Bananas, Babies, and Women Who Buy Their Graves: Matrifocal Values in a Patrilineal Tanzanian Society

Bananas, Babies, and Women Who Buy Their Graves: Matrifocal Values in a PatrilinealTanzanian SocietyAuthor(s): Lesley StevensSource: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol.29, No. 3 (1995), pp. 454-480Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/486018 .

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Bananas, Babies, and Women Who Buy Their Graves: Matrifocal Values in a Patrilineal Tanzanian Society

Lesley Stevens

Re'sumg

Cet article examine quelques manifestations des valeurs matrifocales dans une socidte patrilineaire, celles des Haya du nord-ouest de Tanzanie. Dans la premiere partie, I'article presente une description et une analyse de la performance et la symbolique d'un rituel post-natal pour femmes mariees et sages-femmes, axe sur la theme de la frcondite des femmes et des bananiers. Il retrace des liens complexes entre ce rituel traditionnel et la position historique et contemporaine de la femme Haya. La deuxieme partie de l'article resume une autre ligne de recherche: sur les femmes Haya qui font de la prostitution en ville, et qui retournent au village pour acheter un terrain et y vivre inddpendamment des hommes, comme fermidres, femmes d'affaires et chefs de familles monoparentales. L'article conclut en

suggerant que, dans les deux champs de recherches (aupres des femmes mariees et aupras des femmes qui suivent un chemin moins traditionnel) il y a 6vidence des valeurs matrifocales, bien que la societd Haya (et surtout sa loi coutumidre) reste strictement patrilineaire.

Introduction This article had its genesis in the eventual convergence of two separate and apparently disparate observations made in the course of research on the society and culture of the Haya people of Northwest Tanzania. First, the only surviving intact Haya traditional ritual is a women's post-natal ritual, cele- brating (married) fertility (Stevens I991). Second, independent women (separated, divorced, or widowed, and sometimes returned prostitutes) head a significant minority of village Haya households, and some are landowners (Smith and Stevens 1988). Indeed, these two phenomena do seem to be disparate. One might assume that the ritual and its symbolism reflect an older, perhaps pre-colonial, cultural matrix and serve to reinforce patrilineal marriage structures. The phenomena of divorce, prostitution, and female household heads might, on the other hand, appear to reflect social change and represent the breakdown of traditional patrilineal values and structures of marriage and land inheritance.

454



455 Stevens: Matrifocal Values in a Patrilineal Tanzanian Society

Much of the literature on Haya society and culture stresses its strictly patrilineal character, its commitment to patrilocality, and (implicitly) its overall patrifocal orientation (Cory and Hartnoll 1945; Reining 1967; Swantz 1985; Weiss 1993). My own research and (admittedly limited) field contact with Haya women has led me to conclude that the picture is more nuanced: when both women's ritual symbolism and their economic and marital stra- tegies are examined from the perspective of the women themselves, the matrifocal qualities of Haya society and culture are evident.

The work of two scholars has had a catalyzing effect for this project of locating and identifying the matrifocal elements in Haya society and culture. First, Wendy James (1978) argues that matrifocal ideas are present even in "notoriously patrilineal societies," but are obscured by a scholarly overemphasis on jural structures. Second, Ifi Amadiume in her study of the Igbo women of Nnobi, Southeast Nigeria further contends that "descent system has little to do with women and power" (1987, 19o). While it must be acknowledged that Amadiume is highly critical of Western (and feminist) scholarship on African women, she does provide a model for any researcher seeking to identify evidence of female power in an African society. '

The following account of Haya post-natal rituals and the phenomena of divorce, prostitution, and female household heads does not claim to have captured a unitary indigenous gender ideology. It merely identifies and inter- prets elements of the culture which, from a social-structural perspective, might be judged marginal and inconsequential, but which this Western observer believes express matrifocal values. The first section reviews the ethnography of the post-natal "Endilalila" rituals and updates it with data from present-day informants. The discussion then turns to the ritual symbolism in the context of the debate about nature, culture, and gender (Ortner 1974; MacCormack and Strathern I981). My interpretation of "Endilalila" focuses on the central role of the banana tree, arguing that Haya fertility symbolism involves continuity between nature and culture and symmetry and complementarity between the genders. The second section examines women's options and their agency in choosing alternatives within the system of marriage and land tenure. These options, the agency and motivating values of the women, and their acceptance at village level are all expressions of the same matrifocal values that I have identified in the post-natal rituals.

The Ethnography of Endilalila, Past and Present2 The Haya people are Interlacustrine Bantu, living in Northwest Tanzania, west of Lake Victoria in the district known in the colonial period as Bukoba and now called the Kagera Region. They share many cultural characteristics with such neighbouring peoples as the Banyoro and Baganda, who had social and political systems based on kingship and an aristocracy (Map I).



456 CJAS / RCEA 29:3 1995

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According to their customary law, codified in the I940os by government sociologist Hans Cory (Cory and Hartnoll 1945), they are strictly patrilineal (especially in land inheritance) and virilocal; they also still practice clan exo- gamy. Although the traditional aristocratic ruling clans (Bahinda) are believed to be descended from northern, cattle-owning pastoralists, the majority of Haya have, in fact, been settled peasant agriculturalists for many centuries, practicing a very intensive form of horticulture and producing the staple, plantain banana, on small holdings (one to two acres on average). The Haya (like the Baganda) have been very Christianized, with an intensive missionary presence, both Catholic and Protestant (mainly Lutheran); few people have an open allegiance to traditional religion.

The following account of Haya birth (or more specifically, post-natal rituals) is drawn from both documentary sources and interviews with village informants describing present-day practice. The earliest account is by Pere Edmond Cesard (1935, 1936), a White Father who published a series of articles on the Haya in the journal Anthropos from I1927 to 1936. Two further field accounts of birth customs were published in the 195os by a Swed- ish medical officer (Moller 1958) and an agricultural officer (Rwiza 1958). These were the principal sources for a summary account by Marja-Liisa Swantz (1966), which compared women's life cycle rituals in nine Tanzanian ethnic groups.

The descriptions of current practice are derived from two sets of interviews carried out by Haya research assistants in 1987 and 1993. In 1987, six elderly village midwives (aged sixty-five to eighty-seven years) were interviewed by a local resident, a male employee of the Tanzanian Ministry of Culture. In the fall of 1993, two younger practicing midwives and five of their clients were interviewed by a female assistant, a former resident of the area, who also attended a performance of the ritual at the home of one of the interviewees. 3

The various accounts of the Endilalila rituals that I bring together vary in detail; however, a single, symbolic item ties the accounts together: the banana tree. It is impossible to spend any time in a Haya village without being struck by the omnipresence (and cultural importance) of the plantain banana. Every Haya homestead consists of a house with a forecourt of swept earth, but surrounded on every other side by a plantation (kibanja), thickly planted with banana trees, whose mature leaves form a thick barrier, both to the sky and to neighbouring homesteads.

