Efundula
and History:
Female Initiation in Pre-Colonial and Colonial Northern Namibia
by Patricia Hayes
On two
specific occasions the female initiation ceremony efundula became the
center of political controversy in the Kwanyama region of Owambo, northern
Namibia. Efundula is the oshiKwanyama term given to the female
initiation rite through which all young women were expected to pass. In other
areas of Owambo it was called ohango. These conflicts straddled a
complex borderline between pre-colonial and colonial African history. The first
confrontation occurred in 1914 prior to colonial occupation. Here the proposal
to stage efundula caused extreme
tension between the young Kwanyama king, Mandume ya Ndemufayo, and German
Rhenish missionaries who had been active in the kingdom since 1890. The second
episode occurred in 1935, twenty years after the colonial occupation of the
north. In this case missionaries were again opposed to the efundula ceremonies,
but this time they confronted a Native Commissioner and South African colonial
policy that promoted the ritual as a healthy ‘tribal’ institution.
I wish to focus on efundula
for reasons which go beyond a normative women’s history and the imperative to
‘fill gaps’. The ceremony moves in and out of visibility in ways that
illuminate the embeddedness and inter-connectedness of gender with other
processes of history and social change. The ritual dealt with the transition
between girlhood and womanhood in Ovambo societies on the northern floodplain,
grappling with issues of sex and death, generation and regeneration, and its
implications were understood to embrace the entire social body. It had evolved
over centuries and carried individual, familial, lineage, collective, statist
and symbolic ramifications that went far beyond its discrete performances. At
the time of the efundula conflicts covered in this paper, female
initiation was of central importance in Oukwanyama and other societies because
male circumcision had mostly fallen away. Thus we have women consistently at
the center of the recreation or endangering of society; they are also, on
occasion, at the center of public and cultural controversy.
It is of course important to historicise efundula.
But the central argument I wish to make here is that instead of treating it in
isolation, efundula offers an unprecedented means to historicise other
things, such as the nature of stratification in Kwanyama and Ovambo societies,
and the sporadic symmetries between pre-colonial kingship and later colonial
control. Looking at the past through the lens of efundula suddenly
reveals unexpected continuities, and unaccustomed faultlines. There can be no
denying that, on the borderline between the hardened historiographical
categories of pre-colonial and colonial, the ongoing complexities and depths of
a society’s internal dynamics have tended to become lost.
A central theme that filters through the genealogies of efundula
and its perceived impact on power and culture in Oukwanyama is its public
dimension. The latter was an important component of the missionary objections
in both 1914 and 1935. This raises the question of how appropriate it is to
think about efundula as spectacle. This term comes with a set of
theoretical concerns normally associated with the ‘modern’, whereas here we
deal with historical conditions that seemingly fall outside this description.
The result is to bring so-called pre-colonial African history closer to the
kind of analyses emerging recently in ‘colonial studies’,[1]
though it also qualifies them. Besides the gendered nature of the public
aspects of efundula, this paper also explores the masculinisation of the
ritual leadership in eastern kingdoms of Owambo, especially during colonialism,
and the reasons for this gender polarisation over the organisation of the
ritual.
We start
with the two moments when efundula became the site of conflict. Mandume
ya Ndemufayo is most popularly remembered as a heroic king who resisted
Portuguese and South African colonisation during World War 1. But the Kwanyama
kingdom for many years before this was going through momentous upheavals.
Mandume’s reign from 1911-17 marked a particular phase of reasserting control
from the center. He was reformist and innovative king who actively and
independently sought to put his house in order at a time of increasing foreign
pressure and mounting decentralisation of power in his own kingdom. There were
numerous aspects to the forceful recentralisation he pursued, but in due course
he turned his attention to the perceived encroachments of mission activity.
Since 1890 a small but cohesive set of Christian groups had emerged at four
Rhenish mission stations in the kingdom. As the Rhenish mission conference
reported in a document entitled ‘Kampf um die Efundula in Ovamboland’, in 1914,
Mandume prohibited young women from getting married in the Christian church
unless they had first undergone efundula. Mandume’s gesture was a move
towards ritual recentralisation, touching on one further royal insecurity in a
range of measures which otherwise focused on judicial, military and tributary
matters.
In the missionary account, the king raised the stakes
enormously in this particular struggle by arguing that if this ‘national
custom’ (a ‘tradition of his forefathers’) were broken, he would die.[2]
Panic spread among the mission’s Christian converts who fled to neighbouring
Ondonga where Finnish Lutheran missionaries gave them shelter. Family members
left behind were reported to be in danger. Mandume offered a compromise of one
hour’s participation by the female converts in the open or public section of
the ceremony. Missionaries still maintained that this would undo all their hard
work over the years and refused.
In the end, the conflict was subsumed by events: drought,
famine and war rapidly unfolded and resulted in the postponement of the large efundula
ceremonies planned for 1914. With the colonial division of Oukwanyama by the
Portuguese (from Angola) and South Africans (on the South West African side),
German missionaries were expelled and Mandume died. By the time this
controversial efundula cycle finally (and peacefully) took place, it was
1917.
Twenty years later, in colonial midstream, another cultural
and political storm broke over efundula. This time it was between the
Anglican mission in the Kwanyama area and the Native Commissioner, Major C.H.L.
(‘Cocky’) Hahn. The lines of fracture in this conflict emerged from the proposed
performance of efundula dances on the occasion of the Administrator
of South West Africa’s visit to Owambo in 1935, when the Administrator’s party
was expected at Oshikango (see map).
On the specific occasion of the Administrator’s visit, the Anglican missionaries
protested at the ‘glamorisation’ of the ceremony which would result from the
performance of efundula dances before a large audience, which included
a party of distinguished guests. They criticised the Native Commissioner for
his regular practice of taking international visitors to see the efundula
dances as the highlight of any tour of Owambo. They moreover did not want
the young women resident at the Anglican mission near Oshikango to come under
pressure from parents and headmen to participate in the ceremony.
At the crux of this dispute was the missionary objection to efundula,
not simply because it was ‘pagan’ – a reference to its public performance of
dances and prior phases, all of which were visible. The whole ceremony,
according to the Anglican mission, was tainted by its ‘phallic flavour’ – a
reference most pertinently to its private or secret parts, which were
invisible. One Finnish missionary
asserted that no decent person could even speak of it. While missionaries
elsewhere in Africa (particularly East Africa) sometimes showed signs of a
willingness to incorporate and Christianise female initiation rites,
missionaries in Owambo did not swerve from their adamant opposition to efundula,
though the degree of condemnation varied slightly between Finnish-Lutheran,
Anglican and Catholic denominations.[3]
The Native Commissioner, by contrast, promoted efundula
as a ‘healthy tribal institution’. His vociferous support arose from the wider
development of arguments concerning ‘indirect control’, where officials were
enjoined to support existing structures of African authority, through which
colonial rule was administered. Hahn’s discourse dwelt on the dangers of
‘detribalisation’ in southern Africa, which would result in the breakdown of
local hierarchies and loss of control. He was against rapid Christianisation,
against the adoption of western clothing, and against the abolition of
customary practices. In an extensive body of documentation, both textual and
visual, Hahn argued for the local development of ‘indirect rule’ officially
through administrative channels and reports, and politically at the League of
Nations and later the United Nations. He also brought it to a virtual art form
in his aestheticising photography. Efundula
was a principal constituent of this body of ‘tradition’ that Hahn sought to
preserve and promote in the interests of indirect rule.
The juxtaposition of these two major disputes concerning efundula,
pre-colonial and colonial, argues a striking alignment in the political and
structural interests of an African king and a colonial administration. If we
wish to identify the building blocks upon which indirect rule was erected in
northern Namibia in the 1930s, and acknowledge the borrowing from African
historical and cultural precedent in which colonialism engaged, then we need to
pay attention to this moment of strange symmetry between Mandume and Hahn and
the gender and social frameworks they attempted to apply. It complicates the
argument that colonialism was only a ‘thin veneer’ for the vast bulk of people
on the Ovambo floodplain.
