"These Things Might Be There in The Bible, But They Are Hidden " - Christian Appropriations of The Practice of Labia Elongation in Zimbabwe
"These Things Might Be There in The Bible, But They Are Hidden " - Christian Appropriations of The Practice of Labia Elongation in Zimbabwe
"These Things Might Be There in The Bible, But They Are Hidden " - Christian Appropriations of The Practice of Labia Elongation in Zimbabwe
25 No 1 (July 2019)
Hellen Venganai1
1
SHORT BIO ABSTRACT
Hellen Venganai is a lecturer at the Wo- It is well documented that Christianity played a significant role in advancing
men’s University in Africa in the Faculty discourses of modernity and in reconfiguring gender and sexual cultures in
of Social and Gender Transformative Africa. However, calls for a return to African traditional cultural practices
Sciences. Her research interests are in are dominantly associated with “traditionalists” and rarely with Christians.
gender, sexuality and culture, and child This stems from a long discursive history of negative constructions of
rights. these practices since colonialism through institutional Christian discourses
and more recently, Western hegemonic versions of feminism. Participation
INSTITUTIONAL AFFILIATION or non-participation in these practices was (and still is) often projected as
Women’s University in Africa; signifying whether one is a Christian or non-Christian. While Christianity
[email protected] remains significant in the construction of identities in many African coun-
tries, this article troubles the illusion of a shared “Christian identity” by
ORCID interrogating how Christians relate to certain practices that have histori-
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5357-9034 cally been framed as “traditional” or “cultural” and therefore divorced from
Christian values and norms. In particular, the essay draws from empirical
studies done with young urban women and men in Zimbabwe on the
practice of labia elongation. The ways in which participants spoke about
this practice, challenge essentialist understandings and dominant re-
presentations of these so-called traditional practices. Participants took
complex and contradictory positions in criticising and supporting labia elon-
gation at different moments by invoking Christian discourses interwoven
with notions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race. Drawing from the
work of poststructuralist and postcolonial feminists, the essay demon-
strates how contemporary Zimbabwean urban Black Christians exercise
agency in redefining this practice in relation to their own Christian identities
as they take up different subject positions and navigate multiple identities
connected with their lived realities.
KEYWORDS
labia elongation; Christianity; Zimbabwe; identities; sex education; tradition
1
Preben Kaarsholm, “Culture as cure: Civil society and moral debates in KwaZulu-Natal
after apartheid,” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 18, no.2
(2006): 89.
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“These Things Might Be There in the Bible, But They Are Hidden”
2
Anette Wickström, “Virginity testing as a local public health initiative: a ‘preventive
ritual’ more than a diagnostic measure,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
16, no.3 (2010): 534.
3
Ezra Chitando, “Down with the Devil, Forward with Christ! A Study of the Interface
between Religious and Political Discourses in Zimbabwe,” African Sociological Review
6, no.1 (2002): 2.
4
Tompson Makahamadze and Fortune Sibanda, “‘Battle for survival’: responses of the
Seventh-day Adventist church to the HIV and AIDS pandemic in Zimbabwe,” Swedish
Missiological Themes 96, no.3 (2008): 293.
5
Elizabeth Schmidt, “Negotiated spaces and contested terrain: Men, women, and the
law in colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1939,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16, no.4
(1990): 623.
6
Sylvia Tamale, “The rights to culture and the culture of rights: a critical perspective on
women’s sexual rights in Africa,” Feminist Legal Studies 16, no.1 (2008): 47-69.
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The African Journal of Gender and Religion Vol. 25 No 1 (July 2019)
important site of identification for the colonised and still does for most
people in postcolonial African countries as reflected in this article.
Although Christianity is not presently associated with a particular social
class, it is worthwhile mentioning that during colonialism it played a
central role in the creation of an African elite.7 This was achieved most
significantly through missionaries who were the first to offer formal
education to Black Africans.8 This is why Christianity was seen as “an
agency of social mobility” for Africans, especially during colonialism.9 To
demonstrate this shift in social status in that colonial context, the
Zimbabwean middle-class “rejected tradition and custom in favour of
modernity.”10 Partly, this was to show that they had progressed more
than their uneducated counterparts. More significantly, assuming this
position was more connected with Christian teachings in missionary
schools, which sought to denounce African traditions.