THE BANANA TREE

CUsard (1936, 97), in his account of Haya banana cultivation, referred to "Le bananier, qui, semble-t-il, fait corps avec le Muhaya, A tel point qu'il ne sau- rait exister sans lui." 4 Elsewhere, Cesard, who never hesitated before an



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opportunity to mix metaphors, referred to the banana tree as the "soul" of the Haya. But, as Cesard himself recognized, the "mystical" significance of the banana could not be separated from the fact of its centrality in material life. The plantain banana was the staple food (the Luhaya word, ebitoke, means both "cooked plantain" and "food"). The fruit also provides the staple drink, banana beer (rubisi); the leaves provide shelter, plates, drinking vessels, umbrellas, storage containers for crops such as beans, and gift wrapping; fibres provide tying material for building and cutting instruments; and the trunk is a water reservoir. The banana tree and its constituent parts and by-products are a pervasive part of Haya material life in the present, as they were in the past (although certain uses of the plant, for example, the manu- facture of clothing, have disappeared). In addition, as noted above, the tree, its life cycle, and its reproductive parts have a central role in Haya post-natal ritual symbolism.

The plantain banana tree (Figure I) has a distinctive life cycle that is played out constantly before the eyes of Haya householders. New trees come from shoots (byana) on the trunk, which are replanted in holes filled with fertilizing vegetable and animal manure. These shoots take about one year to mature. As the tree matures, a hermaphroditic flower emerges at the top. The fruit forms inside an endilalila, consisting of tightly wrapped sheaths called ekikankabana. As the bunch of bananas matures and emerges from the protective sheaths (which fall off), its weight pulls it downwards. At the tip of the bunch is an unmatured endilalila pointing to the ground. Older trees are often hacked down, leaving only about one metre of trunk standing. This then rots, and along with the felled top parts, becomes fertilizer for a new generation of replanted shoots.

The banana tree has symbolic significance for more than one African society, rooted in a parallel between human and tree life cycles. Wyatt MacGaf- fey (1986, 130), in a study of Kongo symbolism, notes:

Throughout Central Africa, the banana stands for the reproductive capacity of mankind and also for its transitory life and, hence, for the cycle of generations. Unlike other trees it grows to maturity in nine months and dies. Its phallic flower and generous fruit unite male and female qualities. A Kimpasi oath says nguti bizeke, or "may I give birth like the banana tree." ... The new shoot of a banana is synonymous with offspring or a woman capable of renewing the lineage; its dead trunk is a cadaver. 5

In fact, as Cesard specifies, the banana flower is hermaphroditic, and both flower and fruit offer a panoply of possible meanings, not so easily summed up in terms of phallic flower and female fruit. The mature fruit, once free of its protective sheaths, has obvious potential as a phallic symbol. But the endilalila, described by informants as basin or heart-shaped, could also be



460 CJAS / RCEA 29:3 1995

Figure 2

described as uterine, its sheaths which tightly wrap the maturing fruit resembling uterine muscle protecting an unborn child. It also resembles a traditional (Haya forged) women's hoe or nfuka (Figure 2). Such a hoe is an obligatory gift from the groom to the mother of a bride; it is then called nfuka yebiboyo or "hoe of anger," the name indicating that it symbolizes the loss of a daughter as co-farmer.

The fact that the fruit within the final endilalila never matures might also be poignantly suggestive of the range of reproductive losses that women face: miscarriage, stillbirth, infant death. In short, the reproductive appara- tus of the banana tree is a rich source of multivalent symbolism in which human and tree, and male and female fertility, are merged; the life cycle of the tree, from newborn shoots to maturing fruit to death and transformation into rotting fertilizer for a new generation, also has parallels to the human life cycle. It remains to explore what role this symbolism has in the Endi- lalila rituals.

THE ENDILALILA POST-NATAL RITUALS

The post-natal rituals take place at the patrilineal homestead, supervised by the husband's mother and the midwife, and are performed within the first week after birth. They have the classic structure of rites of passage, with rites of separation, transition, and incorporation, and in each, the banana is symbolically important.

Separation: Mother and child are secluded in the hut or house from birth until the umbilical cord stump falls off (a process which is hastened by apply- ing an herbal medicine called akakugwa). The separation of the cord is called okwangana, the same word which is used for marital separation initiated by the wife. The remnant of the cord is kept inside the house; in the past, it was




buried under the marital bed (C6sard 1936, 829) and is still kept near the bed (Ngaiza 1993). According to K. Rwiza (1958, 104), the mother was expected to present the cord to the biological father, with the threat of danger to the child if she did not. 6

During the seclusion period, before the mother's milk comes in, the newborn is fed water, banana juice, or herbal mixtures from an ekikankabana (one of the sheaths from the endilalila, picked by the midwife or mother-in-law). Here, the part of the banana which protects the immature fruit is used to protect the newborn child. The child's initial separation from the womb is thus marked by a human-tree parallel and initiation into the use of banana sheaths as drinking vessels.

Burial of the placenta is another post-natal ritual action which involves the banana tree and connotes both separation from the womb and incorporation into Haya society. Cesard (1936, 829) reports that (in the era of dirt floors) the placenta was conserved and buried under the marital bed with the cord. However, Rwiza (1958), M.S.G. Moller (1958), and Swantz (1966) all agree that the placenta is buried in the kibania. Present-day informants con- firm this, describing the burial of the placenta shortly after the birth by either the father, mother-in-law, or midwife (the accounts vary) at the foot of an eating banana (nchoncho) for a girl and a beer banana (ntundu) for a boy. According to one informant, the verb used for this action is "to plant," and the placenta is sometimes placed inside the hollow of the tree trunk, so that the trunk is like a "coffin" or "tomb." The placenta, traditionally viewed as the brother or twin of the newborn (Moller 1958, 114), is embraced by the tree and forms the basis for an identification of each Haya person with a par- ticular tree. Numerous accounts of the Haya (Reining 1967; Weiss 1993) stress the desire of many adult Haya to be buried in proximity to this place, in a final rite completing the identification with the tree and the land, which was begun at birth.

Transition and Incorporation: The central action of the post-natal Endilalila rituals occurs at the end of the period of seclusion, marked by the separation of the umbilical cord stump (okwangana). The actions are known as okushobokera ("to make the child grow") and okweya ("sweeping"); the two terms are used variably in both documentary accounts and by informants. The core of okushobokera-okweya is the performance of a procession in which women and girls carry the newborn child between the homestead and the banana plantation, singing a fertility song. Processions, carrying, and songs are, of course, typical elements of a rite of transition as described by Arnold Van Gennep (1960).

