Who Owns the Body? Indigenous African Discourses of the Body and Contemporary Sexual Rights Rhetoric

Abstract

The realisation of sexual rights remains a daunting challenge in most of sub-Saharan Africa despite the articulation of these rights in several international documents and national laws. In this paper, we highlight a possible but neglected reason why this is so. Current sexual rights declarations derive from the notion that the body, as a physical entity, belongs to the individual. However, our work in two southeastern Nigerian cultures, the Ngwa-Igbo and the Ubang, shows that there is at least one alternative view of the body, which constructs it as the property of the wider community, rather than that of the individual. In the two cultures in question, rights are embodied in the community, which also lays powerful claims on all its members, including the claim of body ownership. Individuals are thus more likely to seek and realise their rights within the communal space, rather than by standing alone. The assumption that individuals always hold the ultimate right to their bodies is problematic and may constrain the effectiveness of rights-based programmes and interventions in general, and of work around sexual rights in particular.

Résumé

Les droits sexuels demeurent difficiles à réaliser dans la plupart de l’Afrique subsaharienne, en dépit de leur inclusion dans plusieurs documents internationaux et législations nationales. Cet article donne une explication possible, mais négligée, de ce phénomène. Les déclarations actuelles sur les droits sexuels découlent de l’idée que le corps, comme entité physique, appartient à l’individu. Néanmoins, notre travail dans deux groupes du sud-est du Nigéria, les Ngwa-Igbo et les Ubang, montre qu’il y a au moins une autre conception du corps, considéré comme la propriété de l’ensemble de la communauté, plutôt que comme celle de l’individu. Dans ces deux cultures, les droits relèvent de la communauté, qui a aussi de fortes prétentions sur tous ses membres, y compris sur la propriété du corps. Les individus ont donc plus de probabilités de chercher à réaliser leurs droits dans l’espace communautaire que dans l’isolement. Le principe qui confère toujours à l’individu le droit final sur son corps est problématique et risque de limiter l’efficacité des programmes et des interventions fondés sur les droits en général, et en particulier du travail autour des droits sexuels.

Resumen

El cumplimiento de los derechos sexuales continúa siendo un reto de enormes proporciones en casi toda Ãfrica subsahariana, pese a la articulación de estos derechos en varios documentos internacionales y leyes nacionales. En este artículo se proporciona una razón posible pero olvidada del porqué. Las declaraciones de los derechos sexuales se basan en la noción de que el cuerpo, como entidad física, pertenece a la persona. Sin embargo, nuestro trabajo en dos culturas del sureste de Nigeria, Ngwa-Igbo y Ubang, muestra que existe por lo menos otra visión del cuerpo como propiedad de una comunidad más amplia, y no de la persona. En las dos culturas en cuestión, los derechos son parte de la comunidad, la cual exige mucho de todos sus miembros, incluso el derecho de propiedad sobre el cuerpo. Por tanto, es más probable que cada persona busque y haga realidad sus derechos dentro del espacio comunal, y no como ser independiente. La suposición de que toda persona tiene siempre derecho a su cuerpo es problemática y podría limitar la eficacia de las intervenciones y programas basados en derechos, en general, y obrar en torno a los derechos sexuales en particular.

Key Words:

• sexual rights
• bodily ownership
• indigenous body notions
• Nigeria

For over a decade now, the concept of rights has continued to receive attention as an integral component of sexual and reproductive health, holding great potential for improving related outcomes among vulnerable populations. More recently, however, the seemingly abstract, individualistic framings of sexual rights declarations have called their relevance for populations in sub-Saharan Africa into question, provoking an emerging body of conceptual work on how rights are understood and operationalised in African contexts.^1–3 Sub-Saharan Africa presents an intriguing site for the examination of rights. Despite the articulation of sexual rights in international law (and even national law in some cases – albeit to varying degrees), the actual realisation of sexual rights in many African cultures remains a daunting challenge.

While weaknesses in legal systems have contributed to this quandary, formally articulated rights alone do not account for the full spectrum of domains in which rights are framed in sub-Saharan Africa. As Crichton et al⁴ explain regarding the case of Kenya:

“Legal rights interact with customary and religious law and practice. Not all individuals are aware of their rights, or take action aimed at making them a reality. Finally, entitlements are also socially legitimated, and the social sphere, including families and communities, plays a role in either protecting individuals’ entitlements or violating them further. In sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, this is particularly true of issues that involve many social and cultural beliefs and practices, and are traditionally influenced and regulated by the social sphere, including sexual and reproductive health.”