7
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The invention of women: Making an African sense of Western
Gender Discourse (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
8
Michael West, The rise of an African middle class: colonial Zimbabwe, 1898-1965
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
9
West, The rise of an African middle class, 60.
10
West, The rise of an African middle class, 4.
11
Natasha Erlank, “Plain clean facts and initiation schools: Christianity, Africans, and sex
education in South Africa, c. 1910-1940,” Agenda 18, no.62 (2004): 77.
12
Cf. Peter Delius and Clive Glaser, “Sexual socialisation in South Africa: A historical
perspective,” African Studies 61, no.1 (2002): 27-54.
13
Delius and Glaser, “Sexual socialisation in South Africa,” 33-4.
14
Erlank, “Plain Clean Facts,” 78.
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“These Things Might Be There in the Bible, But They Are Hidden”
15
Erlank, “Plain Clean Facts,” 78.
16
Mercy A. Oduyoye, “Human rights and social justice: A theological reflection on
Christian social teaching from 1966-1976,” RELIGIONS: A Journal of Nigerian
Association for the study of Religion 2, no.2 (1977): 76-7.
17
Erlank, “Plain Clean Facts,” 79.
18
Astrid Bochow and Rijk van Dijk, “Christian Creations of New Spaces of Sexuality,
Reproduction, and Relationships in Africa: Exploring Faith and Religious Heterotopia,”
Journal of Religion in Africa 42 no.4 (2012): 325-44.
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The article draws from an empirical study conducted with young urban
Shona women and men in Harare, Zimbabwe, to understand how they
constructed their identities around the practice of labia elongation.20
Much of the existing literature about this practice is from Uganda,21
Rwanda,22 Lesotho,23 and Mozambique.24 Indications from these studies
are that labia elongation is the way through which women conform to
cultural and marital expectations. This literature also associates the
practice with enhanced sexual pleasure, although there are contradic-
tions in terms of whose sexual pleasure improves – those of men or
those of women? In the Zimbabwean context, some White male
historians, anthropologists, and medical doctors wrote about labia
elongation among the Shona during and shortly after the colonial era,
producing limited narratives about this practice,25 while it is unclear who
provided them with this knowledge. For example, one of these authors
wrote that labia elongation was done to prepare a girl’s body “to receive
the man,” adding that “in no way [was] it intended as a form of sexual
excitation.”26 From this, it is unclear whether the author implied that the
practice has no association with sexual pleasure in general or female
sexual pleasure in particular. There are suggestions that in the past,
husbands who married women without elongating their labia would send
them back to their families, which is why girls were forced by their family
19
Bochow and Van Dijk, “Christian Creations,” 329.
20
Labia elongation is a process that involves the massaging and pulling of the inner labia
of the vagina, using the thumb and index finger, sometimes after applying certain
herbal oils or powder to ease the stretching process.
21
Cf. Sylvia Tamale, “Eroticism, sensuality and ‘women’s secrets’ among the Bagan-
da,” IDS bulletin 37, no.5 (2006): 89-97.
22
Cf. Josefine Larsen, “The social vagina: labia elongation and social capital among wo-
men in Rwanda,” Culture, health & sexuality 12, no.7 (2010): 813-26.
23
Cf. Mathabo Khau, “Exploring sexual customs: Girls and the politics of elongating the
inner labia,” Agenda 23, no.79 (2009): 30-7.
24
Cf. Guillermo Martínez Pérez, Esmeralda Mariano, and Brigitte Bagnol, “Perceptions of
Men on Puxa-Puxa, or Labia Minora Elongation, in Tete, Mozambique,” The Journal of
Sex Research 52, no.6 (2015): 700-9.