In an account of such a ritual observed in the fall of 1993 by a principal informant (Ngaiza 1993), the events took place in the evening after the



462 CJAS / RCEA 29:3 1995

umbilical cord stump had fallen off. The newborn girl was placed on the back of a young girl, and the assembled women (the mother, mother-in-law, midwife, sisters-in-law, and neighbours) proceeded with the child from the kitchen hut to the kibanja and back again. They placed waste matter from the birth, the baby's collected excreta, and banana peelings from the seclusion period on a banana leaf "tray" (olungo). Shaking the tray, they proceeded towards the nchoncho tree where the placenta was "planted" and placed the tray containing wastes from mother and child at the foot of the child's tree. The child's excreta would be deposited there until weaning age, and the fruit from the tree would belong exclusively to the mother-in-law or midwife (thus not to the father) as long as the child remained alive. During the procession back to the house with the child, the women sang:

Watwalaki? - Obugumba (What are we sweeping away? - Infertility) Wagalulaki? - Oluzaro (What are we bringing back? - Fertility) 7

The girl carrying the child (who is being carried on the back for the first time) then presented some grass to the father, who was in the house with male relatives and neighbours. The grass symbolizes the girl child; firewood is presented to the father of a boy. Guests were then given coffee beans to chew (traditional hospitality), and food (bananas, fish, and banana beer) was served on the leaves of the child's tree.

This account of a recently performed ritual contains most of the elements recorded by earlier observers, demonstrating that this ritual has persisted intact despite intensive Christianization and the disappearance of most aspects of traditional religion. The ritual has not been in any way Christian- ized, nor combined with Christian baptism, which is performed months later. There are a few differences in detail between earlier documented accounts and those of present-day informants. In Cesard's description (1936, 839), the young girl who carries the baby also carries an endilalila under her arm, and it is the baby that is placed on banana leaves and put under the chosen tree. The baby is then removed, and the endilalila (unmatured fruit) is dropped there. The baby is then carried back to the house while children sweep the courtyard, singing the above song about "sweeping away" infertility and bringing back fertility. This version of okweya suggests that one of the symbolic meanings of the endilalila involves, indeed, an association between the immature fruit and an infertile womb.

A RITE OF INCORPORATION

An additional event called ekikumba is described by present-day informants, but not recorded in the earlier documents (with the exception of a brief reference in Rwiza 1958). Although it occurs on the day of the birth and thus precedes okweya-okushobokera, it has the characteristics of a rite of incorporation. Ekikumba is the ritual announcement of the birth to the new




mother's kin. A pair of messengers, a boy and a girl, are sent by the father's kin with symbolic gifts for the maternal grandmother. The gifts are coffee and millet (traditional offerings to ancestors), wrapped in leaves of the banana tree trunk, ebyai (the trunk where the placenta is buried and new shoots emerge), presented along with a branch from a sacred tree, omusha- sha (under which offerings were left for ancestor spirits).

By the sex of the child who presents the gifts, the maternal grandmother knows the sex of the newborn child. In the case of a female newborn, a girl is head messenger, with a boy to assist her; in the case of a male newborn, a boy is head messenger, with a girl to assist. The messenger hands the gift to the maternal grandmother, who sings her joy and rewards the head messenger with a sum of money (recently 500 shillings) and the assistant with a smaller amount (2oo shillings). The new mother's female kin immediately begin to prepare food to take to her. According to Feliciana Ngaiza (1993), "The pur- pose of Ekikumba is to announce the birth - and the belongingness of the child to their clan" (the father's lineage).

INTERPRETING '~ENDILALILA'.

NATURE, CULTURE, AND GENDER

The Endilalila rituals provide excellent material with which to expand the ethnographic basis of the "nature, culture, and gender" debate. The essay that initiated the debate, Sherry Ortner's "Is Woman to Nature as Man is to Culture?" (1974), posited a universal association of woman with an inferior nature (largely because of her immersion in the "natural" events of reproduction, lactation, and child-rearing). This is identified as a major cross-cultural means of subordinating women to men, the latter of whom symbolically associate themselves with "culture." Surface aspects of the Endilalila rituals are consonant with this thesis: we are presented with an abundance of "natural" symbolism; this is associated with an event in the female reproductive cycle; and it is packaged in rituals performed by women and children in the domestic sphere.

To be fair, it must be acknowledged that Ortner allowed for woman's frequent role as a mediator between nature and culture, and her critics (Mac- Cormack 1982) have gone further, noting that both men and women fill this role. My own reading of the Haya post-natal ritual symbolism sees a somewhat different paradigm at work, not based upon binary opposition at all. Rather, I see evidence of identification or continuity between "nature" and "culture," and not, coincidentally, a significant amount of symbolic gender symmetry.

IDENTITY OF NATURE AND CULTURE, TREES, AND HUMANS

The banana tree itself is difficult to classify in terms of binary opposition as purely "natural." Its omnipresence in Haya villages is less the result of nature than of generations of conscious horti-"cultural" effort and skill: this



464 CJAS / RCEA 29:3 1995

is particularly evident in the building up over time of a symbiotic relationship between the banana plantation and the household, a relationship which produces the waste materials necessary to fertilize the food-producing trees. The extent of the banana's dependence on human input is revealed by an interesting item of customary law. According to Hans Cory and M.M Hart- noll, neglect of a banana plantation was grounds for losing title (at least to non-inherited land), since "the assessors explained that if a banana plantation is left uncleaned, in three years time the trees will be no higher than the grass and will certainly not bear" (1945, I19).

The banana tree is also "cultural" in the sense that it is a direct source of many basic tools and implements for the Haya. The ekikankabana sheath used to feed newborns is an example: this unprocessed part of the tree serves as an instrument for actualizing certain cultural ideas about infant feeding. Within hours of birth, the banana sheath as vessel intrudes "culture" into the realm of infant feeding, a realm which is assumed (by Ortner, among others) to epitomize the "natural." The banana tree itself, then, confounds attempts to classify it in binary terms, being neither purely natural nor cultural, much like the human beings with whom it is identified in the post- natal rituals.

Not only are "nature" and "culture" united in the banana tree and in the identification between the life cycles of trees and humans, but there is no evidence that the waste products that are so prominent in the post-natal rituals are regarded as a part of an inferior "nature." The central action of the post-natal rituals involves body wastes of mother and child: placenta, delivery blood, excreta, and the baby's hair, which is shaven during the seclusion period. Anthropologists have described a number of cultural models for dealing with body waste, all of which dwell on its negative significations: as sub- stances vulnerable to use in harmful witchcraft, as a source of pollution which evokes cultural boundary-setting (Douglas 1966), as a symbol of "liminal" states and persons understood to be marginal (Turner 1967), and (especially with female body emissions) as reminiscent of decay and death and, therefore, threatening to males (Brain 199o0). All of these tend to assume an association between body waste (especially female body waste) and an inferior "nature."

Yet for a people as horticulturally minded as the Haya, I would argue that waste of any kind is not primarily associated with magical danger, pollution, marginal liminality, or the fear of decay and death. Instead, wastes are an essential part of the continuity of generations of trees, people, and Haya culture. New trees are reborn as shoots out of the wastage of dead trees plus manure. The body wastes of mother and child are "planted" in or at the tree trunk, which acts as both a "tomb" for the dead waste of a human birth and a "womb" for the generation of new tree shoots. The pile of excreta deposited




at the child's tree not only fertilizes the tree, but also signifies the child's state of good health, for the grandmother or midwife only has rights to the fruit as long as the child remains alive. 8 Finally, there is the cultural norm that leads most Haya people to seek to be buried in proximity to the placenta; such a burial ensures the continuous ancestral presence on the land, a sort of spiritual "fertilizer." Human and plant birth, maturity, wastage, death, and rebirth are closely entwined symbolically; thus we have little jus- tification for positing either binary oppositions or stigmatization of even female body waste as belonging to an inferior "nature."