Two points need emphasis here, firstly the isolation of the
floodplain where Ovambo lived, secondly the relative lateness of colonial
occupation. By isolation I do not mean the marginality of unimportance and
powerlessness. Ovambo polities were very well-connected with the outside world
in terms of regional and long-distance trade, and were strong enough to keep
German and Portuguese colonial ambitions at bay and other potential intruders
at a distance. This carrying over of pre-colonial power into the 20th
century was obviously linked directly to the lateness of their colonisation.
The result produced is one of strange diachronies during colonial times, with
the administrative preoccupations of inter-war colonial rule meshed together
with the intact structures and dynamics of societies which had never come under
colonial control until much later than most African states and communities.
The way efundula became central to the contest
between colonial and mission agendas shows, of course, its deep implication in
wider histories, even though the matter fades from visibility much of the time.
There is a need to go backwards from the colonial contestations, and explore
some of the possible histories of efundula and its political and social
importance in the gendered and generational contests in pre-colonial kingdoms.
For in order to understand how indirect rule could hinge its effectiveness on
existing structures and cultural techniques, and use sections of efundula
for public performance which audiences could view in person or in photographs,
we need to probe all existing traces and unpack whatever layers we can identify
in the genealogy of this institution. A key question is whether any propensity
towards the spectacular might have existed before Hahn encouraged performances
in an attenuated and public form. Efundula
was not simply at the heart of a problem of colonial and pre-colonial politics
that was precipitated by the missions; obviously it was a medium of much older
contests and negotiations.
The Ovambo
groups settled on the Cuvelai floodplain since at least the fifteenth century,
probably longer, possessed two features that were of crucial importance in the
way efundula became intertwined in society and history. They were
sedentary, and matrilineal. The groups, known generically as Ovambo by
outsiders by the 19th century, had developed into different kingdoms
and polities with increasing degrees of centralisation and demographic growth.
My focus, as is evident, remains on the Kwanyama, the largest and most powerful
of the pre-colonial kingdoms.
While there certainly existed a wealth of ritual supporting
every productive activity of family and community, and each significant
benchmark in the life of the individual, detail of which is plentiful,[4]
efundula had been the most important ritual event in biannual, triannual
or longer cycles in all Ovambo societies for a considerable period, especially
since male initiation (involving circumcision) had mostly fallen away in the
course of the 19th century. The origins of efundula have often been
described as ‘ancient’ by those administrators who dabbled in amateur
ethnography, belonging to groups that form part of the ‘central African
matrilineal belt’. Amongst the nearest neighbouring groups in southern Angola
however, no female initiation ceremonies appear to rival efundula in its
complexity, elaboration and centrality, in the late 19th century at
least.
Efundula varied in duration from one polity to the next, and obviously in scale,
but was generally an extremely vibrant institution in the 19th
century when missionaries and later colonial officials arrived.[5]
Each woman who had attained puberty was a participant. Many were already
bespoken as brides, to be claimed by husbands approved by their families at
their successful completion of all stages of efundula. A point of great
importance in later disputes with missionaries, it was asserted that no young
woman could be married without having passed through efundula. The
ceremonies included gruelling tests of physical endurance, with initiates
pounding grain for long hours when the sun was at its highest. This was
ostensibly to flush out pregnant participants, who by the 1880s were no longer
burnt alive but were still sent away to disgrace and punishment.
After the pounding, a phase of dancing and feasting ensued
with the full participation of the women of the community, who led the songs
containing many social lessons for the initiates now entering full womanhood.
Special drums were played by men on this occasion.[6]
All phases of efundula were marked by changes in dress and hairstyle of
the girls, none more striking than the penultimate stage in which the initiates
became ‘boys’, smeared themselves with ash, dressed in spine-leafed skirts and
roamed the district in bands, often exercising their temporary prerogative to
demand food from any household and to beat any man they encountered.
Apart from the obvious point that the ceremony was of long
duration and had become naturalised in the lives of generations of Kwanyama, we
could speculate as to its functional attractions. It cut down on ‘illegitimate’
pregnancy and sanctioned the sexuality and fertility of those who passed
through it into matrimony.[7]
Indeed in some areas missionaries increasingly appropriated the term for efundula
as ‘marriage’. Certainly that is the present and recent usage of the term ohango
in Ondonga and Uukwambi for example.
Any historicisation of efundula must acknowledge a
defining tension in the deep history of Ovambo polities, between the spread-out
lineages (matrilineal in this case) and the centralised, concentrated power of
kingship. In the eastern polities by the 19th century, the kings
were distinctly paramount, reproducing their supremacy through military,
productive, economic, judicial, ritual and symbolic central control at almost
every turn. Their greatest struggles politically became fixed on rivalry with
omalenga, or big headmen, some of whom were scions of royal matrilineages.
It is these political struggles which have received the most attention in
recent historiography; the more subtle tensions between lineages and central
power have only come under certain kinds of comment.
A number of annual rituals had become the focus of royal
appearance, and royal affirmation and validation of social norms had increased
over a very long period of time in an ongoing process of centralisation. One
such was the annual cattle festival, when cattle were brought back to the main
areas of residence after grazing at outposts through the long dry season. In
the same season, late spring just prior to planting the millet crops,[8]
the collective female initiation and marriage ceremony efundula had also
become an event in which kings intervened.
It is crucial here to consider the developments under King
Mweshipandeka of the Kwanyama, who came to power in 1853.[9]
He is widely credited with ending the subservient tributary status of the
Kwanyama kingdom to the Nkhumbi polity further north, near the Cunene River.
The Kwanyama historian Vilho Kaulinge refers to ‘stories’ of Mweshipandeka’s
increased military activity, with a rise in raiding activities to the north.
The implications of militarisation go further in the work of Edwin Loeb, who
used the missionary Sckär’s notes extensively (ca 1900) and gathered accounts
from different informants recalling approximately the same period as Kaulinge.
Loeb emphasises Mweshipandeka’s abolition of male circumcision in Oukwanyama, a
move which spread to other kingdoms. This crucial rupture with the past brings
to mind the military reforms instituted by another aggrandising king in 19th
century southern Africa, Tshaka ka Senzagakona, who abolished male circumcision
in the emergent Zulu kingdom and developed a formidable system of regimental
villages and military service by young men.[10]
Mweshipandeka did not develop a permanent army like Tshaka by any means, but he
loosened the strong residual hold that lineage elders held over the young men
of his kingdom.
According to the wider southern
African historiography, the end of male circumcision generally implied the end
of lineage control over a cohort of young men’s time and disposability. This
was both literal and symbolic. The problem of political and military
vulnerability of a state when large numbers of its young men were tied up with
weeks of ritual and physical circumcision was ended. Male initiation and war
both had their seasons in the dry months of the year. These considerations
certainly apply in the Kwanyama case. In addition, the king became the arbiter
of the larger, momentous issue of when and how boys become men. It became a
matter of suspense, possibly more geared towards war. It shifted the making of
masculinity from an endogamous affair, tied into local generational politics,
towards an exogamous event (or series of events) that in theory is solely
dictated by the king. It was implicitly a dramatic adaptation that pushed
youthful men out into the world, and later lent itself to further mutations in
the transition to manhood, for example migrant labour.
If we look at the particularities of the Kwanyama and other
Ovambo cases, however, this history of the sinking of male initiation and
retention of efundula, needs further historical nuance. Exisiting
historiographical interpretations are based on patrilineal Nguni societies at
the cutting edge of European mercantile, missionary and colonial contact in the
18th and 19th centuries. The Ovambo, by contrast, were
matrilineal and patrilocal, and were not directly affected by the precipitous
cross-cultural contact affecting southern Africa until the mid-19th
century at the earliest. The impingements of the radical history of slave
trading in Angola to the north were distant until this period.[11]
It is true that by mid-century, the Ovambo polities were deeply enmeshed
through trade and raiding with their African neighbours (Nkhumbi, Herero,
Nama), who were closer to the centers and forces of change. But it was only by
the late 19th century that hunters, traders and missionaries were
visiting the eastern kingdoms of Owambo in considerable numbers, and drew the
region into a complex mercantile network. The crux of the issue here - as in
the mfecane debates - is whether political, economic and social change
that happened in the floodplain over a long period of time, should be explained
according to internal or external dynamics.