25
Cf. for example, John Williams, “Labial elongation in the Shona,” The Central African
Journal of Medicine 15, no.7 (1969): 165-6.
26
Michael Gelfand, The genuine Shona: Survival values of an African culture (Gwelo:
Mambo Press, 1973), 169.
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“These Things Might Be There in the Bible, But They Are Hidden”
27
Mavis Muguti and Nomatter Sande, “Women’s Sexualized Bodies: Dealing with Wo-
men’s Sexual Autonomy in Pentecostalism in Zimbabwe,” in The Bible and Gender
Troubles in Africa, ed. Joachim Kügler, Rosinah Gabaitse, and Johanna Stiebert
(Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2019), 185-201.
28
Cf. for example, Betty Makoni, “Labia elongation is female genital mutilation type 4 –
harmful to girls,” personal blog, http://muzvarebettymakoni.org/labia-elongation-is-fe-
male-genital-mutilation-type-4-harmful-to-girls/.
29
While my PhD study intended to focus exclusively on the practice of labia elongation,
male circumcision emerged from the participants as a male version of genital modi-
fication. This is why my analysis will also refer to this practice.
30
My participants were in their 20s and 30s.
31
My sample was limited to those who identified as Shona. The Shona are considered
the largest ethnic group in Zimbabwe as they are said to account for 82% of the total
population. However, the Shona as a sociolinguistic category is made up by various
sub-ethnicities, notably the Karanga, Manyika, Zezuru, Korekore, and Ndau.
32
Because “middle-class” is a contested category, in the context of this essay I use it in
its relative and loose sense to refer to people who are both educated (at least to the
level of a first degree) and salaried professionals (or children of professionals) who stay
in medium to low density residential suburbs.
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did I select men on the basis that their wives or girlfriends had elongated
labia. However, these details sometimes emerged during our conversa-
tions when some women would disclose their labial status. The inclusion
of men in a study about a female practice was motivated by arguments
that gender is a relational category, and therefore “to study women in
isolation perpetuates the fiction that…the experience of one sex has little
or nothing to do with the other.”33 Prior conversations before my study
indicated that labia elongation, though a female practice, was done for
men’s benefit. Hence, it was also important to capture men’s views
regarding this practice.
33
Joan Scott, “Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: Or, the uses of poststructuralist
theory for feminism,” Feminist Studies 14, no.1 (1988): 32.
34
Emmanuel Mayeza, “Playing gender in childhood: how boys and girls construct and
experience schooling and play in a township primary school near Durban” (PhD diss.,
Stellenbosch University, 2014).
35
Nicola Gavey, “Feminist Poststructuralism and Discourse Analysis,” Psychology of Wo-
men Quarterly 13 (1989): 459-75.
36
Gavey, “Feminist Poststructuralism,” 464.
37
Gavey, “Feminist Poststructuralism,” 464.
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“These Things Might Be There in the Bible, But They Are Hidden”
38
Vivien Burr, Social Constructionism (New York: Routledge, 2003), 18.
39
Jean Carabine, “Unmarried motherhood 1830-1990: A genealogical analysis,” in
Discourse as data: A guide for analysis, eds. Simeon Yates, Stephanie Taylor, and
Margareth Wetherell (London and Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2001), 267-310.
40
Rob Pattman, “Researching interviews, braais and diaries and the gendered perfor-
mances of young men in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and setting agendas for
HIV/AIDS education,” in Society in Focus-Change, Challenge and Resistance:
Reflections from South Africa and Beyond, eds. Lindy Heinecken and Heidi Prozesky
(Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 272-89.
41
Helen Cahill, “Approaches to understanding youth well-being,” in Handbook of children
and youth studies, eds. Joanna Wyn and Helen Cahill (Singapore and London:
Springer, 2015), 95-113.
42
Bridal showers are celebratory urban parties organised for women who are about to
wed, and normally take place a week or two before the white wedding. They become
sites of sex education or initiation for a soon-to-be bride.