GENDER SYMMETRY

The prevalence of gender symmetry in Haya post-natal ritual symbolism is striking, but has not been noted in documentary accounts, concerned as they seem to be with pointing out the implications of the rituals for jural patriliny and proof of paternity. Yet there is balance and complementarity in both symbols and actions.

The sexual symbolism of the banana tree's reproductive parts, is, as noted above, multivocal and not a simple case of one-to-one correspondence between a phallic flower (male) and fruit (female), as MacGaffey suggests (1986, 130). The flower is hermaphroditic, and the banana fruit and its sheaths could be read as either phallic or uterine or possibly both. 9 Both men and women, moreover, have the same symbolic relationship with the banana tree established at birth, when a tree is chosen for them. The identification with the tree is gender specific in the sense that an eating banana tree (nchoncho) is chosen for a girl and a beer banana tree (ntundu) for a boy, but the two types of tree have equal importance in the culture. The symmetry is even greater than is the case in some other African societies (such as the Igbo, for example) who associate boys and girls with different species of trees - palm trees for girls and kola trees for boys (Amadiume 1987, 77).

This is a "women's ritual" in the sense that it celebrates an event in the woman's reproductive life, and women dominate its performance. Yet there is gender symmetry in the placement of male and female participants and in the symbols employed in the central ritual actions. During the seclusion period, the new mother, midwife, and mother-in-law are inside the house, while men (with the partial exception of the husband) are excluded. During okweya-okushobokera, the husband, male relatives, and neighbours are confined to the house, while the women perform the ritual outdoors. The symbolic items brought by the young girl to the new father (grass for a girl, firewood for a boy) are also culturally equivalent: grass is cut daily for use as a disposable floor covering; firewood collected daily is used in the cooking of bananas. Children are usually responsible for both tasks. Finally, during ekikumba (the ritual announcement of the birth to the matrikin), the message



466 CJAS/RCEA 29:3 1995

is carried by a pair of children, boy and girl, and the symbolic items they bring to the maternal grandmother are, like grass and firewood, culturally equivalent. Both are traditional ceremonial offerings to ancestral spirits. Coffee is a male-controlled crop, while millet or sorghum (a traditional staple grain before maize flour became popular) must be ground into flour by women before the processing of banana beer can proceed. These symbolic gifts are both wrapped in leaves from the trunk of the banana tree, the symbolic womb-tomb where the placenta is buried and new tree shoots emerge. Io

I have tried to show to what extent Haya post-natal ritual symbolism and action express notions of identity or continuity between trees and humans, nature and culture, and balance or complementarity between male and female. I do not find evidence of binary opposition between nature and culture, male and female, nor the equation of woman with an inferior nature. And yet, it is undeniable that the Endilalila rituals contain elements which reflect the structural interests of the patrilineage and subordinate the interests of the mother and her kin. These are the location of the rituals on the patrilineal homestead, the dominant role of the husband's mother, the choice of the child's tree on the lineage land by the father or his mother, the concern about possession of the cord stump to prove paternity, and the announcement of the birth to the new mother's kin by the husband's kin.

James's (1978) thesis about African matrifocality helps to make sense of this apparently contradictory evidence and intersects nicely with a critique of the idea that there is a universal association between woman and nature and between man and culture. For James, it is precisely the overemphasis by Western scholars on jural structures as societally definitive that has led them to neglect the evidence of matrifocality:

During the middle part of this century, constitutional principles of a quasi-legal kind articulating the main forms of social organization were sought, almost to the neglect in some cases of more humane considerations as to what the com-

plexities of personal and moral life might be like for people actually living in various forms of social structure. ... The dominant model of society remained of the system of rule, of the arrangement and transmission of rights and duties and powers .... The jural model of society . . dealing with the structuring of

men's rights over things and rights over persons (including women) tends to leave women out of the picture, even in matrilineal systems (James 1978, 144, 145). II

The same overemphasis on jural structures as societally or culturally definitive tends to make men look more "cultural," since they dominate the jural and political realms. Similarly, this way of defining African societies makes women look more "natural" than they are, because of their exclusion from




the jural and political realms. Their power seems to be confined to the domestic sphere, and their activities (child bearing, lactation and feeding, cooking, and even the production of food) seem closer to "nature" than do the making and enforcing of laws.

The alternative applied here involves looking at the range of meanings in ritual symbolism without privileging the elements that are obviously related to patrilineal structural concerns. This allows matrifocal elements to emerge and to be seen as expressing fundamental, not secondary, cultural values. From this perspective, I conclude that Endilalila rituals have sur- vived intact, not because (as women's rituals tied to the domestic sphere) they express matrifocal ideas that are marginal or inconsequential, but because matrifocal values are an enduring, central preoccupation of the culture. 2

Women Who Buy Their Graves: Divorce, Prostitution, and Haya Matrifocality It is perhaps not too surprising to find matrifocal values expressed in the symbols and rituals of birth and fertility, even those of a "notoriously" patrilineal society. This section explores the phenomena of Haya divorce, prostitution, and female-headed households; these are less obvious, but equally fertile sources of evidence for the presence and centrality of matrifocal values in Haya culture. It is only recently that some scholars have begun to examine Haya divorce and prostitution from a gynocentric perspective, as rational choices and examples of female agency, not of passivity, despera- tion, or moral degeneration (White 199o; Larsson 1991). I would like to build on this work by looking at the ways in which Haya society, although patrilineal, has options and outlets for female agency and independence built into it (and sometimes built into its customary laws). These options and outlets, and the use women make of them, I interpret as manifestations of the under- lying matrifocality of the society and culture. I 3

THE PREVALENCE OF DIVORCE, PROSTITUTION,

AND FEMALE-HEADED HOUSEHOLDS

Numerous studies of the Haya have noted their relatively high rate of divorce or, more accurately, of marital separation. While the available statis- tics may not be reliable, they do suggest that marriage is relatively easy to leave for both women and men, has been so since before mid-century, and possibly was so pre-colonially. A.T. Culwick (1938), in a survey of 3 300 Haya women, found that only fifty percent of women aged 20-29 years and forty percent of women aged 30-39 years were still living with a first husband. Priscilla Reining and Audrey Richards (1954), as part of the East African Fer- tility Survey, found that thirty-five percent of their sample of Haya married



468 CJAS / RCEA 29:3 1995

women had entered into a second marriage (though it was not specified if this was always subsequent to a divorce). Swantz (1985, 72) cites the proportion of divorced women as eight percent, according to the 1978 census of Kagera Region (compared to 3.8 percent for Kilimanjaro Region). In a (non- random) sample of thirty extended family households in one village, Swantz's student researchers found evidence of forty divorces. More recently, Charles Smith and Lesley Stevens (1988) found in a random sample of ten percent of the households in one village that thirty percent were female-headed (two-thirds of these separated or divorced, and the rest widowed).

