Change and Chisungu in Zambia's Time of AIDS

ABSTRACT

Through an examination of amafunde – a Bemba word meaning ‘instruction’, which refers to the training given to a young woman before her marriage – this article explores the social changes that have followed widespread HIV infection on the Zambian Copperbelt. Amafunde today are marked by openness between senior women and those they train for marriage, an openness that they encourage their charges to adopt in married life. This emphasis on direct or ‘straight’ speech stands in stark contrast to earlier accounts of female initiation in Zambia, which highlight ‘obscure’ modes of communication. An analysis of this change reveals the increased importance of both secrecy and disclosure in Zambia's time of AIDS, as well as the influence of Pentecostal Christianity. Most importantly, it indexes changes in the social forms that the interplay of secrecy and disclosure has traditionally produced.

KEYWORDS:

• Female initiation
• social organization
• Pentecostalism
• HIV/AIDS
• Zambia

Acknowledgements

The earliest ideas for this article were developed in a conversation with Katherine Miller. A version of this argument was presented at a workshop on “Biographies in Times of Crisis: Exploring Religious Narratives of AIDS in Africa and the African Diaspora,” held at the University of Groningen on 13–15 December 2012. Thanks to the workshop participants for their helpful engagement with the paper. Lyn Schumaker, Jean la Fontaine, Barbara Bompani, Linda van de Kamp, and Alice Street provided helpful feedback on subsequent drafts. The ultimate argument of this article was strengthened by comments from two anonymous reviewers for Ethnos, as well as editorial help from Mark Graham. As always, any shortcomings are my own.

Funding

My fieldwork was funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant; the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland; the Moray Endowment Fund at the University of Edinburgh; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant; the Friends of the International Center; and the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Thanks to each of these organizations for their invaluable support.

Notes

1. The name of this township and the names of all individual informants are pseudonyms.

2. In Bemba the ‘ch’ sound, as in ‘church’ is usually written with only the letter ‘c’. However, Richards used the spelling, ‘chisungu’ rather than ‘cisungu’. For the sake of consistency, I follow her example.

3. While Bemba custom was a central part of the amafunde I observed, ethnicity more generally also informed the rite. The women who trained Gift drew on their own ethnic backgrounds to support their points or on those of others (including myself) to illustrate what one ought and ought not to do in marriage. For example, Gift was told that white couples (basungu) spend a year on a ‘honeymoon’ to make their marriages strong; in a similar pattern, she and her husband should not bring any relatives to live with them (a practice common throughout Zambia) for the first year of their marriage.

4. Women on the Copperbelt today are typically trained both according to their own ethnic backgrounds and those of their future husbands; however, should there be a difference between the two those in charge of the training generally defer to the husband's side.

5. The chisungu that Richards records took place near the geographic centre of the Bemba paramount chief's power, and it must be remembered that the rise of the paramount chiefs brought about significant changes to Bemba religion. Despite these changes, however, those initiations that took place after the establishment of the paramount chieftaincy through the colonial period and onward, still reflect the historical religious importance of women (Hinfelaar 1994).

6. A similar pattern obtains in the controversial practice of ‘virginity testing’ in South Africa, which, as Scorgie (2002) has shown, produces cohorts of senior and junior women through ritual practice.

7. The feminine prefix ‘na’, which we have already encountered in the term ‘nacimbusa’, carries more respect in the plural or formal Bana, and it is more commonly used in this form on the Copperbelt, particularly when employed by young, single women such as myself. ‘Bana’ can be used as a Bemba translation of ‘Mrs.’, or, as in the case of Bana Ilunga, to denote a teknonym. Some women on the Copperbelt use the English ‘Mrs.’ instead, a preference that Rasing (2002:93) connects to the prestige associated with marriages that are licensed in court, and not just accomplished through traditional means.

8. In the light of the clear emphasis on pleasure in the literature on sexuality in both Zambia and other parts of Africa (Rasing 2002; Spronk 2005), I realize now that I ought not to have been surprised that this had such a central role to play in Gift's amafunde.

9. Proverbs 14: 1.

10. Epstein reports that these perceptions were inaccurate by the time of his fieldwork in the 1950s, and that he observed that Copperbelt young people would speak openly about sex in the presence of their elders (Epstein 1981:83). However, in the light of the wider context of Epstein's argument, we might well question how far his observations reached. First, Epstein situates his remarks on the lack of discretion about sex in a study of traditional courts, a space where public testimony is expected and required. Second, his observations are made within a broader discussion of what his informants believed to be a decline in morality, neatly summed up as a lack of mucinshi, or ‘respect’. While some of my informants would be inclined to agree with Epstein's informants here – they too felt that the Copperbelt lacked a moral compass – Gift's amafunde were undertaken in direct opposition to this perceived trend. In other words, Gift's amafunde were concerned with maintaining traditional forms of respect, and particularly with protecting the details of her marriage with a barrier of discretion.

11. It is probably more appropriate to translate intambi as ‘tradition’, rather than ‘culture’, though the word carries connotations of both. In either case, intambi refers to the past, to things that have been handed down from one's ancestors.

12. While the national HIV infection rate for Zambia is, according to UNAIDS, 12.5%, the seventh highest in the world, the virus is more prevalent in urban areas like the Copperbelt, where the infection rate is 17%. Broken down by sex, the rate is 22% for women and 12% for men.

13. I thank an anonymous reviewer at Ethnos for pointing out this aspect of secrecy.

14. While this remark reflects Bana Sinkala's worry that ARV treatment might conceal HIV infection, others in Zambia have expressed concern that these medicines will reveal their HIV status, for example, through weight gain (see Schumaker & Bond 2008:2131).

15. I thank Barbara Bompani for this point.