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43
While bridal showers are for women, there are also bachelor’s parties for men about to
get married, although these are not as common as bridal showers. When they occur,
they are organised by male friends, while pastors are rarely invited. I did not focus on
bachelor’s parties, because from interviews I conducted with men about how they know
about labia elongation they did not mention these as platforms through which they
learn about this practice. Instead, they mentioned the internet and peers as their
sources of information on labia elongation. However, I must add that some female
participants complained that, while women at bridal showers were encouraged to
sexually please their husbands, men were not subjected to similar teachings at
bachelor’s parties where all they do is “drink beer and braai meat.”
44
Gisela Geisler, Women and the remaking of politics in Southern Africa: Negotiating
autonomy, incorporation, and representation (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2004).
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ever told me that at the kitchen tea. I think churches don’t [teach this];
most churches are silent about such things though they know that it’s
important or that men like it, or that some women in church actually
already have them, but I [think] they do it outside the church, because I
personally haven’t seen any church where they talk about it except
recently.
When I asked her why she thought most churches do not teach about
this practice, she said it was because they believe that it is “done in the
name of tradition, [therefore] it’s not holy-like.” Interestingly, she told me
that her husband in one of the ladies’ church meetings had encouraged
women to elongate their labia which aroused “a lot of interest” among the
ladies from this church. Contributing to these women’s interest and
delight, it seems, is the idea that a male pastor, and a religious figure,
was endorsing a traditional practice often constructed as ungodly in
dominant Christian discourses, yet quite significant to most of them.
45
Normally bridal showers are held in houses. This was the first time I had attended a
bridal shower held in a church building.
46
Although it emerged in my study that most women in Zimbabwe had undergone labia
elongation, there was a suggestion that this practice had been popularised by older
women of Malawian and Mozambican origin who are said to be more knowledgeable
about this since they attend cultural initiation schools. Emerging from conversations
with other participants were stories that Malawian and Mozambican women have
established “sex academies” in some highdensity suburbs where they teach women
how to spice their sexual lives including how to pull one’s labia effectively within a short
period. Women will then pay for these services.
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the husband. She reminded them that a “woman’s vagina should not be
like that of a girl,” and therefore elongated labia brought that difference.
So, in this context, elongating one’s labia was very explicitly constructed
as differentiating a girl from a woman, who was presumably deemed
sexual. She ended the topic by offering her services to show those who
wanted to do it, about how to do it.
Despite witnessing this Christian led bridal shower, the other women I
interviewed could not agree whether Pentecostal Christian churches
teach or should teach about labia elongation. However, the main position
they took was that they “don’t normally teach” this specific subject and
sexuality issues in general, especially in public events such as kitchen
parties. One of the women, Chenai, explained that because sexuality
and labia elongation were “intimate [and] private things,” only those
women who were about to get married and those already married were
taught about these individually and in private and by specialists in the
area.
Others indicated that in the few cases where young women were taught
about labia elongation by religious figures, it was often done in non-
sexualised ways despite the fact that they are already adults. Ruva,
another female participant, indicated that she once attended a single-
women meeting at their church when she was 26 years old. A female
church elder who was leading the meeting told the young women to
elongate their labia as that would help them to urinate in a “smart way
without splashing urine all over the toilet seat.” When I asked Rudo
whether they had responded to this elder, she said, with laughter, that
they kept quiet. She added that while the young women in the meeting
did not openly question what they were told, most knew that what the
church elder had taught them about labia elongation “was a lie.” This
was an indication that young women can act ignorant of sexuality issues
in front of prospective suitors, teachers, or parents who construct
themselves as authorities on sexual knowledge.47 In this case, the
assumption by the church leader was that, since these young women
were still unmarried, they have no prior knowledge of sexuality matters
from other sources of sex education including traditional initiation
schools, family, and peers. This is tied to Christian discourses em-
47
Abigail Harrison, “Hidden love: Sexual ideologies and relationship ideals among rural
South African adolescents in the context of HIV/AIDS,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 10,
no.2 (2008): 175-89.