Levels of participation in prostitution are even more difficult to quantify accurately (as indeed they are in North America); however, there is evidence that a significant minority of Haya women participate in urban prostitution, mostly for a temporary period and subsequent to marital separation or divorce. Culwick (1938) estimated that 5.5 percent of the women aged 14-39 years in the area studied were absentee prostitutes. More importantly, he stated that all of the women were wives who had "run away," thus docu- menting a link between separation (specifically, wife-initiated separation) and prostitution. Brad Weiss found in 257 marital histories that fifty-seven wives (twenty-two percent) had "spent some time in urban areas in activities associated with selling sexual services," and he noted: "women who market sexual and domestic services in this way almost always begin their work subsequent to a dissolved marriage" (1993, 35 note 9).

The 1987 research summarized in Smith and Stevens (1988) identifies a third element which frequently follows separation, divorce, and prostitution: the formation of female-headed households and, occasionally, female land ownership. Of the fifteen female household heads interviewed, four had purchased land to which they held title, and at least one of these did so with the proceeds from urban prostitution. The link connecting separation and divorce, prostitution, and female-headed households was observed ten years earlier by Swantz's student researchers in Kagera Region. Though Swantz assessed the overall socio-cultural status of Haya women as low compared to the status of women in other Tanzanian societies, she did acknowledge a dif- ference between married and independent women. Her researchers found that married Haya women were "conspicuously vulnerable economically," and more clearly disadvantaged than separated or divorced women (Swantz 1985, 67). They also noted that women landowners (mainly returned prostitutes) were accepted by villages as household heads: "Women who have purchased the right to land they cultivate or who are cultivating their own plots in Ujamaa villages, are now accepted as heads of household and as holding tenure." Swantz thus provides a needed corrective to the continued influ- ence of categorical statements by earlier researchers such as Reining, who




assumed that "the Haya woman can never be the head of the family" (Swantz 1985, 60). As recent research by Birgitta Larsson (1991) shows, this statement was probably less than accurate, even during the period of Rein- ing's research in the 195os: Larsson's interviews with former prostitutes who had been active from the 193os to 195os reveal that they bought property and established themselves as household heads throughout those decades.

DIVORCE AND HAYA CUSTOMARY LAW

The use of the term "divorce" is quite problematic in the Haya context, since there are two Luhaya expressions for marital separation, neither of which is accurately translated as "divorce" (Cory and Hartnoll 1945, 94; Kibera 1974, 31). The first term is kutambya, which is usually translated "to drive away," and refers to a situation where a husband sends his wife away, frequently because the union is childless. The second term is kwangana, variously rendered as "to separate," "to go home for a while," or "to dis- agree." (As previously noted, this term is related to the noun describing the separation of the umbilical cord stump.) Kwangana refers to the situation where the wife chooses to leave a marriage and returns to her birth family. Neither of these cases necessarily ends in divorce (a legal termination of marriage by return of the bridewealth and permission to remarry). Either situation could result in a temporary separation or a permanent rupture.

Despite the existence of two terms and two forms of separation, kutambya has been assumed to characterize Haya divorce. Cory and Hartnoll (1945, 94) comment: "Use of this word illustrates the native point of view on divorce." And indeed, Cory and Hartnoll's codification of customary law provides ample evidence of the husband's advantages in divorce: a husband can "send away" a wife, but not vice versa; he can do so even when the wife is not at fault; he can almost always reclaim the bridewealth; and he unequivocally "owns" any children produced by the union, plus the first child of the wife's next union (through the bisisi custom). The other form of separation, kwangana, in which the wife leaves at will, is men- tioned but not emphasized in the codification of customary law, though it represents an important escape mechanism which balances to some extent the harshness of kutambya. Cory and Hartnoll (1945, 101, 102) do

acknowledge that, "If the wife remains adamant she cannot be forced to return to her husband," and they cite several cases involving women who refused to return, as well as fathers who refused to return daughters despite threats of fines. '4

Interestingly, we have to turn to the White Father, Pere CGsard, to find an anecdotal account of the background to kwangana. Cesard did not approve of the autonomy exercised by the Haya wife ("Elle jouit d'une grande libert6 dont elle abuse parfois dans les visites A sa famille et celles qu'elle regoit") 15



470 CJAS / RCEA 29:3 1995

and observed that she did not hesitate to use the option of kwangana in order to increase her domestic power:

Elle est vraiment reine au foyer ... la moindre observation ou le refus de toucher aux mets aminerait une fugue et la femme se planterait IA pendant plus d'une semaine (CUsard 1935, 98). i6

In C6sard's view, the Haya had a rather loose sense of the marriage tie:

On vit ensemble tant qu'on peut se supporter, sinon on se quitte. L'homme voit surtout dans la femme aprbs la procr6ation des enfants les avantages pratiques qu'il en retire et la femme qui en sait est facilement boudeuse et exigeante, un rien ambnerait A la fugue, peut ktre la divorce (CUsard 1936, 823). 17

Cesard (1936, 828) traced the root of the problem of frequent wife-initiated

separation to the part of the marriage ceremony where the bride's father recognizes his daughter's right to leave, a provision Cesard viewed as annul-

ling the marriage from the Catholic point of view. This part of the Haya wed-

ding, kutera omushango ("to state the case"), is described in detail by Cory and Hartnoll (1945, 244), and some version of it is still performed in wed-

dings today:

The father says to the musigire (groom's representative): "You have asked me for a wife for so and so and I have given you one. Do not treat her badly. Rather than that bring her back and I will refund the brideprice. She can always live with us. Her name is Kamundage."

The story of Kamundage illustrates Haya thinking regarding the role of the father as advocate for his daughter in marital disputes and reveals a certain cultural flexibility about gender identity as well. Kamundage is an only daughter who is brought up like a boy by her father, Nyamuhima. When the

"boy" is requested as a page by the King's court, Nyamuhima agrees, on condition that he be informed if the boy is ever threatened with execution. When Kamundage is sentenced to death at the behest of a King's wife whose attentions "he" has spurned, the father is called and comes to prove Kamundage's innocence by revealing that "he" is a girl. In the wedding context, the story is meant to remind the groom and his party that the bride's father is to be consulted in case of dispute, as he knows his daughter best. Kutera omushango occurs, from a structural point of view, as merely the transfer of a passive woman from one group of men to another; from the perspective of the woman, however, it constitutes publicly witnessed permission to leave an unsatisfactory marriage. Thus, kwangana can function as a culturally sanctioned expression of female power within a patrilineal marriage system.