I wish to examine the internal dynamics, and re-emphasise
the relative isolation in which these polities had evolved. It is this
interiority that is stressed continuously in oral tradition and oral history in
Owambo: causation which comes from within, and which by implication can be
brought under control. External actors and forces (traders, missionaries etc)
are not at the center of these narrative reconstructions.
My proposition here is that lineage influence was strongly
invested in the initiation rites, where the older supervised the younger.
Lineage (as opposed to royal) power was also residually present in efundula,
partly because these long predated centralised kingship and carried important
traces of a more decentralised past, but also because of the localised venues
in which they were conducted. This is not to say that royal power was a recent
development. The protagonistic role in oral traditions of origin played by
founding figures, who frequently gave their names to the polities which
emerged, point to the early (centuries old) elevation of a leader who was tied
to an incipient royal clan, and whose influence no doubt affected the making of
the historical traditions recounted. This is in the context of narratives of
settlement of the Ovambo progenitors who were in a process of migration from
further north over a period of centuries. But what becomes fascinating in these
oral traditions, are the many signs of the accretion of royal power which can
be read off directly and indirectly from the sequences in the accounts, from
the environmental information about the worlds these groups moved into and out
of and in which they evolved complex ways of life.
If we attempt to read some of the significations of
Kaulinge’s pre-colonial history of the Kwanyama, these suggest a dense
intertwining of environmental, demographic and political factors. The sites of society in this account move,
significantly, from the Oshimpolo forests to the oshanas (water channels
in the floodplain), from hunting, pastoralism and mobility to cultivation and
sedentarisation. The shift from the centrality of cattle to the centrality of
grain, is a background against which population increase happened – probably
gradually, but nonetheless dramatically, until the Kwanyama (ironically ‘those
who eat meat’) became the most populous kingdom on the floodplain.[12]
These processes of course are highly compressed in the oral accounts, the
passage of centuries is collapsed in one symbolic/narrative sleight of hand.
Nodes of memory and mnemonic devices in this tradition of telling history do
not follow the Eurocentric linear and chronological narrative methods that are
endorsed in the historical canon of academia.
Thus the Kwanyama moved increasingly from the productive and
symbolic resources of forests and animals, to water and grain. The proximity of
the Kwanyama to the Oshimpolo woodlands to the east means that they continued
to navigate between the two. But two factors encouraged the growth of the
centralisation of power under kings. The first was the settlement near the oshanas,
the water channels. This put a priority on land located close to the water.
Lineages settled in their plots and the omikunda (districts) flourished.
But authority to allocate plots concentrated power in the hands of a few. The
heads of these omikunda were beholden to local headmen, and ultimately
the king. Secondly, the resulting substantial demographic growth of the
Kwanyama in the 19th century also pushed the polity towards greater
centralisation and management of the new hierarchy of resources. Once some
degree of centralisation was established, every cultural or social intervention
that followed served as an increment to this power, which had continually to
reproduce its legitimacy even though it was becoming increasingly naturalised.
My contention is that this was happening across the floodplain over a very long
time, in a very particular environment.
Where does efundula come into this picture of the longue
durée? What does centralisation mean for the long-standing rite of passage?
Though the initiative for preparing efundula appeared to remain very
local,[13]
the Kwanyama kings came to decide the date of efundula ceremonies, and
presided over their inauguration and conclusion at certain venues. It is not
certain what degree of concentration of numbers occurred, as opposed to
dispersed ceremonies taking place, but the intervention of kings would suggest
the former. The other aspect that kings controlled was who could, or should,
participate. Each woman who had attained puberty was in theory a participant.
This became clear when first Mandume and later Iipumpu ya Tshilongo (king of
Uukwambi) attempted to enforce the participation of young Christian converts.
Both kings made it very explicit that Christian girls would not be allowed to
marry unless they had undergone efundula.[14]
The point to note however, is that the king did not control the main substance
of the ceremony. He had no authority to determine who should succeed or fail in
the endurance tests, nor have any effect on the fertility and regulation of the
young women concerned. These remained the province of the ritual expert, namunganga,
who directed the ceremony.
The key shifts towards centralisation which have a bearing
on efundula in the Kwanyama kingdom are firstly the abolition of male
circumcision (oshiKwanyama ethanda) by Mweshipandeka,[15]
making efundula the only remaining initiation ceremony which converged
people, and absorbed the social body for a short space of time. The question
remains whether lineage elders sought to increase their control of efundula
in order to compensate for the loss of male circumcision. It is very difficult
to find evidence relating to this, as the oral histories and mission records
are dominated by the royal presence. But it is important to note that while the
pattern of ending male circumcision took hold on the floodplain,[16]
powerful vestigial privileges for circumcised men remained in force for a long
period. An interesting example of this persistent importance of circumcision
was the prohibition on uncircumcised kings from entering the vicinity of any
former king’s embala.[17]
The end of male circumcision thus entailed a loss of spiritual authority at
some level for the kings; it was a ‘secularisation’ that increased the mystique
and power of ritually prepared men, who operated in very decentralised ways.
They were men in demand for many ritual activities, including efundula.
The second great shift in the fortunes of efundula
with regard to central power came with the liberalisation of the penalty for
transgression, for illegitimate or premarital pregnancy. The timing of this is
not clear, but oral history indicates that in Oukwanyama it occurred during the
reign of Weyulu ya Hedimbi, 1884-1901.[18]
Rhenish missionaries took the credit for this; in Ondonga Finnish missionaries
also took credit for using their influence to change the penalty. However,
there is nothing to prove it was their influence that swayed this reform. It is
more plausible to consider it as part of the long contest between central and
lineage power. The explanation for the severe earlier penalties, where both the
pregnant girl and her lover were burned, was rendered as a concern for the
overall well-being of the entire clan from which the girl came. It was
necessary to purify the clan radically of the perils of illegitimacy and
unauthorised sexual activity.[19]
The new penalty simply exiled the pregnant girl and lover
from the polity. In practice, these unfortunates took up residence in
neighbouring polities and were effectively cast out of their families; this was
thought to be sufficient. This judicial intervention by kings was a challenge
to the judicial precedents of lineages and families. It was another bold,
centralising and de-spiritualising move, which might conceivably be held to
have increased the dangers to the clans affected, weakening their integrity.
It is when we try to grasp this last point that the limits
of a more functional interpretation of efundula
become apparent. The rite of passage was not simply about the legitimation of
sexuality. A large part of the crisis in the efundula conflicts with Christian missions, was stated by Mandume,
namely the inherent perils of social destruction if the participation of each
young woman was not ensured. Mandume voiced this through a royal idiom, here
resembling an inflated family idiom, claiming his own self-destruction would
result. But this cloaks a more pervasive and collective claim that comes
through genealogy: literally all members of the young women’s lineages were
affected. It can be argued that in certain interpretations of ‘Kwanyama
thought’, efundula encoded a variety
of transitional and liminal experiences which were thought necessary for the
well-being and reproduction of the entire group. As Sean Hanretta suggests in
the case of 19th century Zulu women, those in a liminal state are
culturally ambiguous – ‘dangerous yet vital’ – and are part of a shift from
‘one cultural world into another’.[20]
The vulnerability of this transition of body and spirit, individual and
collective, produced the intense sense of risk in the build-up to (and
unfolding of) efundula, and
accentuated other insecurities.
Efundula was a medium through which powers and beliefs, politics and history,
were expressed and contested. It was possibly the main residual interface for
negotiating the layers of increasingly stratified society, partly because of
the sheer numbers involved and its universal application. The kings such as
Weyulu were picking off sections over which they could arbitrate, and bringing
other domains of life to bear on efundula, in this case a secular
judicial intervention. The effects of royal intervention and increased
centralisation on efundula altered its force in society, tilting it away
from its more decentralised origins. Efundula was being reoriented in
certain ways towards kingship, though its central and secret sections were
still out of the range of direct interference and could not be disciplined.