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“These Things Might Be There in the Bible, But They Are Hidden”
48
The euphemist names given to elongated labia varied but were linked to their physical
appearance (for example “number elevens,” nzeve [ears], “extended family,” mabhai-
bheri [Bibles]), or their purpose – maketeni (curtains), zvidhori (dolls), “daddy’s toys,”
and madhoiri (doillies).
49
Cf. Muguti and Sande, “Women’s Sexualized Bodies,” 193.
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guess it’s because that it is not mentioned in the Bible, because in the
Bible you don’t hear it explicitly. You hear of girls that they are, they were
prepared…like in the book of Esther that they [women] took like a year
preparing to go and parade themselves before the King and you wouldn’t
really know that for that year what exactly will they be preparing. You
might be tempted to think that maybe they were being inspected of all
those things like elongated labia but it’s not written, so you wouldn’t really
know whether it is so acceptable, is it biblical? But…why I think it wouldn’t
be sinful to do it, is [that the] Bible respects the fact that as a wife you
should [do what your husband wants]. Just like the husband is
commanded to love his wife, the woman is commanded to respect and
submit to the husband, so if the husband thinks that he wants them
[elongated labia] on his wife, the wife can go out of their way to have
them. So I guess it’s not out of line [with biblical teachings].
Rudo: [W]hat happens in churches is that they say that one thing that you
must value most if you are a married woman, you must value your
husband. So what your husbands wants, that’s what you want, that’s what
you do meaning that it is not a [biblical] teaching that is done openly that
do so-so-so and do this because maybe another man doesn’t like it.
The fact that the practice of labia elongation is not explicitly stated in the
Bible could be the reason behind some churches’ silences around it,
especially those who follow the doctrine that “we speak where the Bible
speaks and become silent where the Bible is silent.”50 However, what is
most significant in this context is the way these two women justify labia
elongation by drawing from biblical discourses around husband-wife
relationships which, as they demonstrate, are characterised by unequal
power relations. It has been demonstrated in other studies that “in some
cases the Bible is unfortunately evoked to support the superiority of men
and the subordination of women.”51 What we see in the above narratives,
is how women (and not men) employ biblical discourses that support
female submission,52 which reinforce rather than challenge female sub-
ordination. The implication is that a good Christian wife must always do
what the husband wants and as the Bible commands. What this also
highlights is the reification and deification of the Bible as a powerful
person, the same way “culture” is also often personified by participants in
relation to gender and sexuality. Often, discourses on “culture” and the
50
Francis Machingura and Paradzai Nyakuhwa, “Sexism: A hermetical interrogation of
Galatians 3:28 and women in the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Pan
African Studies 8, no.2 (2015): 94.
51
Machingura and Nyakuhwa, “Sexism,” 95.
52
These are based on the biblical verses, Ephesians 5:22 and Colossians 3:18.
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53
Rob Pattman, “The beer drinkers say I had a nice prostitute but the church goers talk
about things spiritual: Learning to be men at a teachers’ college in Zimbabwe,” in
Changing men in Southern Africa, ed. Robert Morrell (Durban: University of Natal &
Zed Press, 2001), 225-38.
54
Paul Kollman, “Classifying African Christianities, Part Two: The Anthropology of Chris-
tianity and Generations of African Christians,” Journal of Religion in Africa 40, no.2
(2010): 118-48.
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differently. We are thinking that what we are doing has a benefit or what-
ever.
Taurai (interjecting): Masimba, Masimba, why do you go to gym? Why do
you go to the gym?
Masimba: What?
Taurai: Why do you go to the gym?
Ras: If you were created perfectly?
Masimba: To change my appearance.
Taurai: Why do you want to change what God has created as perfect?
Obert: No, going to the gym is not to go and change, it’s to…
Taurai & Ras: You change! You change!
Masimba: (chuckles) Yes, I change, but the change…
Obert: It’s for healthy reasons…
Sam: I personally feel that natural things taste good just as they are…
People now want to put spices, but natural is the best, so people should
just be as God created them.
