Narrating Rape: An Ethnographic Case-Study of Non-Consensual Sexual Debut in Tanzania

ABSTRACT

This article explores the issue of (female) sexual consent in a non-western context by examining narratives of the non-consensual sexual debut in Tanzania within the institutional and cultural tolerance for intimate violence, and the role of the state and media in condoning “proper” gender roles. None of the young women interviewed during a year of ethnographic fieldwork on a college campus were willing to identify this activity as “rape,” though they frequently detailed the ways that aspirations for “respectability” created conditions of vulnerability to ongoing exploitative sexual relationships with older men in positions of authority whom they once trusted. In the socio-sexual premarital landscape of school girls, sex is never given away for free, but may be dispensed with reasonable expectation of return. In an effort to contextualize sexual intimacy and avoid careless use of labels like “prostitution,” feminist public health researchers began to frame sexual encounters in transactional terms. Although not entirely unproblematic, the less stigmatizing terminology reveals more nuanced intimate economies among men and women which include structurally and culturally-derived elements of deprivation, agency, and instrumentality. This article pays careful attention to the narrative of one young women who describes a socio-sexual premarital landscape which almost universally positions male partners as culturally-empowered to proceed with aggressive, even violent, advances toward young women they wish to have sex with, “date,” or marry. Within this context, this article then teases out emerging discourses about structural conditions that reinforce violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescent
• cultural issues
• gender issues
• intimate partner violence
• school violence
• sexual assault

Acknowledgments

I am profoundly grateful to the university women who met with me, answered my questions, and allowed me a glimpse into their lives. Thanks, too, to the editors of this volume for their important work and to two anonymous reviewers who took the time to offer suggestions on how to improve this paper. I would like to thank my colleagues at Mzumbe University for their generosity during my sabbatical year there. Asante sana to Namwaka Lyamba and Beatrice Benjamini Saï for research assistance. As always, I extend great love to my daughter, who accompanied me in the field.

Notes

¹ All names and some identifying details have been changed to disguise the identities of those who shared their stories with me.

² African cultural contexts differ widely. Within Tanzania, there are immense cultural difference between perspectives on sending girls to school. The Chagga, for example, are noted for their belief in girls’ education (Stambach, 2000) while among the Kisongo Maasai, wives and children are grouped into the same category (Hodgson, 1999).

³ It really cannot be overstated that Africa is not a monolith, and neither is African religion. Twenty-five of the thirty women I interviewed identified as Christian; the remaining five women were Muslim. They all actively attended church or the mosque.

⁴ While rape in the United States has been framed as an act of violence since the 1970s, it is interesting to note that western laws once treated rape as a property crime against a father/husband, rather than as a sexual crime against the woman herself (Ortner, 1978).