HAYA PROSTITUTION AND MATRIFOCALITY

The prominence of Haya women in East African urban prostitution is a much studied aspect of Haya society and culture (Culwick 1938; Southall and Gutkind 1957; Sundkler 1980; Swantz 1985; White 1990o; Larsson I99I). Larsson admits: "The prevalence of venereal disease and the prostitution issue often attracts attention out of all proportion" (1991, 89). While not

wishing to add to this problem, or to engage in more of what Amadiume

(1987, 5) calls "dirty gossip" about African women, I would like to review the evidence. In doing so, I hope to show that Haya matrifocality manifests itself not only in the ritual symbolism of fertility, but also in the initiative shown by Haya women who choose prostitution over oppressive marriages, in their typical reinvestment of the profits in land and in educating children, and in the apparent community acceptance of this phenomenon.

One of the initial difficulties with the discussion of Haya prostitution is the English terminology itself. In the European context, the prostitute has

long been stigmatized as marginal and deviant, and prostitution (or solicit-

ing) criminalized. The indigenous Haya expression, which is translated as

"prostitution," is ali omu mahanga, which, according to Larsson (199 1, 126), means "she is out among the people, looking around," with the connotation of travelling. This expression is somewhat ambivalent in context, since

Haya attitudes towards those who "travel" can encompass both disapproval and outright or reluctant admiration. The Haya terminology also suggests that the exchange of sexual services for payment is prostitution in the Euro-

pean sense mainly when it occurs outside Hayaland. An aside by Cory and Hartnoll (1945, ioo) implies that such exchanges

within Hayaland were not regarded as terribly reprehensible: "The word

prostitution is difficult to define here because the taking of money is no cri-

terion, as many women living with their husbands take payment from time to time from other men." It is not clear that there was, or is, a Haya consen- sus about the labelling of women who "travel" as reprehensible prostitutes either. Some of the women themselves explicitly rejected the title in a 195o letter to the (British) District Commissioner, protesting against a campaign by some Haya Kings and the BaHaya Union to limit travel abroad by unat- tached Haya women:

When the men instituted the law to forbid us to go abroad to find work to help us and our parents, the law was brought to you and to our rulers to be accepted. But we were not called to any meeting to be asked why we go abroad rather than staying at home. ... We hear our opponents saying that we go because of prostitution. This word is an insult to us. If we are called prostitutes, can a woman make herself a prostitute on her own? First of all, is not a prostitute the man who gave us the money? (Larsson 1991, 135)



472 CJAS / RCEA 29:3 1995

Elements of the Haya elite did oppose and attempt to control prostitution, as evidenced by the documented attempts to apply travel limitations. Their opposition was reinforced by colonial government researchers who linked urban prostitution to a presumed venereal disease and infertility crisis. Culwick (1938) spread the notion of the Haya as a "dying people," and a low fertility rate was also a central preoccupation of the East African Fertility Survey in the early 195os (Reining and Richards

1954). Anxiety about Haya survival has surfaced again recently, with the publi-

cation (mainly by mission hospitals) of high HIV sero-positivity rates in the population. A recent article (Weiss 1993) explores the language used by some Haya men about women, which associates them with mobility, speed, money, AIDS, and the dangers these represent to a stable patrilineal regime. Weiss reports that much disapproval is focused upon the woman who travels and returns to buy a plot of land, thus "buying her grave," which, he con- cludes, is "the quintessential act of disruption, dislocation, and uncontrolled mobility" (1993, 33). Weiss stresses the importance of the normative burial on patrilineal land and the centrality of this practice to Haya culture:

I often heard Haya men speak of the importance of staying by the grave of your father.... The Haya are especially concerned to make certain they are buried on the appropriate farm, namely their natal farm (1993, 28, 29).

In contrast, the woman landowner appears to be truly out of step with cru- cial beliefs and practices of "the Haya, " as documented by anthropologists to date. Yet it is worth asking whether, in face of the evidence that women do "buy their graves," have been doing so for some decades, and are evidently satisfied to do so, we can continue to see burial on the father's homestead as an absolute value for all Haya. Is it possible that returned prostitutes who buy land and are even buried on purchased land may be motivated by traditionally Haya values as well? 18

Recent research by women scholars (White 199o; Larsson I991) features interviews with former prostitutes to get their perpective, in an attempt to correct some of the bias in previous work. These studies reveal the extent to which the actions of Haya prostitutes conform to central Haya values such as esteem for land ownership, cultivation of food crops, the raising and education of children, and burial in the banana plantation.

Luise White (199O, 103-25) describes the "Wazi-Wazi" type of prostitution practiced by the majority of the Haya prostitutes in Nairobi in the 193os and 1940s. 19 "Wazi-Wazi" involved: temporary stays in one or more East African cities (usually for a number of years), aggressive marketing of "brief sexual encounters at a fixed price," general refusal to provide overnight or domestic services, and pursuit of short-term profit with a view to investment in land and businesses in Hayaland and eventual resettlement there.




White reports: "In the time I interviewed in Pumwani (Nairobi), I could not find one Haya woman who had been a prostitute between 1936 and 1946. All had gone home" (199o, Iio). This type of prostitution was described as

"highly commercial" by Aidan Southall and Peter Gutkind (I957), whose somewhat disapproving assessment influenced subsequent commentary on

Haya prostitutes. White's interviews with former Nairobi prostitutes who

practiced the "Malaya" type of prostitution (longer-term liaisons, provision of domestic services to migrant men, settlement and property investment in the city) revealed that they, too, disapproved of the Wazi-Wazi prostitutes as hard-headed. However, White contends that Haya prostitution (and, indeed, all colonial Nairobi prostitution) should be understood not only in terms of rational economic choice, but also in terms of traditional family values:

The women saw prostitution as a reliable means of capital accumulation, not as a despicable fate. ... The work of prostitutes was family labour. Prostitutes' pat- terns of re-investment reproduced families either with themselves as heads of household or for their families of origin (1990, 2).

The colonial Haya pattern of reinvestment most often involved shoring up the finances of the birth family's farm (after assisting the family to repay the brideprice owed to the ex-husband), and then frequently investing in the independent purchase of land. The Haya women were thus notorious among Nairobi prostitutes for their attachment to Hayaland:

Those Waziba women wouldn't have graves here in Nairobi, they would go straight back to their own country. These women ... were sending money back to their own country every week, and when they died they would be buried at home too, no matter where they died. When an Mziba woman died a neighbour would take the body and all the property to her father's house (former prostitute, quoted by White 1990, I 15).

Today, according to Ngaiza (1993), women landowners are buried on their own independently purchased land - they literally do buy their own graves. Children without identified Haya fathers are buried there too. Thus, it seems that for these women, burial on the kibania (or banana plantation) has remained an important value, while the idea of burial on the father's kibania may be losing its essential hold.

The pattern of Haya urban prostitution not only is in conformity with "traditional" Haya values about the land, but also has striking matrifocal qualities. Women engaged in prostitution in order to free themselves from marriage by repaying the brideprice and to establish matricentric households in which to cultivate crops and raise children (their own or those of female relatives). Moreover, they often acted with the encouragement of female relatives:



474 CJAS / RCEA 29:3 1995

Haya mothers saw prostitution as a way to obtain financial support for their

daughters, and it is altogether likely that young women were influenced by kinswomen who had been prostitutes in the 192os and 1930s (White 199o, 113).