There is however one final and crucial aspect of centralising power and efundula
which needs attention. Before we can do this, we need to look more closely at
the processes and techniques of efundula.
Efundula and the making of
pre-colonial (and colonial) spectacle
It is not
possible - nor is it my intention - to give a single account of efundula.
It was and is a complex ritual that was subject to enormous variation in its
detail and duration. It formerly lasted several months; by the late 1930s in
some areas it was already reduced to a matter of days.[21]
Despite these fluidities and divergences, documented and oral accounts usually
outline the conceptual stages of the ritual that seem to have been fairly
stable, at least from the late 19th century.[22]
Preparations were considerable, not least weeks of sustained drumming to alert omikunda
(districts) of the coming of the ceremony.
In the first substantive phase of the process, young women
initiates entered a closed house (ondjuo). They were fed by the
namunganga, the ritual leader of the ceremony and his or her assistants.
After a period, the initiates were summoned one by one, and upon their exit
crawled through the legs of the namunganga (though this apparently
ceased in places) and stepped over a cleft stick. According to recent accounts,
at this stage, the initiates were already regarded as ‘married’.[23]
If the initiate was pregnant, the test of stepping over the stick was reputed
to make them stumble and fall. The namunganga then presented each initiate
with a cup of millet beer to which a powerful herb has been added, which she
had to drink. This was a second test for illicit pregnancy, for the brew was
supposed to make the pregnant initiate vomit. The other purpose of the drink
was to give the young women strength for the next stage of the ceremony for
which they needed to be ‘stable’.
What took place thus far, especially inside the enclosed
house, was historically the most secret part of the ceremony and has caused the
most controversy in ethnographies and missionary commentaries. These
controversies revolved around the sexual acts allegedly performed by the ritual
leader: we shall come to these debates later.
The second stage witnessed the initiates undergoing what
many commentators have described as ‘endurance’ tests, where they were required
to pound millet in mortars for hours during the hottest time of the day. Again,
this was reputed to cause the pregnant to fall out of the group. Previously
this could apparently go on for days (perhaps even longer), but this phase has
in recent decades been compressed into a single day. Again, it is difficult to
pinpoint when the shifts occurred, and where and why they did so.
The penultimate stage in the ritual process was when the
initiates were called oihanangolo, which in recent years again seems to
have dropped from practice. This was the stage in which the ovafuka
(initiates) became ovamati (boys). The initiates covered their bodies
with white ash, dressed in skirts made from spiky sisal-type leaves, armed
themselves with knob-kieries and were free to roam the district, demanding food
from households and beating up any man who crossed their path. They adopted the
names of famous male leaders, a favourite after 1917 being ‘Mandume’, and lived
semi-wild as it were, sleeping on the fringes of households and settlements.
Informants recalled with some amusement - and with what accuracy we cannot know
- how this phase allowed a young woman to search out her husband-to-be, and how
she could force him to prepare food for her and her associates, insult him (by
addressing him as kadona or ‘young girl’) and beat him soundly if he was
caught sleeping with any woman already his wife. Such victims were bound not to
offer any resistance. According to different accounts, this stage lasted for
months, weeks or days.
The final stage of the ceremony was open to the wider
public. While men and boys came forward to play the long efundula drums
supported on cleft sticks, the girls danced and sang. Through go-between
figures, men approached the initiates and proposed marriage. These contracts
were usually prearranged. If the initiate in question wore a man’s token, this
signified acceptance. This stage, beyond the claiming of the brides by their
husbands, once gifts had been passed to the bride’s family[24]
and the marriage celebrations at the homes of both the bride and her husband,
more or less marked the end - and the public climax - of the ceremony.
This sketch of the ‘leading principles’ of efundula,
runs the risk of making elements of the rite of passage appear timeless and
fixed, which it was most emphatically not. The account given here is also a
very minimal one, given that the rite of passage contained entire sequences and
worlds of meaning. Various features could still be described, such as the
changes in bodily dressing that mark off different stages of being in the
ceremony, and by the end of which the initiates emerge as mature women. The
role played by young ‘mascots’ or assistants to the initiates, and young men
acting as surrogate husbands, has also not been mentioned here. But this mean
sketch of the phases is necessary in order to locate the problems of this
paper, namely the contests in the staging of efundula, and the way
certain features achieved salience over others in its evolutions and its
representations.
My main argument here, in the case of the Kwanyama, is that
the public massing of young women in the later stages of efundula raises
the adage of ‘wealth in people’ rather than wealth in things. This reflected
glory, presumably, on the kings. But what did it mean when the main massing of
subjects was female? In gender studies we talk frequently about production of
masculinities, but what about the production of femininities here? To be
fertile in a legitimate sense was to bear culture for the whole ‘nation’ or oshilongo,
which includes those who have gone before and those who will follow. This poses
an interesting counterweight to the assumed masculinisation of society that
went with increased militarisation.[25]
But another point to make here is that semiotically, in
terms of signs, women initiates participating in efundula were not only
the bearers of culture, but also the bearers of history. The Oihanangolo
phase implicitly contains references to wilderness, spaces from which Kwanyama
presumably came, but from which civilisation and cultivation had effected a
great distance. This is of course very common in initiation rites elsewhere in
Africa, but here there are specific signifiers in oral tradition which point to
a particular if remote historical reference, namely the forests through which
Kwanyama passed on their migrations to the floodplain, besides the grazing and
hunting areas (the Oshimpolo) which continued to draw Kwanyama men and
their cattle. This inversion of civilisation, this highly deliberate physical
occupation of a liminal space, was accompanied by a robust gender inversion. It
is interesting to speculate as to whether gender roles were more fluid in the
less centralised past, whose landscape was being symbolically revisited by the oihanangolo.
There were ‘sacred’ objects and signs in efundula
that owed nothing to commoditisation, that were steeped in a pre-contact,
pre-mercantile past. As kings and elites in Owambo from the 1880s embraced
consumer goods, especially rifles and western clothing, there was (and is) the
repetitious appearance of the cleft stick, and the prominence of grain and
gathered herbs. These affected the detection of pregnancy, and thus the control
over the ordering of life – none of which was arbitrated by royal power. The
private parts of the ceremony remained of heightened import, and had nothing to
do with royal control that was simply overlaid on the public sections.
I want to explore the issue of public spectacle here, because
it is pertinent to how both centralised power and later indirect rule sought to
use efundula to administrative effect. It is, of course, ambiguous to
apply such a notion here that is normally found in the work of scholars
debating the rival merits of spectacle versus surveillance in relation to
understanding modern forms of European state control and visibility.[26] Implicit in the arguments concerning
spectacle, are firstly, the alienation of the spectator from the object of
display, and secondly, forms of viewing that make the observers passively
complicit in power and control.[27]
In this light, it is certainly not the case that observers attending the final
stages of efundula constituted an ‘audience’ distinct from the
performers. Levels of participation and the close relationships with initiates
were too obvious and too close to produce dazzled onlookers who might have been
de-politicised and pacified by performances presided over by the king. While
the ‘modernity’ of Debord’s society of the spectacle has been questioned and
re-periodised to embrace early modern state practices in the 17th
century, thus taking it out of its 20th century specificity, its
potential application to Ovambo public cultural practices appears limited in
strictly theoretical terms.
Maurice Bloch on the other hand, in his depiction of state
takeover of descent-controlled circumcision in the Merina kingdom of
Madagascar, comes much closer to our African set of issues. His term is not
spectacle, but simply ‘inflation’.[28]
This suggests a way to reformulate public spectacle in pre-colonial Africa as
something intimately connected with heightened performativity or theatricality,
as well as demographic growth and increased state control.