Indeed, for the ultimate realisation of sexual rights, socio-cultural strengths can provide critical entry points for engaging meaningfully with communities. Building upon such strengths can be a powerful strategy for widening any extant openings for community engagement. This paper focuses on the social sphere in sub-Saharan African contexts, drawing primarily on ethnographic accounts from two societies in southeastern Nigeria to illuminate the opportunities and constraints presented by the socio-cultural domain for the realisation of sexual rights as framed in international documents and campaigns.

The paper argues that anchoring the notion of sexual rights on a particular conceptualisation of the body and body ownership is both limiting and problematic. International sexual rights declarations are constructed upon the assumption that the body is a physical entity belonging to the individual. This notion of the body is presumed to be adequate and universal, and has therefore been the basis of most campaigns and programmes around sexual and reproductive health-related issues – from abortion and family planning to sexual orientation and sexuality education. However, sexual rights initiatives guided by this individualistic world-view have typically met with little success in sub-Saharan Africa. Although there are a myriad of plausible reasons for these failures, a less explored dynamic has been the disconnect between international notions of the body and the local discourses and realities of the body that circulate in African cultures. This paper seeks to examine how rights are framed within local discourses of the body. A focus on how the body and cultural conceptualisations of rights are constructed indigenously seems to hold promise for the rigorous problematisation of sexual rights in various settings.

We are very much aware that recent literature on rights includes lively debates – many times generated by feminist activists and scholars – on the multi-sitedness of human rights. In the bulk of these writings,⁵⁶ various forms of individual and group rights have been stressed. The emerging emphasis on economic and social rights – e.g. the rights to safe water and sanitation; safe and effective contraception; accessible, good quality and caring obstetric, maternity and child health services – also derive from the recognition that the community presents an important entry point in the struggle for human rights.

Despite the important insights and leads offered by these studies, they still leave several critical gaps. First, they invariably depict the body of the individual as the ultimate and only measure of the achievement of all rights. Secondly, they tend to gloss over the cultural ideologies that construct and authorise social and group rights. Lastly, their focus is on rights as “things” that all individuals are entitled to by virtue of their membership in communities, without attention to how individuals and the rights they are entitled to are culturally constituted across communities.

Drawing on our research in two Nigerian cultures, this paper offers insights on the critical implications of the socio-cultural domain for sexual rights, particularly as currently articulated in international documents and campaigns.

A methodological note

The ideas and insights developed in this paper are based primarily on data emerging from our years of ethnographic work on matters ranging from gender, sexuality, health, language, personhood, marriage and belonging among the Ngwa-Igbo and the Ubang – two ethnically distinct groups in southeastern Nigeria. We are both members of the Igbo community, with the first author having conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Ngwa-Igbo, specifically, since 1996. The second author married into the Obudu community (of which Ubang is a part) in 1998 and has carried out ethnographic studies there since 2001. The Ngwa are an Igbo-speaking people who presently number about two million and are reportedly the single largest clan in southeastern Nigeria. Ubang is situated within the southwestern edge of Obudu local government area, also in the southeastern region of the country. This traditional, autonomous community is made up of three exogamous lineages, namely, Okiro, Ofambe and Okwerisen, which together number close to 4,000. In this paper, we draw on our work in these two cultures to show how the body is constructed and the implications of these constructions for pursuing the current sexual rights agenda.

Our fieldwork data were further complemented by information gathered through guided dialogues and informal conversational interviews⁷ with persons from other African societies as diverse as Kenya, Ghana, Chad, Zambia, Uganda, and Senegal and from reviewing published ethnographies of other African cultures. The information derived from these interviews and readings resonated clearly with our own observations among the Ngwa-Igbo and Ubang, suggesting the urgent need for deeper exploration, in other African cultures, of the issues we raise in this paper. Our intention, however, is neither to over-generalise about, nor homogenise, African cultures. Scholars have demonstrated that cultural meanings and ideologies of the body and its ownership vary both between and within cultures.⁸⁹ A rich body of research in Africa also supports the existence of a strong and very specific sense of the personal and private self as distinct from the community, suggesting that tensions and distinctions between these two spaces or levels of human reality may be pan-African.¹⁰ On the other hand, it is also the case that in many world cultures, the community – religious, ethnic, nation and, in many instances, the state – stakes powerful claims on the body of individuals, whether for purposes of protection, security, war or reproduction.¹¹

We aim not only to highlight indigenous cultures as spaces and sites where certain key rights are articulated and realised, but also to demonstrate how individualised approaches to sexual rights, and their parochial (western) origins, may be limited in what they offer some individuals. Our central objective is therefore to privilege alternative visions and ideologies of body ownership available in some cultures, calling attention to why such ideologies of the body deserve a much wider hearing in the context of sexual rights.

