In this vein, one type of silence has to do with the fact that some important ways of structuring sexuality takes place through proceedings that are often performative rather than discursive. Commenting on Audrey Richard’s puzzled confusion when attending the Bemba chisungo ritual of female initiation in the 1930s, Henrietta Moore points out that:
[T]he fact that symbols are concretizised in the body in forms which have no direct linguistic referent accounts perhaps for Audrey Richard’s puzzlement about what the girls were learning and for her assertion that some of the meanings were obscure. The ambiguity of meaning associated with embodied experience is something which can only be incompletely copied in language (Moore 1999:13).
Moore also says that “[i]t is a mistake to underestimate the importance and power of embodied knowledge which does not require precise linguistic referents” (Moore 1999:12).
Beyond and connected to these areas of non-discursive social relationships there is also the issue of discretion. It is my impression from my work in northern Mozambique that what actually goes on in terms of extra-marital sexual relations, is one thing, but to talk about it is another. Discretion is important (cf. also Helle — Valle, this volume). As long as you do not talk about a certain extra-marital affair, nobody has to take action against it. For instance as recorded by Catholic priest Valente de Matos, who worked in northern Mozambique in the 1950s and 1960s, regarding Makhuwa female initiation rites: “The women have to give the impression in talk and gesture of being shy and modest women, especially when confronted with other men, so that nobody, and least of all their own husband, should consider them women of bad reputation. Afterwards, in a low voice and taking advantage of some distraction on the part of the men present, the conselheira [old woman master of the ritual] will add that, provided that they take the proper precautions, they may arrange a secret lover” (Matos 1968). The rules for decent wifely behaviour include rules for a decent love affair. Officially women’s monogamy is important, and extra-marital affairs do not exist as long as they are not spoken about. In my own work I met the importance of discretion in very explicitly, when during a session of young boys’ initiation rituals it was pointed out to them that “in case you see your mother in the bush making love to another man, you must not tell your father about it. You run the risk that he’ll kill your mother, in which case her death will be your fault.” The transgression in this case seems to be the discursive act rather than the sexual one: the one to blame is not the mother and not her lover, but the son who brought word to the father.
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Against this background it is difficult to see from where to take the clues for the construction of a language in which to talk about sexuality. In South Africa there has been, for the last few years, a push for opening up a debate on female and male sexualities, a debate which is not developed on the terrain of mainstream AIDS/‘African sexuality’ discourse, but which is struggling to find a voice reflecting female sexual agency, while at the same time resisting hegemonic male power (cf. Agenda no. 28, 1996). This is an uphill struggle. Of course the missionaries have not worked in vain; in South Africa too the Madonna/whore discourse is active. Local studies have found that “women are viewed and view themselves
‘African Sexuality’/Sexuality in Africa: Tales and Silences
as ‘slags’, ‘sluts’ or ‘loose’ if they are sexually active and take multiple partners, while men are congratulated for such behaviour. Such language also reproduces female sexuality as receptive, as a vessel to receive male sexuality [seeing women] as either pure (and asexual) or impure (and sexual)” (Shefer 2001:8; see also Machera, this volume). Generally, according to Tamara Shefer, “sexuality gets framed as a male domain, in which men control and set the terms, and to which women must be inducted and guided” (Shefer 2001:10). This is the well known theme of the male actor and the waiting virgin. But as Shefer also insistently points out: “there is a need for the development of discourses which challenge the negative construction of girls’/women’s sexuality and sexual desires, and put forward a positive acknowledgment of women as sexual agents” (Shefer 2001:14).
The aim of this chapter has been to help in making the development of such discourses possible, through the auxiliary tasks of de-stabilizing existing notions, venturing feminist readings and mapping silences, thus trying to clear a space, as it were, for alternative discourses.