The element of the spectacular suggested in the history of efundula
performances in an emergent kingdom such as Oukwanyama, refers to the effect of
numbers on the eye. Inevitably, there was an increase in scale, and shift in
ethos, when kings took up intervening or arbitrating positions in the public
section of the rite. The latter assumed new ceremonial and spectacular
dimensions because of the king’s arbitrating role and the expansion of the
public section of ceremony, which were due to demographic factors. One gets a
sense of efundula emerging as a massing of numbers that brought with it
a new visual experience. For royalty, the aspect of spectacle arises because
this is ‘wealth in people’ taken to the next logical step: it is put on
display. This has the impact of a new public culture.[29]
Debord argues that in the society of the spectacle,
‘Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’ In
the Kwanyama case, as royal power was building increasing, efundula was
still directly lived but had also become a representation. Alongside the
construction of a certain kind of femininity for the individual concerned, and
because of the falling away of male initiation from the 1850s, a feminisation
of Kwanyama culture was taking place as certain aspects of efundula
filled the public space.
This was the sight that colonial officials encountered after
1917. Native Commissioner Hahn in particular, later appropriated those
spectacular aspects that were generated under pre-colonial conditions,
promoting and extending their representational dimension through solicited
performances and photographs. Segments of efundula become more prone to
decontextualisation, partial interpretation, stereotyping and reification. The
population density and prominent position of the Kwanyama in the floodplain environment
translated into the largest efundula, with the largest participation and
largest spectacle. This is pertinent to much of the earliest colonial
photography of efundula, for it is the Kwanyama ceremonies which are
later the most photographed, by René Dickman based in Namakunde on the border,
and by Native Commissioner Hahn. The public sections, a massing of numbers made
possible through demographic growth and kingship, were blown up in size. This
made the elements of ‘spectacle’ ripe for colonial exploitation and became a
veritable powder keg in the confrontation with missionaries.
The efundula
and ohango ceremonies which colonial officials first witnessed and
photographed after 1917 took place at a very significant historical juncture.
The efundula in Oukwanyama was scheduled to take place in 1914, before
it was suspended in the face of drought, famine and war.[30]
The kingdom was militarily occupied in 1915 and split between Portuguese and
South African administrations; the latter sent a further military expedition in
1917 to remove Mandume, who had proved too troublesome to control. It was after
his death, and the installation of a Council of Headmen, that the efundula
ceremonies took place under the auspices of powerful regional headmen. These
then became part of a process of reconstruction, of recovery from famine and
war, and the signal for society to reproduce itself after a cataclysm.
It also meant that suddenly, in a royal vacuum in Oukwanyama,
colonial officers who believed themselves to inhabit a modern sensibility were
confronted with a diachronic scene from what they termed ‘Old Africa Untamed’.
The latter was overwhelmingly female. As so often in ethnographic photography,
including most of the examples here, the
photographer-ethnographer-administrator was concerned with the polluting effect
of his presence, and sought ‘to preserve the purity of the cultural other he
represents.’ Compulsory visibility was thus imposed on the subjects and the
photographer became invisible ‘behind his [sic] camera’.[31]
We are thus presented with a single time, or timelessness, by the framing of
the scenes. This is in part how the colonial reification of the public aspects
of efundula effectively took place, and the ceremony entered a new phase
of representation.
Examples of administrators who doubled as photographers in
the early years of South African occupation were Major Charles Manning and Rene
Dickman,[32] with their
young colleague Hahn remaining after 1921 as Native Commissioner. There was a
distinct photographic shift between earlier and later efundula images.
This should remind us that there were different ‘agendas of visibility’[33]
as far as Ovambo women were concerned: they were being made visible, but we
have to be critically aware of the conditions of this visibility at different
junctures.
Both Manning and Dickman were in Namakunde in 1917 where they
photographed Kwanyama initiates in the oihanangolo phase of efundula
(Photos 1, 2
and 3). Manning’s album captions
[34]
indicate an awareness of the gender inversion allegedly
taking place as initiates have the freedom to move about as ‘boys’ (Photos
2 and 3). The photographs show the detail of their dress,
the presence of their young attendants on the side, but not their activity.
These are somewhat static and ‘documentary’ photographs, extending to the
portrait genre in Manning’s case with his single, posed figure photographed
on one knee (Photo 4). The static
quality tends to freeze the ‘oddness’ of the girls’ attire and ash-covered
faces at this stage of wildness, of living out in nature. In the rest of the
ceremony the initiates were compressed into the rigours of a new role as mature
women, but here they were allowed a spell of crossing the threshold into the
gendered other. At the borderland between girlhood and maturity, they had
the space to flip between roles and revel in the ambiguities. The certainties
of being a woman after efundula, and responsible for particular spheres
of domestic production and reproduction, gave no hint of the raucousness of
gender-busting that allegedly went on during the latter stages of the ceremony
in which these oihanangolo were located. As in other initiations, it
was probable that the liminal ritual space was designed as a threshold space
to engender the very stability of female identity that was intended to follow
the rite of passage.
The next photographs by Dickman and Manning respectively mark
out the transition to another phase (Photos 5
and 6). As both officials took
photographs here, this was probably still Oukwanyama. It signified the entry
into the most public and participatory section of the efundula, where
the young women adopted new attire and came forth to dance to intense drumming,
and were claimed by their prospective husbands. These two photographs appear
to show the initiates on the brink of this dancing. Dickman’s photograph is
of particular interest here, as it combined a militarily straight line of
initiates, apparently still under orders though probably about to commence
dancing. Their ranking together gave a uniformity to the women, and their
hidden faces in the photograph hint at the secrecies and authorities in the
ritual space at that time.
Photographs have the potential to add new layers of insight
and complexity to any gender historiography in Africa. The most striking
feature to emerge is the empirical contrast between the so-called invisibility
of African women in most colonial documentation and their all-too-frequent
visibility in photographs. What is so intriguing with the photographs here is
the apparent reversal of what happens with the voice, for as the photographer
effaces himself, Ovambo women are foregrounded.
It is perhaps ironic that it is only with photographs that
we can start to ask what visual impact efundula might have had, in
terms of performance and theatricality. This not only creates the possibility
of picking up traces of what people might have seen during these performances,
but also projects a sense of the contours of visibility of Kwanyama women,
who were normally out of the public space. Implicit in this spectacle were
sequences which showed serried ranks of initiates, their individual identities
lost in the various forms of dress and cosmetic change; the homo-social bonds
as they became uniform together in serialised sequences. Then there are the
intense interactions with the participating public that were photographed
(Photos 7 and 8),
and finally (from Uukwambi) the carrying of some of the efundula initiates
away on the shoulders of their ‘husbands’ (Photos 9
and 10). These suggest some of
the ‘intricacies, interweaving, and effects of multiple media, multiple events,
and multiple participants and perspectives’ that characterise initiation ceremonies.
[35]
In the photographs of the last phase of efundula by
Dickman and Manning, filled with drama and action, there is a recording of
the energy and frenzied interaction of the spectacle. At times the photographers
appear to be inserted right in the scene, in the tail of the swirling activity
(Photo 10). These dazzling, confrontational
and perhaps disorienting scenes taken from close vantage points suggest a
photographic immersion in what seemed disorderly about efundula. These
photographs were captioned often in terms of ‘Ovambo tribal ceremony’; they
suggest the resilience of pre-existing institutions and somewhat opportunistic
photographing, rather than premeditated documentation of something known.
At this stage of colonial rule, the South Africans did not know what use to
make of these images and they remain the province of the personal rather than
the official album. They were never instrumentalised. It was no coincidence
that administrative policy at this stage was somewhat amorphous and undefined;
‘indirect rule’ was only adopted as a nomenclature in the late 1920s. These
earlier efundula photographs stand in great contrast to Native Commissioner
Hahn’s focus on the formal composition of lines and orderliness in his 1936
panoramic studies of efundula. His work, which takes place nearly two
decades later, suggests the preparation of a new visual regime expressive
of consolidated colonialism.