Brigitta Larsson (1991), who interviewed elderly returned Haya prostitutes, provides some autobiographical accounts which display the same themes of female agency in escaping marriage, adherence to important Haya values about land and family, and popular acceptance of their choices at the local level. "Georgina," one of Larsson's interviewees, left her husband in the

1930s, "travelled" in three East African cities during the 1940s, returned to

buy a stone house in Bukoba Town and a plot in her village, established herself as head of an extended family household, educated her own and her sisters' children, and was at the time of the interview a prominent elderly member of the Lutheran Cathedral. 20 Georgina explained:

They (Haya prostitutes) did not agree to be treated badly, and left their husbands .... Men wasted their money on beer and women, while women knew how to spend income on land, houses and childrens' education (Larsson 199I, 128-29).

Larsson also cites a Swedish missionary (circa 195 3) who described the popular attitude towards such women:

As a prostitute she is a respected person in society. She has not a shameful occu-

pation from the peoples' point of view. When she returns from the city, feasts are arranged in her honour. These are not prodigal son feasts, but a celebration for an important member of the society, who is dressed according to latest fashion and has money in a bank account (1991, 132).

White and Larsson provide an important new perspective on Haya prostitution by attending methodologically to the voices of the women themselves; the autobiographical accounts and contemporary observations allow the matrifocal values of Haya society and culture to emerge. There are many parallels to their findings in the observations of my principal informant about returned prostitutes, which I reproduce here in unedited form:

Some Haya women face difficulties in marriage and are forced to separate (okwangana). Common reason that has forced most Haya women to resign from marriages is that of the husband oppression (informant's emphasis), where a wife works all alone while the husband drinks and relaxes. The wife is to take care of the family and to respond to pregnancies at the same time. Men come home very late drunk, demanding good food and creating blames over every- thing. Women find themselves unable to afford anything, because the husband remains the owner of the woman's work products. On top of that, they receive severe beatings and sometimes even lack support from the in-laws. Most women I know (that is, returned prostitutes) faced this kind of situation and




finally decided to go back to their parents. Other parents even advise their

daughters to separate when they see the situation is intolerable. When they return home, they find that life is not as easy as it used to be before they were married. They find parents are unable to take care of them or even assist them to be independent. They find themselves being a burden to parents and in some cases parents show unwillingness to accommodate them when they do not have material contributions. While facing these problems a woman will think of a friend or neighbour or relative who practices or practiced prostitution and is well off. She will look for contacts in order to go and try her luck. According to my understanding after talking to many people on this issue, this is the main reason why many Haya women fall into this kind of life. Evidence to this is the fact that after they earn enough money to buy a shamba and build a house they return to the village and live an independent life supporting their children and relatives. I can cite examples in my village (here she lists eight names) all of them returned home, bought shambas, built houses and stayed to live ordinary life (Ngaiza 1993).

This description of Haya prostitution confirms the unfortunate ways in which patrilineal jural structures (of marriage, land inheritance, and male control of cash income) subordinate women. On the other hand, it conveys a sense of the prostitute's initiative, her conformity with Haya values about land and children, and her acceptance by family and community. The exclu- sive use of the term Kwangana indicates that the phenomenon of Haya prostitution often begins with marital separation initiated by a wife, who takes advantage of this option permitted in the marriage system. Subsequently, for economic reasons and with encouragement from friends or related women, she tries prostitution. It is clear, in this account, that the ultimate goal is the formation of matricentric households of a female household head, related women, and their children. (The account brings to mind a 1987 interview with a returned prostitute and landowner, during which I learned that the woman household head was supporting herself and her three children, her mother and maternal aunt, and her sister and sister's child.) The informant uses the terms "independence" and "living an independent life" to describe this goal. These households are anomalous from the patrilineal, jural perspective; yet, because the women cultivate bananas and raise children, they conform to central Haya values. The informant also uses the words "nor- mal" and "ordinary" to describe the village life of returned prostitutes; this wording likely reflects a significant degree of popular acceptance of the choices made by women and the outcome of those choices.

Conclusion The Endilalila rituals contain elements which reflect the concerns of the patrilineage, yet they also betray a strong matrifocal emphasis: the centrality



476 CJAS / RCEA 29:3 1995

of women's agricultural and reproductive fertility is expressed in symbolism characterized by continuity between nature and culture, and balance between the genders. I have tried to show in Section II that women who choose divorce and prostitution may also be acting out of traditional values, such as the desire for land to cultivate, upon which to raise children, and perhaps be buried. These values are actualized in a way that I have called matrifocal: in solidarity and with the support of female relatives and friends, with a strong priority for the education of children, and on land that is under the control of (and sometimes in the legal tenure of) a woman.

The question remains how much weight matrifocal values and practices have in a society that is, according to the lawbooks and majority practice, patrilineal and patrifocal. One solution (Ifi Amadiume takes this position regarding the Nnobi Igbo) is to conclude that matrifocal elements are surviv- als from a pre-colonial matriarchy that fell victim to both African and Euro- pean patriarchalization. There is no evidence to support such a hypothesis about Haya society (although in the pre-colonial kingdoms, royal and aristocratic women had considerable powers).

The contrary view, that male dominance is (and probably was pre-colonially) a universal fact is represented by Ortner (1974) and Edwin Ardener (1975, 1977). While assuming universal male dominance, Ardener also wanted to account for the presence of an "autonomous female view" (1975, 13), which he discovered while studying the Bakweri of Cameroon. In two influential articles, "Belief and the Problem of Women" and "The Problem Revisited," he used the metaphor of dominant and muted groups and codes to account for the presence of multiple perspectives (not just of gender but of class as well) in single societies. Dominant groups control the communicative system of any society. Muted groups "do not form part of the dominant communicative system of the society"; their viewpoint is a muted code, rendered invisible, inarticulate, "mere black holes in someone else's universe" (Ardener 1977, 25).

The evidence of Haya matrifocality presented in this paper does not support Ardener's conclusion that the perspective of women is so muted as to constitute a "black hole." (This seems to me a more accurate description of the status of matrifocal concerns in North America than among the Haya.) The metaphor of dominated and muted groups, which often does make sense of certain evidence, seems too absolute and not sensitive enough to ambiva- lence and ambiguity. It does not account for the evidence that many Haya women do not allow themselves to be dominated, nor for the evidence that women have resisted attempts to limit their options. Nor does it account for the extent to which Haya men (most notably perhaps as fathers of daughters, but also as neighbours of independent women) display attitudes of acceptance, even admiration for the autonomous woman farmer.




James formulates the role of matrifocal ideas in jurally patrilineal societies in this way:

There is a deeper and historically more enduring level at which the nature and

capacities of women are given primacy in the definition of the human condition itself (1978, 160).

Matrifocal ideas are, in this view, a sort of cultural sub-stratum shared by most Haya people, both male and female, perhaps in tension, but not in direct conflict, with their society's patrilineal structures. This matrifocal sub-stratum manifests itself diversely: in traditional fertility symbolism, in the formation of matricentric households and their community acceptance, and even between the lines of the patrilineal customary law itself.

