1995:246). Thus in McClintock’s reading the subtext regarding Gagool is “a nar­rative disciplining of female reproductive power” (McClintock 1995:246). King Solomon’s Mines, like others of Haggard’s novels, is fiction written for boys and men. It is dedicated, on the front page “to all the big and little boys that read it”. As a girl I […]

Rider Haggard’s imperialist fiction was often staged in Africa where Haggard as a very young man, from 19 to 25 years of age, had been first a civil servant (as jun­ior secretary to the Governor of Natal, South Africa) and later tried his hand at ostrich farming (Stiebel 2001:21 ff). Back in England Haggard “divided […]

Both of the two old ‘tales’ I have selected for discussion have been analysed be­fore for what they reveal regarding the complicated relationships of power and identity as entangled with male sexual anxieties and desires, all connected to the colonizing enterprise and to the ways in which it was conceived. The reason for taking them […]

19th and early 20th centuries, the times when hierarchies of ‘race’ were facts of science. This makes one speculate regarding what passes as ‘science’ today. It also means that you cannot just jump into talking and thinking about sex in Africa. The conceptual terrain is carved and cut in all sorts of often invisible ways; […]

Signe Arnfred Introduction This chapter is an intermediate outcome of an ongoing effort to think sexualities in contexts of gender in Africa. I have called it ‘tales and silences’ a) because in the field of ‘African sexuality’ there seems to be an abundance of re-circulated ide­as and conceptions, which on closer scrutiny tell more about […]

While there has been the odd suggestion about staging omafundula as a tourist attraction, (cf. Fairweather 2001:223) initiation ceremonies on the whole appear to have survived and enjoy a modest revival as living culture, not merely as heritage in performance. The 1996 TV programme showed pupils from a local primary school who attended the event […]

This last section draws on very recent developments in Owambo, and the wider postcolonial Namibian society, where beginning in the mid-1990s disputes over the values that pull the national and local community together have increasingly embraced notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’. The production and prime-time screening of a documentary on efundula (Carstens 1996) exemplified this […]

versity of Namibia were commissioned to study (male and female) initiation in the mid-1990s, word quickly made the rounds that they were researching ‘female gen­ital mutilation’(FGM). The local Namibian variant is framed by an international gender-and-develop — ment discourse and a concomitant school of thought in feminist Africanist re­search. With its stress on the perceived […]

scale premarital pregnancies of young women (‘teenage pregnancies’) and AIDS. The social significance of efundula in regulating female sexuality and fertility, which, as informants in Owambo have suggested, need more attention in re­search and education, has certainly not been recognised by the Christian church­es. Instead, the Lutheran church particularly persists in its policy that young […]

“In our tradition we are very Christian”. This commonly-heard statement exem­plifies the cultural identity of many Owambo in the postcolonial era. In Owambo, where the proportion of practising Christians is estimated at about 90 per cent, Christianity has largely succeeded in restructuring people’s conceptual universe in important respects, including the social, cultural and political representations […]