Hahn’s efundula photographs shown here with his panoramic
camera in fact were taken on the occasion of the 1936 gathering at Oshikango
mentioned at the beginning of this paper, in honour of the visit of the Administrator
for South West Africa. These constitute very wide, horizontal shots of a staged
efundula event. The rotating lens on Hahn’s camera provided the amplitude
to represent numbers. This was where Hahn’s model council of headmen was in
operation. Photo 11 encompasses
male drummers and female initiates massed together in opposing formations,
with spectators to both sides. The dignitaries who appear in other photographs
of this meeting, in huts specially set aside to shelter them from the sun,
[36]
also stand in the background as spectators of the efundula
in this photograph. This display was precisely the kind of ‘glamourisation’
to which missionaries objected.
But the importance of these two photographs does not stop
there. Hahn not only built on the centralising work of pre-colonial Kwanyama
kings by promoting aspects of public spectacle, he extended it by creating
something which brought efundula into the realm of the modern: an
audience of spectators which was divorced from the participants. Not only was
this 1936 event a staged one, but it was not uncommon for communities to
reschedule or repeat their efundula dances to coincide with Hahn’s tour
with an official visitor.[37]
In addition to this decontextualisation of the ceremony, the photography of efundula
which circulated outside Owambo in official publications, created even more
distant audiences, bringing them much closer to Debord’s analysis concerning
the shift away from the lived into representation. Though having said this,
participants and local onlookers would still have seen things very differently.
Hahn’s camera visually isolated particular aspects of the ceremony.
As Virilio puts it, ‘The frame, the limit of visibility, is clearly what makes
conscious objectification possible.’
[38]
Efundula was increasingly emptied of its complex
meanings, which then made it easier for performances to be coded as ‘healthy
tradition’ by the administration. Photo 12
zooms in on the closer line of initates with the namunganga striding
out in front of this regiment of women. Much of the power of this photograph
comes from the direct gaze of the namunganga into the camera - it seems
almost confrontational. In addition, the angle is quite low, which builds
up the figure of the ritual expert as he strides in front of his charges.
There is something deliberate in Hahn’s photographing here in order to represent
the challenge of the man’s look and that of the many eyes behind him. This
is not just a photogenic traditionality to be viewed by white observers whose
support Hahn sought. Hahn’s kudos as the ‘Lord of the Last Frontier’
[39]
who controlled over a hundred thousand such Ovambo would
have been enormously reinforced by such an image.
The panoramic photographs in particular convey a sense of an
assembly that is under control, a moment in the cultural life of society where
people mass together in order to move from one stage of their personal lives to
another. This was African but orderly, and Hahn was enormously attracted to
orderliness, and to the rationalities and discipline he imputed to pre-colonial
African authority. The numbers, the lines, the formations, the choreography
were on a scale that was quite awesome, as were the dancing and drumming that
followed. The panoramic photographs capture this scale and project a sense of
the cohesion of society with indigenous authority intact and, not by accident,
women under control.[40]
This was the very core of Hahn’s project: a representation which he urged as
the ideal ‘native’ condition and which the South African administration in
South West Africa should preserve.
Efundula,
ethnography and masculinisation
One final
issue needs discussion in the tracking of efundula through the late
pre-colonial and early colonial history of Owambo. Through this impressive
photograph (Photo 12), Hahn instated
the ritual leadership of efundula as ineluctably masculine. This feature
came very strongly to the surface in representations of the ceremony in the
eastern parts of Owambo in the colonial era. When later anthropologists such
as Tuupainen refer to the ‘master of ceremonies’, and note he has a female
assistant, it suggests that in Ondonga the namunganga was always male.
In fact, the maleness of this ritual leader has been stated and assumed in
so many sources that it has crystallised as universal, and been taken for
granted in the historiography.
[41]
However, it is important to question the gendering of the
organisation of efundula over time in ethnographic representation,
especially in the light of recent efundula
performances that unsettle this androcentric assumption.[42]
For example, the initiations held in 1996 in Ondjondjo and Omatanda in Owambo,
were conducted by women, not men.[43]
Also, the studies by the Powell-Cotton sisters in 1937 in the southern Angolan
part of Oukwanyama indicate that the position of namunganga could be held by either a male or a female practitioner.
The masculinisation of the namunganga in
the bulk of ethnography and anthropology requires exploration.
Hahn’s ethnographic notes date mainly from the 1920s,[44]
and it is pertinent to ask how far local indigenous discourses concerning efundula
made their way into these texts. We should not assume ‘colonial’ and
‘indigenous’ were completely separate and counter-posed to one another. Hahn
obtained his information from a number of Ovambo sources, whose opinions
(though not individually acknowledged) have a distinct presence in what he
recorded. Hahn’s position was a mediating one. He tapped the knowledge of
certain senior figures, usually headmen, and wrapped it up in his own diction,
redolent of the codes and conventions in ethnographic writing to which he was
increasingly exposed from the 1920s. At this time when Hahn prepared notes on efundula,
local missionaries who attacked his support for the ceremony also produced
statements that depended partly on Ovambo sources, but mainly on prior
missionary studies whose quality and context varied widely.[45]
By the 1930s, no thorough mission ethnographic research was underway (with the
possible exception of one Finnish missionary) and most missionary discourses
relied on hearsay and second-hand opinion. These easily took on a
propagandistic flavour, as we shall see.
The ‘definitive’ published research however has been widely
acknowledged as Maija Tuupainen’s Marriage in a Matrilineal African Tribe.[46]
Tuupainen published this doctoral research on marriage and efundula (or ohango)
amongst the Ndonga in 1970. She acknowledges her intellectual debt to Audrey
Richards, not surprising given her anthropological research on the ‘central
African matrilineal belt’ and indeed initiation.[47]
Tuupainen was greatly assisted in her research by resident Finnish missionaries
in Ondonga, and uses Hahn’s material extensively in her description of the ceremonies.
The alternative accounts of the Powell-Cotton sisters working in Angola did not
have access to Hahn’s ethnographic material, but obtained some information from
French-speaking missionaries in southern Angola instead. Interesting
differences arise from these divergent origins of information.
As noted, the maleness of the ‘master of ceremonies’ was the
striking feature to emerge in 20th century accounts of efundula.
The second and related feature in existing representations of the ceremony,
which has led to its being branded as ‘immoral’ and ‘indecent’ in the minds of
missionaries and (so they hoped) their Ovambo converts, has been the alleged
sexual act performed by the male ritual leader in order to symbolically ensure
the fertility of the female initiates. As outlined above and in Tuupainen’s
narrative of the initiation, in the first stage of the ceremony when the young
women are enclosed in the ondjuo, they leave the house by crawling
between the legs of the namunganga standing with legs apart over the
entrance. They must then drink from a special cup which contains a mixture of
Ovambo beer, potent herbs, and allegedly the ‘seed’ of the ‘master of
ceremonies’ who has brought himself to ejaculation and placed the resulting
semen into the cup. It is also alleged that he stirs the mixture with his
penis. Tuupainen is one of the most explicit sources on this point, and she
also makes mention of sexual intercourse taking place between the ‘master of
ceremonies’ and his senior female assistant at a particular juncture in the
ceremony.[48]
While it is unclear how much of this detail was known
personally to missionaries in the 1920s and 1930s, they specifically referred
to the ‘phallic’ nature of the ceremony as being their prime objection to it.
Hahn by contrast makes no reference to such matters, at least not in writing.
This suggests that many people in the churches had internalised a powerful
discourse relating to sexuality, heterosexuality and fertility. It is no
accident that these libidinous readings arose in relation to the part of the
ceremony with the most potent secrecy, when initiates were secluded in the ondjuo.
For missionaries in the 1930s, this was more explicit than the position Rhenish
missionaries had held in 1914 when deliberating Mandume’s ultimatum to their
female converts. At that time, missionaries were concerned that they could not
supervise what happened during the private sections of the ceremony, but there
was a more general disapproval of the heathen influence of drumming and dancing
in public.