Taurai: Nothing is added, herbs or anything when pulling labia, it’s the
same with you, you just lift weights and your muscle grows.
In the above excerpt, going to the gym in this case is on the one hand
presented as a male activity, while situated around versions of middle-
class masculinities and discourses of self-improvement on the other
hand.55 Furthermore, arguments in favour of labia elongation and male
circumcision are both secular and individualistic which render people’s
bodies as projects on which to work and improve on, from where the
Creator ended, through their own actions. Such self-improvement dis-
courses and practices seem to resonate with key features of modernity,
yet, ironically deployed by some participants to justify a traditional
cultural practice. The reason why men alluded to male circumcision is
against the background that currently Zimbabwe is one of the countries
in Southern Africa promoting it as an HIV prevention strategy. The
circumcision campaigns are, however, not exclusively framed within
health discourses, but also in discourses of modernity and sexuality. For
example, medical circumcision is presented as desirable because it
supposedly limits the likelihood of premature ejaculation, while also
carrying connotations of being fashionable and wise.
Just like men in the conversation presented above, some women, who
identified as Christian, also drew analogies of applying make-up and
trimming eyebrows to justify the practice of labia elongation, at the same
55
Hannah Farrimond, “Beyond the caveman: Rethinking masculinity in relation to men’s
help-seeking,” Health 16, no.2 (2012): 208-25.
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Chido: [T]he issue is, it’s not all about that God created me without them
[elongated labia]; if it was like that, people would not be applying those
Black Opal,56 people would not be trimming their eyebrows, because you
were not created [like that]. God created you with all those eyebrows, so
why are you removing them, but it’s all about what people are encoun-
tering in their day-to-day lives. Even in churches, people would not be
wearing trousers, people would be walking around naked because we
were created naked.
56
This is a range of make-up products popular with Black African women.
57
Bridgette Bagnol and Esmeralda Mariano, “Politics of naming sexual practices,” in
African Sexualities: A Reader, ed. Sylvia Tamale (Cape Town, Dakar, Nairobi, and
Oxford: Pambazuka Press, 2011), 271-87.
58
Ayo Coly, “Un/clothing African womanhood: Colonial statements and postcolonial
discourses of the African female body,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 33,
no.1 (2015): 18.
59
Coly, “Un/clothing African womanhood,” 18.
60
Bagnol and Mariano, “Politics of Naming,” 26.
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61
Mike Kesby, “Participatory diagramming as a means to improve communication about
sex in rural Zimbabwe: A pilot study,” Social Science & Medicine 50, no.12 (2000):
1723-41.
62
Muguti and Sande, “Women’s Sexualized Bodies,” 186.
63
Chris Weedon, Feminist practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987).
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“These Things Might Be There in the Bible, But They Are Hidden”
64
Pattman, “Beer Drinkers Say,” 235.
65
Weedon, Feminist Practice, 86.
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[women] who think it’s important are uneducated.” Reflecting on this, one
can argue that she was presenting herself (and even myself) as
educated and empowered women, thus disassociating us from the
practice she constructed as a source of “abuse” and against Christianity.
However, months after this conversation, when I asked her during an
interview why some women were not keen on pulling their labia, she
pointed out that some women
think it is some form of abuse, that why should you pull yourself? Why
should you try to be something that you are not? If God wanted these
things [labia] to grow long, he would have created them long (laughs);
there are some people with those line of thoughts, but then…each one
will be trying to justify their decision.
When I reminded her that she had expressed a similar opinion earlier,
she said her “mindset has changed to some extent” adding that she
“wouldn’t even mind trying it [although she] wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble
to do it.” I found it puzzling that she was now among the women who
alluded to biblical references to rationalise labia elongation. She is the
one who argued that labia elongation, though not stated in the Bible, is
implicitly biblical if done to please the husband. In the focus group
discussion that she participated in, after other women spoke positively
about the practice, I was surprised when she posed the question, “So
what do we do? I have girl children, should I tell them to pull?” The
question implied that her perception of labia elongation was shifting to an
extent that she was now considering educating her own (and church)
daughters about this. I found her question perplexing because I was
under the impression that she would criticise this practice using the
same arguments she gave to me in our earlier conversations.
