FOR the BaTonga women, female genital mutilation (FMG) is an age-old practice.
The practice has existed in their society for hundreds of years and has neither adversely affected their fertility nor given their womenfolk the types of gynaecological or obstetrical problems that have been associated with the operation in recent years.
Ritual initiation in the Zambezi Valley and Binga takes place during the dry season, after the harvest, when food is plentiful and there is free time from everyday chores.
This time of year is also symbolically important because it represents a new season of fruitfulness, fertility, abundance and the possibilities of new life just as initiation seeks to give birth to new, fertile, culturally transformed young women.
Initiation ritual leaders do not only teach subservience, but are also examples of ultimate female authority; wise, unyielding and unsentimental.
It is the BaTonga’s responsibility to see to it that girls are imbued with the ideals of femininity as laid down by previous matriarchs.
Stoicism, which must be displayed during the initiation, tenacity and endurance, which are achieved through the many other ordeals a young woman must undergo and most important bravery, fearlessness and audacity are qualities which will enable her to stand her ground as an adult in her household and within the greater community.
Thus, the matriarch has a responsibility of creating dual-natured and community-oriented women.
Matriarchs occupy the upper echelons of female initiation ceremonies.
The next and most important category of women, as far as the continuation of initiation is concerned, are the middle-aged grandmothers, whose critical job is to put pressure on their daughters, who may be wary young mothers.
These eminent elders have significant moral and emotional control over their married daughters.
This group of older women are well aware of their importance when it comes to initiation and often spearhead the organisation and orchestration of their granddaughters’ ceremonies.
According to traditional customs, mothers must initiate their daughters properly in order for them to become traditionally recognised as persons with rights and responsibilities in society.
Thus, there is enormous cultural pressure on mothers to conform to the tradition of initiation.
During the afternoon of their first day of initiation, young women are taken to a river behind a hill and bathed with special leaves and other oddities.
They are given wrap skirts to cover their bodies before being taken to a house where their bodies and faces are painted thoroughly with white clay.
They are then rushed outside into the front yard.
A thin ‘rope’ with a small amulet similar to those worn by young children for protection as well as decoration is attached around their waists. Several leaves are tied around their waists in preparation for the initiation.
Elaborate indigenous coloured cloths are laid out across the bare ground and then on top of the girls.
Perfumed talcum powder is tossed over the girls as the hair-braiding rite commences.
Ritual combs and braiders are carefully selected.
Drums are beaten and trinkets and money are tossed from the crowd to the braiders.
The girls are then led away and the procedure is done.
The matriarch’s ‘medicines’ are also used to defend the sodality against intrusive men and other non-initiates who may try to steal its secrets and powers.
Most elders professed that the matriarch has power over all men, including those within the chieftaincy.
Because of their secret knowledge regarding fertility, such women have the power to cause impotence in men as well as death.
Most important, the matriarch has the socio-religious authority to create a ‘woman’ who is a most productive asset as far as patriarchy, that is, male headed families, compounds, villages and lineages are concerned.
She gives religious, social and cultural sanction to women’s reproductive and productive roles: an initiated or well-‘trained’ woman will fulfill her social responsibilities as mother and as farm labourer.
Given the traditional socio-economic primacy of marriage and motherhood among the BaTonga, as in most African indigenous cultures, and the initiation’s paramount historical function of producing marriageable women committed to accomplishing their productive and reproductive roles, the matriarch is charged with the most credited task in society.
What female initiation teaches first and foremost is the subordination of young girls and women to female elders: their mothers, future mothers-in-law, grandmothers, older women within the community and of course, female ritual leaders.
The young women are taught the art of subservience to their future husbands and other male representatives of those lineages.
They also maintain their cultural superiority over the uninitiated or uncircumcised women.
The practice of female ‘circumcision’ has more to do with deeply imbedded Western cultural assumptions regarding women’s bodies and their sexuality than with disputable health effects of genital operations on African women.
For example, one universalised assumption is that human bodies are ‘complete’ and that sex is ‘given’ at birth.
Anthropologists have not been the only ones interested in initiation and FGM.
In the 1980s and 1990s, feminists, politicians, international aid organisations and the international medical community within and outside Africa have produced a plethora of literature and convened conferences and workshops on the subject of the effects of various forms of FGM, sexuality and psychological wellbeing.
First, as regards the health implications of FGM, several short and long-term risks have been associated with the practice that excision is medically unnecessary; the practice does not pose any significant adverse long-term effects to women and that, moreover, traditional circumcisions are done by very well trained experts.
Doctors, irrespective of their positions on the legitimacy of the practice, agree that short-term risks can be significantly reduced, if not altogether eliminated, through the use of antiseptic instruments, anaesthetics and skilled traditional officials.
The BaTonga example makes evident underlying biases of such culturally loaded notions concerning the natural female body.
The word natural is uncritically tossed around in the FGM literature to describe an uncircumcised woman, when actually it needs definition and clarification.
The BaTonga concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ differ significantly from Western definitions and it is these local understandings that compel female FGM.