In the 1930s missionary sexualisation of efundula, it
would seem that the heterosexual and sexual performance could not have taken
place without a male ‘master of ceremonies’. The most objectionable feature -
and that which fuelled the struggles of the 1920s and 1930s over efundula
- thus hinged on the masculine ritual leadership of the ceremony. However,
according to other sources, efundula has been organised and conducted by
female ritual leaders for decades and even (as interviewees stressed)
generations. If this is correct, it either signifies that things have changed
in the years since Hahn and even Tuupainen wrote their texts, or it completely
undermines the concentrated phallocentrism in the ceremony so earnestly built
up in the ethnographies and missionary discourses.[49]
If the latter case applies, then there is an argument to be made that the
ceremony has also been represented not just in a heterosexual and sexualised
fashion, but to the point of hyper-sexualisation. This is not to deny that efundula
deals with sexuality. But the chain of processes that takes place during efundula
incorporate social education around sexuality - mostly through song - and have
important symbolic aspects that address maturation, pregnancy, childbirth and
domestic labour.[50] Sexuality
in the ceremony is but one part of a larger conceptual continuum celebrating
and preparing young women for fertility and larger roles in the world.
Missionaries by the 1930s were singling out particular alleged and highly
sexualised aspects of the ceremony (masturbation, doctoring drink with semen,
possible sexual intercourse) and castigating the entire proceedings on this
basis.
Though Hahn is not involved in overtly ascribing dark sexual
acts to the leaders of the ritual, he has participated in the process of
masculinising the ceremony by consistently representing the leader as male. His
agenda was not a moralistic one, and he possibly even derived voyeuristic
pleasure from watching the dances, taking his photographs and looking at them.
Why did he not photograph a female namunganga? It is possible that the
small pool of ritual experts at the time was male, but it is more probable that
in his absorption with centralised structures and indirect rule, a masculine
profile of ritual leadership was only natural. In his histories of efundula,
he is very careful to constantly construct interventionist moments by chiefs in
the ceremony. This is crucial, and differs sharply from Rhenish mission
accounts between 1890 and 1914 where efundula organisation appeared far
more localised and decentralised. Hahn’s emphasis is on the ceremonies being
located near residences of former powerful kings, and on the to-ing and fro-ing
between namunganga and chief to seek authorisations and to keep the
latter informed. This behaviour came very close in fact to his ideals of
indigenous authority and he might have picked out this political aspect for
emphasis. He remained insensitive to shifts in the ceremony as a whole
especially where it was more decentralised. He does write of a female presence
in the direction of the ceremony, but she is only described as the ‘assistant’
to the male namunganga.[51]
In the photographs of efundula by Hahn, she was certainly not the focus
of his camera.
Conclusion
A great
many questions remain concerning how efundula might have been conducted
in the past, and how different its gendered leadership might have been in
former decades. Is it Hahn’s sheer androcentrism that produces the impression
that ritual leadership was only male? Did missionaries – through some
psychoanalytical device stemming from their own various cultures of repression
- invent the sexual component of efundula? To leave the enquiry at this
juncture, one that is simply critical of the production of colonial and missionary
discourses, is to avoid the implications of the historicisation attempted
earlier in this paper. That is, efundula
cannot be understood simply as a cultural practice that is timeless, and which
is interpreted in modified ways by ‘Europeans’ entering Owambo in the 20th
century. The issues around which debates became fixated have their origin in
the shifts in efundula performances
back in the 19th century.
My contention is that with the abolition of male
circumcision in the 1850s, there was a rise in the cultural, social, political
and historical value of female initiation as the one universal rite that
brought lineages and kings together. The rite of passage embodied the
signifiers of a more decentralised past, and yet kings were making symbolic and
public inroads on efundula. My
suggestion is that the greater weighting of circumcised males from the relevant
lineages in efundula is more likely
to have resulted from these occurrences. It is even possible that the
sexualisation of certain aspects of the rite of passage may have arisen here in
the latter half of the 19th century in response to such royal
secularising moves: the male namunganga
would have become indispensable. Just as the vehicle of the feminisation of the
oshilongo (nation) rose to new prominence,
male ritual expertise may well have been asserted to conduct the ceremonies.
This was integral to a very old contest between lineages and central power,
with women at its core.
The issue of central power provides a few possible
explanations concerning efundula in
the 20th century. A significant shift in Kwanyama efundula
practices is supplied by the notes left by the Powell-Cotton sisters, who
researched over the border in Angola and were quite divorced from the battles
raging over the initiation in South West Africa. They emphasize the possibility
that efundula had changed since the Rhenish missionary Tönjes had
observed parts of the ceremony before World War 1, and that research by
themselves and missionaries based in Angola uncovered great variations. This
suggests that there were decentralisations of efundula, quite in
contrast to the timeless, centralised picture drawn by Hahn. Their period of
research (1936-37) took place at the very time arguments over efundula
were most heated across the border. The Powell-Cotton sisters produced quite a
different picture of the sexual symbolics in the ceremony they attended, to
those of missionaries based on the Namibian side of the border. Diane
Powell-Cotton’s notes specifically state that no intercourse between ritual
leader and partner took place, and the drink given to the initiates was not
stirred by the penis of the namunganga. The sisters were informed that
these practices had been dropped. Young men related that they could remember
them still happening when they were boys. Finally, the two sister ethnographers
confirmed that the ritual leader (namunganga) could be equally a woman
or a man.[52] In Angola there was no policy of indirect
rule, nor were ‘tribal practices’ promoted by the administration. With local
decentralisation in this part of the old Kwanyama kingdom, certain gender
polarities in the ceremony might have been reduced.
Hahn invested deeply in continuing forms of centralisation
in Oukwanyama: he admired his ‘virile’ Ovambo kings and took their cultural
elaborations and secularisations much further. Thus in stark contrast with
Nancy Rose Hunt’s account of how missionaries in the Belgian Congo
choreographed a spectacle for members of the Belgian royal family and other
visitors, of cannibals transformed into domesticated Africans,[53]
the spectacle offered up in colonial Owambo was the opposite. The point is that
for the purposes of his own spectacle of indirect rule, showing tribe and
indigenous authority in harmony for international consumption, the nexus of
centralised and public (which raised the stakes very high) inexorably drew in
male supervision. The dynamic of centralisation led to increased gender
polarisation that had probably already begun when kings began to intervene in
initiation. Thus Hahn’s efundula
appears to be dominated by the male namunganga.
Where the rites of passage were increasingly held in more
local settings, especially across the Angolan border where no prestigious
Council of Headmen operated to replace Mandume, the stakes were not so high,
the affair not so public. It is no accident that the Powell-Cotton sisters
identify such places as where women had always operated as namunganga, and where overtly admitted sexual practices had dropped
off. These were the decentralised re-orientations of efundula, probably drawing on older models and practices, but also
redefining the rite of passage in new contexts.
Despite Hahn’s efforts to promote and preserve
traditional practices in the interests of indirect rule, Owambo eventually
became one of the most heavily Christianised regions of Africa.[54]
By the 1950s the rates of conversion to Christianity were considerable: as
McKitttrick argues, members of lineages were finding another way ‘to dwell
secure’. The period between 1920s and 1940s seems to represent the most
contested and fraught transitional phase for societies where the younger
generation began to challenge the old, women left their families’ control for
that of the mission, and the ‘detribalisation’ that Hahn deplored seemed to be
taking greater hold. [55] The
ideological battle over the loss of headmen’s authority, over the growing
independence and even insubordination of Christian subjects, over the alleged
poverty of monogamous Christian households, became very fierce.
The disputes raging around efundula in the 1930s-40s
were largely articulated by parents, headmen, administrators and missionaries.