66
Rob Pattman, “Ways of thinking about young people in participatory interview
research,” in Handbook of children and youth studies, eds. Johanna Wyn and Helen
Cahill (Singapore and London: Springer, 2015), 79-92.
67
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (London:
Tavistock Publications, 1988).
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“These Things Might Be There in the Bible, But They Are Hidden”
68
Jane Elliott, Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and quantitative approach-
es (London: Sage Publications, 2005).
69
The Remba are part of the ethnic groups in Zimbabwe that are said to still be practising
traditional initiation schools where male circumcision and labia elongation are
emphasised.
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At the same time, it is worth noting that the invitation of (female) pastors
(as moralistic figures) to kitchen parties and not to bachelor’s parties,
signifies how morality and the duty to provide sexual pleasure is often
imputed to women, while men can revel in their naughtiness in bache-
lor’s parties. In order to challenge this, some scholars argue that “there
should be a synchronisation of the syllabus taught at bridal showers and
the bachelor’s party” where both men and women are taught about how
to mutually please each other sexually.73 The church discourse in biblical
texts shared at some of these bridal showers or other Christian women
gatherings contribute to the representation of women as mere objects of
sexual desire, whose bodies are and should be under the control of their
husbands.74 This argument is affirmed by how Christian women in my
studies implied that the decision for some women to elongate their labia
is not personal but depends on whether or not their husbands express
desire for elongated labia. The desire to please husbands stems from
70
Tamale, “The rights to culture,” 48.
71
Harry Garuba, “Explorations in animist materialism: Notes on reading/writing African
literature, culture, and society,” Public Culture 15, no.2 (2003): 264.
72
Axel Harneit-Sievers, Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian
State in the Twentieth Century (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006).
73
Muguti and Sande, “Women’s Sexualised Bodies,” 196.
74
Muguti and Sande, “Women’s Sexualized Bodies,” 186.
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“These Things Might Be There in the Bible, But They Are Hidden”
the fear that men might leave them for other women who have elongated
labia. Women are subjected to additional pressure from female church
leaders to provide maximum sexual satisfaction to their husbands even if
it means engaging in cultural practices that “militate against women’s
sexual autonomy.”75
References
Bagnol, Bridgette and Esmeralda Mariano. “Politics of naming sexual
practices.” In African Sexualities: A Reader, edited by Sylvia
Tamale, 271-87. Cape Town, Dakar, Nairobi, and Oxford:
Pambazuka Press, 2011.
Bochow, Astrid and Rijk van Dijk. “Christian Creations of New Spaces of
Sexuality, Reproduction, and Relationships in Africa: Exploring
Faith and Religious Heterotopia.” Journal of Religion in Africa 42,
no.4 (2012): 325-44.
75
Muguti and Sande, “Women’s Sexualized Bodies,” 191.
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Chitando, Ezra. “Down with the Devil, Forward with Christ! A Study of the
Interface between Religious and Political Discourses in
Zimbabwe.” African Sociological Review 6, no.1 (2002): 1-16.
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Larsen, Josefine. “The social vagina: labia elongation and social capital
among women in Rwanda.” Culture, health & sexuality 12, no.7
(2010): 813-26.
Pattman, Rob. “The beer drinkers say I had a nice prostitute but the
church goers talk about things spiritual: Learning to be men at a
teachers’ college in Zimbabwe.” In Changing men in Southern
Africa, edited by Robert Morrell, 225-38. Durban: University of
Natal & Zed Press, 2001.
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Tamale, Sylvia. “The rights to culture and the culture of rights: a critical
perspective on women’s sexual rights in Africa.” Feminist Legal
Studies 16, no.1 (2008): 47-69.
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