Constructions of the body

All human societies hold fundamental conceptualisations of the human body that underlie concepts of relatedness, rights, gender, growth and development and are performed through fields of action as diverse as healing therapies, etiquette, sexuality, hygiene, nourishment and funerary rites.¹² In many African settings, as in several other parts of the world, the body is largely symbolic.¹¹ It does not merely or primarily represent that which may be seen – meaning an individual’s personal, physical entity. Rather, it is an extension of many other phenomena that are central to the societies with which individuals are affiliated. The body, anthropologists argue, transcends its biological, anatomical, and physiological substrate. It is a medium of culture and the locus of the construction of sociality.¹³

Conklin’s study of cannibalism among the Wari’ of western Brazil shows that the practice has roots in notions of body ownership.¹⁴ She argues that the Wari’ see the body as a place where personality, community and individuality reside. When the Wari’ consumed the body of their enemies, with whom they did not trade, intermarry or have peaceful relations, it was an intentional and generalised expression of anger and disdain, not so much for the killed enemy as for the larger body and community to which the enemy was affiliated. An enemy’s body was thus largely a site where Wari’ revulsion and hatred for the body-social of the wider community of enemies was performed and realised. On the other hand, when the Wari’ consumed a member of their own group who died naturally, it was out of love, affection and respect for the dead person as well as for the Wari’ society at large. To the Wari’, the idea of leaving the body of a loved one to rot was repulsive and showed disdain for the deceased and the larger Wari’ society.

From the perspectives of the communities we have studied, the body is essentially a slate upon which the community inscribes a variety of norms, beliefs, rights, statuses, etc. Members of the communities also see themselves as “bodying forth” their communities. Indeed, they (community members) have little authority over their bodies, deferring instead to their respective communities. Framed in the context of culture, life among the Ubang and Ngwa is more strongly structured around communal roles and responsibilities, rather than the wishes of the individual. The day-to-day activities of individuals, families and communities are intertwined with cooperation and collective responsibility as the key values around which relationships are constructed. Individuals have the significant duty of sustaining and improving the life of their community, which in turn lays claim on them, owns them and assumes a duty to protect them. The idea of “duty” therefore tends to greatly overshadow that of the “right of privacy” in several African socio-cultural settings.¹⁵

The communitarian ethos of African human rights philosophies has also been extensively documented in the literature. Taking their lead from Dieterlen’s ground-breaking work,¹⁶ contemporary Africanists have debated the place of personhood, individuality, the self, human rights and self-identity in the community.^11,17,18 The debates have particularly probed whether individuals and their rights stand on their own, apart from the community, or the two are naturally embedded in social relations and a community. Or, as Ellen Corin puts it, whether societies always provide the bridgehead of personhood and rights for the individuals or individuals naturally have rights and can defend themselves from the “collectivizing pressure of the clanic image”.¹⁹ The common refrain running through this entire debate has been that in the bulk of African cultures, individuals reach their full stature only amidst the solidarity of their community. The community allows the individual to actualise him/herself without destroying his/her will. Individuals thus become persons with rights and privileges because their communities recognise them as such. As we will demonstrate using ethnographic accounts, this worldview and ideology has its impact on the manifestation and understanding of rights.

With a focus on sexual rights in particular, we turn first to a brief examination of body notions among the Ngwa Igbo and the Ubang. The implications of the notions of the body found in these cultures for sexual rights are subsequently articulated.

The body in Ngwa culture

The world-view of the Ngwa Igbo constructs the body as the property of the entire Ngwa society. Individuals, therefore, have limited control over the uses to which their bodies, and the bodies of others, are put. The Ngwa themselves say, “Ngwa nwe madu”, meaning the Ngwa society has ownership over its members. This communal ownership of the body plays out in a number of ways among the Ngwa, from attitudes toward crime, to religious practices, to marriage and funeral rites – indeed, it can be said to permeate the entire fabric of the Ngwa culture. This is partly the reason most Ngwa, perceiving any attempt to compel them into doing what they ordinarily would not do, are wont to exclaim: “Ngwa nwem ekwela!” (May the Ngwa, who own me, forbid!) However, in this section, we will limit our discussion to a few domains that highlight body notions in Ngwa culture.