They of course tell us little about the aspirations of the young women who
agreed or refused to participate in efundula or ohango at this
time. Some of the conflicts facing these women do emerge however. The refusal
of young Kwambi women to participate in ohango in 1931-32 for example,
indicated a resistance to royal control and a growing attraction to the local
mission station. In some cases girls were forcibly detained and pressured to
attend the ceremony, as happened with three female students at Odibo Anglican
mission in 1934.[56] But
equally, young Christian women struggled with themselves and missionary
prohibitions when they escaped missions to (secretly or otherwise) observe or
participate in the ceremony.[57]
The tensions over efundula represented a defining
moment of colonial crisis in northern Namibia, with efforts being directed at
preserving cultural practices surrounding women’s bodies, and not allowing them
to be ‘smashed up and wiped out’.[58]
But as I have tried to argue throughout this paper, there were older struggles
that predated the storm around efundula in the inter-war years of the 20th
century. These showed the ceremony as a medium through which local lineages and
centralising royal power had long competed and negotiated their respective
influences, through the bodies and performances of young women. It places this
ritual around gender and generational transformation at the center of cultural
self-definition in Ovambo societies.
As cultural self-definitions shifted with increased
conversion to the churches, coinciding with the masculinisation and
sexualisation of the ritual organisation in colonial and mission discourses by
mid-20th century, so the attendance at efundula ceremonies
fell away. This was until its revival in more recent years. As Cory Kratz
points out, ‘People eventually abandon ceremonies that are unresponsive or
unrelated to their lives, though the relations of ceremonies to the broader
sociopolitical circumstances can be redefined.’[59]
Such redefinition is now occurring as efundula is advertised on local
radio and attracts a new generation of participants in a new time of crisis.
This moment also represents a demystification of some of the ethnographic myths
about efundula that developed in the colonial era. Young women who
attend today in the midst of new socio-economic problems and postcolonial
moralities are recontextualising the ceremony; those women who direct the
proceedings are responsible for its rehistoricisation and the loosening of its
gender polarities.
[1]
Examples include Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds), Tensions
of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), Nicholas B.
Dirks (ed), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992); Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
[2] Whether Mandume actually
believed in his own prediction was a matter of skepticism amongst the
missionaries, who noted elsewhere his skilful populist use of ‘tradition’ to
further his political ends. See Hayes,
‘Order out of Chaos.’
[3] In more recent years in postcolonial Namibia, the Anglican and Catholic churches appear to have increased in tolerance, though the Lutheran church remains opposed.
[4] Useful sources include Archiv der Vereinte Evangelische Mission (AVEM) No 1.477, Sckär, Historisches, Ethnographisches, Animismus, ca 1901-13; C.H.L. Hahn, Heinrich Vedder and Louis Fourie, The Native Tribes of South West Africa (Cape Town: Cape Times, 1928); Heinrich Vedder, South West Africa in Early Times (London, 1938); Hermann Tönjes, Ovamboland. Land, Leute, Mission (Berlin, 1911); P.H. Brincker, Unsere Ovambo-Mission (Barmen, 1900); Carlos Estermann, Ethnography of Southwestern Angola (New York, 1976) Vol 1; Edwin Loeb, In Feudal Africa (1962).
[5] For studies of efundula in more recent periods, see Maija Tuupainen, Marriage in a matrilineal African tribe (Helsinki: Westermarck Society, 1970); Gwyneth Davies, ‘The Efundula: Fertility and Social Maturity among the Kuanyama of Southern Angola’ (MA thesis, University of Kent, 1987); Powell-Cotton Museum, D. and A. Powell-Cotton, 1937a, ‘The Efundula: Engagement and Marriage’. Further overview is provided in the unpublished paper by H. Becker, presented at the Gender and Colonialism conference, University of the Western Cape, 1997.
[6] Uukwambi might be an exception to this. Interview with Sister Credula Uugwanga, Oshikuku, 6.7.1989.
[7] Present-day informants have argued this in much the same way that the Powell-Cotton sisters recorded in 1937, though the scale of premarital (or pre-efundula) pregnancy in contemporary Namibia provides a different context for such remarks.
[8] Though German mission sources between 1890 and 1916 give April and May as the main months during which efundula occurred in Oukwanyama.
[9] This is the
date given in Beatrix Heintze, ‘Kwanyama and Ndonga Chronology. Some Notes’ in
Journal of the SWA Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft 1972-73, p 52. Others give
the date as 1856.
[10] Debates on this Zulu historiography are most recently developed in Carolyn Hamilton (ed), The Mfecane Aftermath (Johannesburg and Durban: Wits University Press and University of Natal Press, 1995).
[11] The account of
slaving activities between Angola and Owambo in Jan Bart Gewald’s entry in John
Middleton (ed), Encyclopedia of Africa
South of the Sahara Vol 3 (New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1997),
pp 263-4, is very inaccurate. See Patricia Hayes, ‘A History of the Ovambo of
Namibia, 1880-1930’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1992), pp 71-72.
[12] Demographic figures for 1901 based on Finnish Mission sources suggest the Kwanyama numbered roughly 45 000; the Ndonga 20 000; the Kwambi 15 000 and smaller polities 7 000. Hayes, ‘History of the Ovambo’, p 25.
[13] AVEM c/k 7 No 18, Welsch, ‘Die Forderung der Oberhauptlings Mandume betrefs. Efundula and die Gefahren, die unsern Gemeinden deraus erwachsen,’ 1914.
[14] Ibid. On Iipumbu, see Hayes, ‘History of the Ovambo’, pp 250-263.
[15] See Loeb, Feudal Africa, p 236.
[16] While this statement holds true for Oukwanyama, and applies broadly, it must be qualified in specific cases. Ondonga for example reversed its abolition of male circumcision early in the 20th century; it remained vibrant in parts of western Owambo until the 1920s at least and continued in Angolan regions.
[17] Embala is usually translated as ‘palace’; it signifies the royal residence. Auala ELCIN Archive Z III 2, Wulfhorst, Chronik der Station Omupanda, 1915.
[18]
Meredith McKittrick argues in To Dwell Secure (Portsmouth:
Heinemann, 2002) p 40 that as no witnesses are recorded as seeing the older
form of punishment, it was probably myth. But this dismisses many indirect
references to the transition, especially in Oukwanyama. Moreover, witnessing
all aspects of efundula was of course not possible for outsiders.
[19]
According to Loeb, Feudal Africa, p 258, pregnancy prior to efundula
was a common cause of suicide among young women.
[20] Sean Hanretta, ‘Women,
marginality and the Zulu state: women’s institutions and power in the early
nineteenth century’ in Journal of African
History, 39 (1998), p 392, especially footnote 11.
[21] The latter was the case in the Kwanyama area where the Powell-Cotton sisters did their fieldwork in 1937 in Angola. See Powell-Cotton Museum, D. & A. Powell-Cotton, 1937a, ‘The Efundula: Engagement and Marriage.’
[22] This basic outline was recently reiterated (for if not still performed, these phases were at least still known) by informants during fieldwork in Owambo in December 1996. An important component of this research was the discussion of colonial photographs of efundula with informants. I am grateful to Natangwe Shapange and Nangula Amoonga for their research assistance, to Nepeti Nicanor for translation and transcription, and to the University of the Western Cape for research funds.
[23] Interview with Peyavali, Omatunda, 14.12.1996.
[24] It is inaccurate to conceive bridewealth in Owambo in the same terms as for example lobola elsewhere in southern Africa. Payment to the bride’s family did not exceed one ox and several hoes.
[25] Sean Hanretta’s account of
increased profile in religious spheres of Zulu women also problematizes the
assumption of militarization resulting in the masculinization of Zulu society
in the 1820s. Hanretta, ‘Women, marginality and the Zulu state.’
[26]
The key text on modern spectacle is Guy Debord, Society of the
Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red Press, 1977); on surveillance and the
panoptic machine see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of
the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1979). For a critical discussion of the
implications of, and differences between, these positions, see Martin Jay, Downcast
Eyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), chapter 7.
[27] Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), pp 63-69.
[28]
Maurice Bloch, From Blessing to Violence. History and ideology in the
circumcision ritual of the Merina of Madagascar (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), p 128.
[29] Public culture is a term that
encompasses acts of assembly, notions of audience, processes of viewing, as
well as the problems of cultural production and reception.