During my work in northern Mozambique from the early 1980s onwards, I was always intrigued by the female rituals of initiation, which by Portuguese colonialism as well as by Frelimo guerrilla forces and later the Frelimo government, were condemned as Harmful Traditional Practices, subjugating women. The women themselves, however, defended the rituals as key to their subjectivities and collective identities as women – a defence expressed in doing rather than in words: the women just continued practicing their rituals out of sight and earshot of political authorities.
This continued practice looks like resistance of the foot-dragging kind, what James Scott (1990) has called the ‘hidden transcript’: forms of resistance which are not vocal and organized, but silent and pre-understood, enacted under-the-radar of the powers that be. Maria Lugones (2010) provides a set of deeper-going, more detailed concepts useful for understanding the resilience of these rituals. First her concept ‘the coloniality of gender’, by which she wants to show how a dichotomous, hierarchical distinction between men and women was introduced by colonial powers backed by Christian missions. In this process, she says, “women were subalternized through the combined processes of racialization, colonization, capitalist exploitation, and heterosexualism” (p 747). Second, her focus on resistance: “Instead of thinking the global, capitalist, colonial system as in every way successful in its destruction of peoples, knowledges, relations and economies, I want to think of the process as continually resisted, and being resisted today” (p 748). In this context she talks of “the colonized … as a being who begins to inhabit a fractured locus constructed doubly, who perceives doubly, relates doubly” (p 748). This notion of double existence captures very well what I encountered time and again in Mozambique.
In the paper I’ll apply these lines of thinking in a re-interpretation of female initiation rituals in northern Mozambique as spaces of resistance to colonial and Christian conceptions of gender and sexuality. I’ll also investigate how these lines of thinking may apply to other forms of non-conforming sexual practices elsewhere in Africa.