One area where Ngwa notions of the body become very apparent is in the society’s practices surrounding incidents of rape. The Ngwa do not see this heinous act as a crime committed by one individual against another. Rather, it is perceived as a crime committed by one community or lineage against another community or lineage. The rapist’s community is viewed as having raped the victim’s community. The rapist’s entire community is also regarded as being at fault for not providing adequate training to their erring son to ensure that he manages his urges properly and abides by the laws of the land. In this instance, the notion of the “communal body” is privileged over the body and personhood of the victim. The body and personhood of the victim are important; however, the serious incident is regarded as having affected a larger body than that of the victim alone. The “communal body”, therefore, appears to take preeminence in this matter. The unobtrusive place occupied by the “individual body” vis-à-vis the “communal body” becomes more evident when it comes to the aftermath of the crime. Rape is regarded as an abominable act which desecrates the entire community. As a result, the rapist as an individual is not looked upon to compensate the victim; rather, his community is required to compensate that of the victim. The rape victim is not left without compensation, however. But her compensation is derived directly from the communities involved, usually taking the form of a piece of land or the supply of farm produce over a period of years, or the rapist may be required to relinquish his oil palm-harvesting rights – a major economic loss – to the rape victim for a period of years. In effect, the community serves as a channel for the realisation of the victim’s rights – rights which may be unattainable on her own. This whole process also involves elaborate rituals of appeasement through which both communities, the perpetrator and the rape victim are cleansed and restored.

In a similar vein, although violence against women exists among the Ngwa, their world-view does not necessarily support it. Our ethnographic work among the Ngwa indicates that, when the battery of a wife by her husband is adjudged as being frequent and “unwarranted”, the women within the community collectively rise up and retaliate on behalf of the victim by launching a physical assault against the abuser as a group. Furthermore, husbands who attempt to prevent their wives from partaking in the actions of the avenging women are seen by the society in a negative light. The Ngwa agree that battery inflicted by husbands is not committed against their wives, but against all women in that community. In other words, at a certain point of abuse, the community views itself as being the body that has been mistreated and thus takes collective action. This, therefore, suggests that the victim of domestic violence may not necessarily see herself as the victim of abuse, but rather may feel that a crime has been committed against her community as well. Thus, pursuing justice via existing channels, such as the formal legal system, may seem less effective or logical in the eyes of the abused woman than relying on her community for redress.

As a final example from the Ngwa Igbo, we will examine the issue of suicide within the Ngwa community. The act of suicide can be said to carry an insinuation that the body belongs to the individual concerned and that s/he is at liberty to decide what to do with it. Among the Ngwa, however, when an individual commits suicide,^* no Ngwa ideally has the right to touch the deceased’s body – not even for the sake of bringing it down from the noose. A stranger – an outsider from a different community – must be brought into Ngwaland and paid to bring the body down and bury it.^† The rationale is that the entire land of Ngwa has committed suicide; hence, there is no one left to “bring them down”. Following a suicide in Ngwaland, a complex set of rituals must be conducted in order to bring the community back to life, as it were. Community members do not attend the burial of the suicide, as they are all presumed to be deceased during this period. The burial is therefore handled by a non-Ngwa under the guidance of an Ngwa traditional priest.

Ubang body notions

Similar to the case of the Ngwa, the body among the Ubang peoples of Obudu is seen as belonging to the community. Drawing on insights from the marriage process in Ubang will help to clarify this notion of the body.

When a woman’s “body” is given out in marriage, it is made clear that only one right is being transferred to her in-laws: the reproductive right to affiliate the children borne out of this union with their patrilineage. Importantly, this right is given to the community of her in-laws, rather than to an individual man or husband. This right is pronounced via the following Obudu saying: “Unyelibe u ka atie a; u ka lishi ye.” This adage is translated to mean: “The married woman gives the ‘underneath’; she does not give the ‘head’.” Simply put, the rights to a married woman’s “underneath” (symbolising the sexual and reproductive organs and, therefore, the children borne within marriage^‡) belong not even to her husband, but to his community. The rights to her “head”, however (symbolising her own life) are retained by her own community, irrespective of her marital status. Her “head”, or life, belongs to her community, not to herself. Consequently, the Ubang claim that it is rare for an Ubang man to murder his wife is because he is informed unequivocally from the onset that the “body” given at marriage ultimately belongs to the community of his in-laws.

