Davies (1987:102) argues that the male-female reversal served as a visual and pos­sibly psychological contrast between girlhood and adult (married) womanhood where the sanctioned period of liberty was complementary to the “serious and re­sponsible” position of women in marriage. It then was first and foremost a stage of liminality, where the young women stripped off […]

In the postcolonial society, representations of efundula continue to play a major part in the Owambo, and beyond in the national Namibian, cultural discourse. This final section of the chapter revisits the silences around women’s initiation that I encountered in the mid-1990s. It then engages with the increasingly public presence of efundula over the past […]

opportunity of obtaining training in professions such as nursing which allowed them to develop new perspectives within a changing society (Becker, 1995:105). Altered gendered sexualities played themselves out in different ways in the Owambo communities. The growing attraction to Christianity as a cultural strat­egy to claim modernity did not necessarily mean that people abandoned older […]

There is no doubt that the cultural discourse and practice of gender and sexuality in Owambo were shifting through the impact of Christianity. Earlier, the initiation was central to the definition of female identity. It legitimatised women’s adult­hood, sexuality and fertility. A long process of preparation for womanhood which had begun during early girlhood, culminated […]

For the most part, the missionaries posed as saviours of African women whom they imagined as downtrodden ‘beasts of burden’, trapped in the sinful darkness of the continent. However, the Christian discourse on gender and sex­uality was far from unitary. From the early years of the Rhenish Lutherans’ work in Oukwanyama their views on Owambo […]

Native Commissioner C. H.L. Hahn’s written and visual ethnographic narra­tives of initiation pertained crucially to the discursive reconstruction of a patriar­chal and hierarchical Owambo ‘tradition’. Hahn loved to attend and take pictures at the ceremonies. In the event, residents occasionally had to reschedule or repeat their efundula dances to coincide with his visits.[27] Hahn’s photography […]

Megan Vaughan (1991:130) reminds us that in the colonial state’s dominant dis­course on African sexuality, women’s sexuality was to be contained by means of social control and order, represented by African men in the name of ‘tradition’. She argues that the containment of women’s sexuality was regarded as one meas­ure of the effectiveness of an […]

Efundula, ohango or olufuko became fiercely contested when women’s mobility and sexuality evolved into major issues in the altercations between the male triad of missions, colonial administration and Owambo authority. A battle over patriar­chal control of women marked the early decades of colonialism in Ovamboland[25]. In northern Namibia, as elsewhere in the colonial world, struggles […]

tain ritual ‘tests’ that the member of the younger generation had to pass.[22] While the ethnographic silence about female ritual leaders may be partly due to the co­lonial omission and outright non-recognition of women, who were regarded as an anomaly in any positions of power, it may also be more in line with an overly […]

applies to the written and visual ethnographic oeuvre of the native commissioner cum self-styled ethnographic authority C. H.L. (‘Cocky’) Hahn.[20] The colonial era ethnographies are typified by their stasis in space and time. Most published sources only depict the eastern Owambo communities of Ouk — wanyama and Ondonga, in spite of their authors’ claims that […]