Ku Mpanga

(written 4 April 2012)

"I'm feeling..." I struggled to find the right words as Claire and I walked along the path to my house.  "I'm feeling a lot of things."
Claire is an RPCV (Returned Peace Corps Volunteer) who was here from 2008-2010, also an education volunteer in Northern Province.  Now earning a Master's degree in development sociology from a university in Amsterdam, she was back in Zambia for a few months, doing research on the Peace Corps and the communities that host volunteers.  While visiting my site, she asked me if I had been to a girls' initiation ceremony yet, and then asked a woman in the village to invite me to one.  The very next day, we were preparing to leave school when the woman told us to follow her.  Off we went, ku mpanga--into the woods.

As we stood on the perimeter, watching, Claire told me quietly, "The first one I went to was with another volunteer, and we were like, 'This is some National Geographic shit!'"  I nodded in agreement.  We were in the woods with a handful of teenage girls I recognized from school and some women from the community, but it felt as though we were in another place, another time.  The four girls undergoing the ceremony were unclothed except for a large piece of fabric wrapped around their waist and between their legs, almost as a large diaper.  We had missed part of the ceremony, but Claire explained that the dirt caked in a thin layer on their torsos was from a ritual in which they crawled and slid on the ground like snakes.  All of the rituals, it seemed, were metaphors for something in nature, or for emotions.  All were accompanied by drumming and/or singing, though I couldn't make out the words.  Some were instructional, such as the dance where girls pantomimed washing out the fabric they would use to manage their menstrual flows.  Many had an implied or even overt sexual context, requiring the girls to contort their bodies in unusual ways.  (One that sticks out had the girls in a bridge position, bending their head all the way backward to pick up small twigs from the ground, using only their teeth, and deposit them a few centimeters away.)

There were four girls undergoing the initiation, and four girls, clothed and presumably slightly older, clearly having undergone the initiation sometime previously, leading their peers.  A cluster of women, including the BanaCimbusa, who is in charge of such ceremonies in the village, formed a loose circle around them, singing, laughing, and occasionally arguing about how a certain ritual should be performed.  Sometimes they, too, participated as well.

"Some of the things we saw feel very--not O.K. to me," I told Claire afterward, "on a visceral level."  One ritual involved each girl fighting an initiator for a small twig, squat-hopping to a background of music while trying to wrestle the stick out of the other's grasp.  I can still see in my mind the tears that glistened in one's eyes as she fought, the aggression building inside her as she writhed and wrestled, bare-footed and mostly bare-skinned, struggling with all her might. In another exercise, the girls were slapped lightly on their faces and breasts.  Zambia women stretch their labia, and in a moment rife with embarrassment, each girl had to remove her waistcloth enough to show the assembly her progress in this endeavour.  Claire and I stayed on the periphery for that revealing.  The whole lot of dances and tasks had to be at least somewhat uncomfortable; the girls' bodies were scratched and dirty before they were through.  (We were, after all, in the woods; the only carpet beneath our feet was a rough one of grass, weeds, and other natural debris.)  And while the spectators and leaders were having a good time, I'm not sure the girls found the experience particularly pleasant.

I've never found the idea of initiation particularly appealing, especially when it involves intimidation, violence, embarrassment, or sexual elements.  I've never, to my recollection, initiated anyone, and my only experience as initiatee was in my senior year of college, when I was inducted in as part of the school newspaper's photography staff.  As I was on crutches at the time, I was graciously excused from the photo scavenger hunt that comprised half of the initiation process, and the other half was filled with silly activities and ceremony steeped in tradition.  My general philosophy has always been that people should be welcomed, guided, taught when entering a new role or group, rather than abused or humiliated merely as a forum for them to prove they can hack it.

I found myself surprised, though, at how intrigued I felt by the overall process.  Sure, parts of it went against what I felt the girls needed to know and be shown; isn't allowing them to realize their womanhood by being slapped just setting them up for a lifetime of tolerating domestic abuse?  And Claire said she once asked girls, "Is it confusing for you when the mothers in the village take you in the woods and essentially teach you how to have sex, then scold you when you become pregnant?" and the girls had responded that yes, it was confusing.  So while the rituals sent some mixed messages and some messages I don't agree with, I also realized that this gathering was the most empowered I had seen any women since coming to my village nearly a year ago.  Suddenly I realized that while I wrack my brains trying to figure out how to get 15-year-old girls (whose academic performance is generally far below the boys', whose is also quite low) to understand how to solve for x in math class, their minds are filled with thoughts and experiences I can't even fathom.

"I'm just trying to figure out how to describe what we just experienced," I said as we neared my house in the last light of dusk, "and the only words that come close are 'raw,' 'primal.'"

"But you know those words have very negative connotations," Claire warned me.

"I know, but I don't mean them negatively.  People at home won't get it, though; trying to describe this will just feed into the stereotypes and misconceptions of Africa that so many Americans have."

So I know, and yet I have tried.  Because being there, ku mpanga--in the forest--which seems the best title I can find for the whole event--was one of the most fascinating experiences I've had in this country.  There's so much I want girls to know about the world they are growing up in, and their role and rights in it.  But at the same time, it was amazing to be part of a ceremony, a ritual of womanhood, that was likely done hundreds of years ago in a similar fashion.  Parts of me wish that I, too, had had a rite of passage into womanhood--something to acknowledge the period of transition from child to adult.  Yes, encouragement and guidance must be there, but maybe it's not all bad to summon a range of emotions--rage, arousal, vulnerability--as part of a challenge, an experience that leaves its participants with a few battle wounds but a hard-won sense of endurance and achievement.  Isn't it good, perhaps, to connect--in a supported way--with the parts of us that are primal, that have existed always, and that transcend geography and culture?  Ancestral sex instruction must be accompanied (especially in a country with an HIV prevalence rate as high as Zambia's) by modern sex education, including thorough coverage of condoms and contraceptives.  (Religions can teach as they wish, but governments and communities themselves, I believe, have a responsibility to help prevent the spread of disease and unwanted pregnancies.)  The way to make this change is not necessarily by banishing the old, but by using it as a forum to incorporate the new.

These women were together, alone, away from the men that dominate their culture and country.  A small boy came in search of one of the women involved, and was allowed to stay, seated a fair distance away, as long as he kept a citenge covering his head for the entire duration.  Being able to be there for this sense of private community was incredible.  I was allowed entrance into a secret club, I felt, and while Claire and I were happy to take our leave after following the procession back to a house where elderly women waited and the girls entered to continue the initiation process, I can't imagine a better way to have spent two hours of the late afternoon.  Thereafter, I looked at the girls I had seen there in the forest with more respect, more admiration, more appreciation for the strength they have and the women they are becoming.