Furthermore, since a wife is given into the care of her husband’s community, having to explain her frequent illness, proneness to accident or untimely death to her community is considered as highly undesirable. A woman’s marital family accepts the fact that her body does not belong to them, and they take pains not to relate to her body in an incriminating manner. Families in which wives suffer mysterious or repeated illnesses or untimely deaths are known to lament: “After we give account of the ‘underneath’, how will we account for the head?” Offended in-laws, on the other hand, are said to warn: “All we gave you was the ‘underneath’ – we did not give you the head!” Thus, although custom demands that women marry outside their lineages, thereby becoming “wives”, their location as “daughters” remains pre-eminent. This is evident from the very term for “lineage daughter” in Ubang – nwang abe – which literally means “unmarried [female] child” or “spinster” and refers to all lineage daughters, young and old, married and unmarried, widowed or divorced.^* This framing of women as bebuang abe (plural of nwang abe) is evidence that they continue to be seen as belonging to their natal communities – not as individuals, but as community representatives whose rights must be protected by the communities from which they come, age and status notwithstanding. Authority over their bodies has not been relinquished to the bebuang abe themselves. Their bodies are constructed as belonging to the community, and the community still sees itself as the framework within which the rights of these individuals can be realised.

The conceptualisation of the body as a community entity is further illustrated by the rules governing death and burial in Ubang society. Among the Ubang, when a man is deathly ill and not expected to live due to the severity of the illness, his wife or wives typically play a limited role in his care. Ideally, he is nursed instead by his sisters – the daughters of his community, who are viewed as the owners of the body. While wives are never quite regarded as bona fide members of their marital communities, daughters are full-fledged community members and thus have the responsibility of conveying their brother’s body from the present world to the world of the ancestors, the presence of capable wives notwithstanding. The point here is that a husband’s body does not belong to his wife – it is a communal possession.

Also, among both the Ubang and the Ngwa, despite the existence of a will stating otherwise, in the event of a man’s death, his remains are brought back to his community, and the community decides where he will be buried. There have been dramatic occasions when bodies have been exhumed and re-buried simply because the community concerned was not properly consulted regarding burial proceedings. Furthermore, in Ngwaland, when a wife dies, she is usually buried in her marital home. However, if she was known to have been maltreated in marriage, her community demands her body and takes it back to her natal home for burial.

From the above examples, it is evident that there are alternative constructions of the body to those inherent in international human rights discourse, of which sexual rights are a part. Attempts to impose notions of rights that do not resonate are thus likely to meet with resistance in African societies, given that the majority of these notions aim at divorcing rights from their communal grounding in indigenous spheres.

Discussion

Because notions of the body are not necessarily universally shared, any attempt to operationalise international sexual rights declarations must begin with an understanding of how the population concerned conceptualises the body and body ownership. The examples we have shown here demonstrate that, for certain populations, individual rights cannot be expressed or fully achieved individually, suggesting that the philosophy of the body as a corporeal entity belonging solely to the individual does not resonate universally. In the two cultures in question, rights are embodied in the community, which also lays powerful claims on all its members, including the claim of body ownership. The individual is thus unable to pursue and realise all his/her rights by him/herself; rather, the community ascribes rights to the individual and confirms them. Accordingly, in our attempt to ensure the realisation of sexual rights, it is important to be cautious about uncritically assigning the body to the individual and wary about programmes that take a universal notion of the body and its ownership as their point of departure.

While factors such as colonialism, industrialisation, globalisation, western education and modern religions may have weakened indigenous Ngwa and Ubang cultures, the extent of this onslaught is contestable. Scholarship on social change in Nigeria (and particularly in southeastern Nigeria), continues to draw attention to the important phenomenon of cultural continuity. It is argued that although major changes and dislocations have occurred in the cultural practices and values that characterised indigenous Nigerian societies for millennia, several key aspects of these cultures persist.^17,20–22 In The Resilience of Igbo Culture, Dike aptly contends that several aspects of indigenous cultures in Nigeria, particularly the critical local cosmologies and world-views that structure and organise the relationships between people and their communities, continue to wax strong.²³ Many indigenous artistic, cultural and religious practices have also demonstrated their resilience. Similarly, Nwosu has suggested that despite irrefutable cultural change, the average Nigerian still retains the core essence of his/her indigenous cultural heritage, and indeed a strong sense of loyalty to this heritage, deep within his/her consciousness.²⁴ Moreover, as many studies have shown, Nigerians who live outside their native villages usually stay in touch with “home”. They regularly call, visit or write home for advice on a variety of issues, ranging from careers and marriage to children’s education, sickness and property, affirming their attachment and subordination to local cultural norms and values.

