understanding the dilemmas of women in northern Mozambique. Against this background, the current article discusses aspects of female sexual socialization – still practised, yet with deep historical roots, such as labia elongation – along with manifestations of Female Genital Power, as well as the resilience and resistance of these women, now confronted with the demands of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’. The article also considers issues of temporality as it re-visits aspects of ‘African tradition’, which are seen by the women themselves as sources of identity and power, while seen from positions of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ these same rituals are condemned as backward and as oppressive of women. Thus, the assumed temporal progress from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ is destabilized and disrupted.

Keywords

• African decolonial feminist thinking
• female rituals of initiation
• labia elongation
• Female Genital Power
• critique of development thinking