Notes I. James (1978, 157) defines matrifocality as a "common cluster of ideas about the wider

importance of women's child-bearing capacity, their creative role in bringing up a new generation, and even a recurring notion about the natural line of birth being handed on through women." Amadiume (1987, 40) defines matrifocal as "mother-focused" and "having a female orientation," with a "household arrangement around the mother and her children, the focal or reference point being the mother." I would add that matrifocality also involves symbolic and practical recognition of the role of women as the pri- mary producers of the food that permits family reproduction.

2. The Haya do not have one name for the whole complex of post-natal rituals. I have adopted the name "Endilalila" out of convenience, and because the endilalila part of the banana tree plays a significant part during the whole post-natal period. Swantz (1966) uses this term for the actions performed at the end of the seclusion period. I have used the term "rituals" here, although J.S. La Fontaine (i 972) advocates the use of the term "ceremonies" in her description of Gisu women's life cycle celebrations. This is because they do not involve explicit offerings to ancestors (and thus, she implies, are not fully religious). If the presence of ancestor offerings defines traditional religion, many women's rituals are excluded from the category of religion, a conclusion I find hard to accept. It is also arguable that the post-natal rituals described here do imply ancestor veneration.

3. I would like to acknowledge the work of the two Haya researchers who translated my questions from Swahili and English into Luhaya and interviewed midwives, their clients, and other village women for this study. They are: Gration Kabalulu of the Tan- zanian Ministry of Culture, Kagera Regional Office; and Feliciana Ngaiza of the Department of Workers' Education and Participation, Dar es Salaam. I am very grate- ful to Magdalena Ngaiza of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Dar es Salaam, for her advice and assistance.

4. "The banana tree, which seems to be like one's own body to the Haya, who wouldn't know how to exist without it."

5. According to Ardener (1975, I2), when he refers to the Bakweri of Cameroon, it is the fruit, and not the flower, that is phallic: "the edible plantain banana is a male crop and consciously seen as clearly phallic." The wild banana, on the other hand, is used in women's rites, a use Ardener describes as a "feminization of the male symbol."

6. The Haya also have a well-documented system of social paternity, known as the bisisi



478 CJAS/RCEA 29:3 1995

custom. The first man to have real or mock intercourse with a virgin acquires (social) paternity rights over the next child born to her. Since a woman in the post-natal seclusion period is regarded as symbolically virgin, if a man other than her husband gains access to her and performs the mock intercourse, he becomes the social pater of her next child.

7. The ritual songs of African women and girls are lamentably underdocumented. Ama- diume (1987, 77) provides some examples of birth songs and stresses their matrifocal content. Haya girls sing their own topical compositions at weddings (for an example referring to AIDS, given to me by the daughter of a midwife, see, Stevens 1991). A more traditional wedding song compares the bride to a ripe sweet banana and is sung by a female send-off party at the bride's home (Ngaiza 1993).

8. The indigenous Haya idea that body waste could have auspicious meanings evidently escaped the colonial medical officer who complained: "The heap can become quite sizeable, creating a nuisance from the point of view of smell and fly breeding" (Moller 1958, 117). Nevertheless, the Haya are not alone in this view; Amadiume (1987, 77) notes that in Nnobi (Igbo) culture, it is good luck to be urinated or excreted upon by a baby.

9. Carol MacCormack (1982), in researching the fertility symbolism of the Mende and Sherbro peoples of Sierra Leone, found such symbolism is usually polysemous, often combining male and female meanings. For example, "water" means both semen and amniotic fluid.

io. Reining and Richards (1954) note that the fertility survey among the Haya showed that "children of both sexes are equally desired"; this seems to be reflected in the amount of gender-balanced symbolism found in the post-natal rituals.

II. Cory and Hartnoll's (1945) codification of Haya customary law is certainly vulnerable to criticism on these grounds. Women are treated mainly as the objects of male legal manipulations. And yet, reading between the lines, it is occasionally possible to find implicit recognition of women as subjects and actors.

12. The disappearance of many traditional Haya rituals, the combination of others with Christian forms, and the survival of the Endilalila rituals are also discussed in Stevens (1991).

13. By putting the emphasis on evidence of female agency in exercising the options available within their society and culture, I hope to steer between two extremes, neither depicting divorce and prostitution as completely pathological, nor romanticizing them and thus "enabling the very real constraints on (women's) lives to be dismissed" (Caplan 1992, 78).

14. Divorce and the bisisi custom are related, and they are both excellent illustrations of the opportunities available for female agency, even within customary laws seemingly designed to benefit men. After divorce, a man can claim social paternity rights over the first child of his ex-wife's next union because he was first to have mock intercourse with her after the previous birth. This custom of bisisi, which does cause women to lose children to non-biological fathers, has been viewed in an extremely bad light by European observers - both scholars concerned with women's rights and missionaries concerned with the integrity of families. Yet even this notoriously biased custom contains a counter-balancing element favouring women. Reining and Richards (195 4, 376) assert that women have some control over the designation of social paters, since the woman has "sole right to state who has had access to her after delivery." The authors describe the case of a pregnant woman who plans to leave her present husband and deliberately allows her lover access following the delivery, thus ensuring that he will have paternity rights over their next child. Alternativeiy, "she may abort her next




pregnancy ... bisisi rights of the first husband are nullified." They conclude: "BaHaya women have no fear of extra-marital pregnancies."

15. "She enjoys a great deal of liberty, which she sometimes abuses in visiting and getting a lot of visits from her family members."

I6. "She is truly queen of the household ... the least comment or refusal to touch meals (by her husband) can lead to her running away and staying there (with her family) more than a week."

17. "They live together as long as they can stand each other, and then they separate. What the man sees in a woman is, after the procreation of children, mainly the practical advantages he can get from her. The woman who is aware of this can easily become pouty and demanding, a mere trifle leads to her running away, possibly to divorce."

18. Ardener (1977, I9) summarizes the contradictory results when Bakweri culture was investigated though the use of first male, and subsequently female, informants: "For the men society was in chaos, even breaking down. For the women, life was a periplus of adventures, in which the role of the independent 'harlot' was often viewed as objec- tively a proud one." Ardener may be exaggerating the polarization between "male" and "female" points of view, but his observation is appropriate, warning about the dangers of over-generalizing because of familiarity with informants of one sex.

19. Wazi-Wazi refers to the Waziba, the people of the kingdom of Kiziba in Hayaland, and to the Swahili word which means "bare" or "open."

20o. Regarding acceptance of prostitutes by the churches, Larsson says: The travelling women lost contact with the Church.... But often when they returned to BuHaya they also returned to the Church. As they were used to being independent, they soon found their way into leadership positions, as Church elders or leaders of women's group (1991, 143).

Bibliography Amadiume, Ifi. 1987. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an Afri-

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Documents

Bananas, Babies, and Women Who Buy Their Graves: Matrifocal Values in a Patrilineal Tanzanian Society