While rural–urban migration is an ongoing phenomenon in southeastern Nigeria, ceremonies around important life events (e.g. birth, marriage, death) are usually still situated in rural contexts, which are still often regarded as home, even by the migrant. Marriages, for instance, may not be regarded as valid unless traditional marriage ceremonies or processes take place in the rural home. Migrants’ remains, and even the umbilical cords of infants born into migrant families, are usually transported from foreign lands (as distant as Europe and North America) for burial in the rural home, re-affirming community ownership of the individual.

In the face of these realities, certain international sexual rights declarations may be difficult for prospective rights-holders to appropriate or relate to. The following rights, for example, were selected from a list of 11 sexual rights declarations adopted at the 14th World Congress of Sexology in 1999,²⁵ and labelled as “fundamental and universal human rights”:

“The right to sexual autonomy, sexual integrity, and safety of the sexual body This right involves the ability to make autonomous decisions about one’s sexual life within a context of one’s own personal and social ethics. It also encompasses control and enjoyment of our own bodies free from torture, mutilation and violence of any sort.”

“The right to sexual privacy This involves the right for individual decisions and behaviors about intimacy as long as they do not intrude on the sexual rights of others.”

“The right to make free and responsible reproductive choices This encompasses the right to decide whether or not to have children, the number and spacing of children, and the right to full access to the means of fertility regulation.”

The emphasis on the individual is inherent in these declarations; our argument is that it fails to take into account the realities of those affiliated with strongly community-oriented cultures,²⁶ thus privileging a particular world-view. In the Ngwa Igbo indigenous culture, for instance, there are regulations surrounding how, when, where and with whom sexual congress may hold.²⁷ This highlights the powerful role that community (as opposed to personal) ethics can play in the lives of individuals. Furthermore, in many African societies, community fertility desires have been known to inform or, indeed, to override the very notion of individual reproductive choice. In building sexual rights upon a one-sided premise, we do a disservice to prospective rights-holders, who are expected to realise their rights within framings that may be ill-suited to their realities.

We hasten to acknowledge here that several unanswered questions remain regarding issues such as the tense, multi-layered and sometimes contradictory position the individual and the body might occupy in indigenous world-views and cultures. Indeed, many individuals arguably operate or function as “multiple selves”, simultaneously adhering to community expectations and to individual desires, depending on their location at the time. We also note the possibility of differences in the character and quality of rights that local cultures and communities ascribe to the bodies of men versus women, adults versus young people, and so on. However, our aim, simply stated, has been to draw attention to the incompatibility between some African ideas and western discourses of the body and the implications of this tension for work on sexual rights in Africa.

While we are persuaded that rights are realisable, we recommend that a concerted effort be made to take into account how the individual’s rights are linked to the community and to understand how rights are communally expressed and articulated. In many African cultures, rights are embodied in the community and the community sees the individual as part of it. Given this reality, it is plausible that individuals will tend to seek their rights within the communal space, rather than standing alone. In such contexts, discourses that assume universality about constructions of the body are likely to foster a disconnect and meet with resistance or inertia.

Programs need to be sensitive to varying conceptualisations of the body in order to deliver the expected impact. More research is, however, needed on what kinds of programmes can be delivered to respond to these issues. An exciting starting point might be the examination of body and ownership notions in different societies to begin to reveal potential opportunities and to better understand the constraints.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the International Workshop on Gender and Sexuality, James P Grant School of Public Health, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 26–31 July 2007 and at the Ford Foundation sponsored 2007 Sexuality Institute, convened by the Population Council, Nairobi, and the Africa Regional Sexuality Resource Centre, Nigeria, 28 October–2 November 2007, Mombasa, Kenya. The paper benefited from the comments of participants at these meetings.

Notes

* The most common suicide method in this culture is by hanging.

† On the other hand, the Ngwa have no problem with handling the body of a non-Ngwa who commits suicide within the Ngwa community.

‡ Any children born out of wedlock are automatically absorbed by the woman’s patrilineage, becoming the children of her father. Of importance is the fact that these children are seen as belonging not to her, but to her natal community.

* This is also the case with Ngwaland, where the term nwa ada has the same meaning and refers to the same categories of women.