Decoloniality and women’s agency in sex education in Zambia

Abstract

In 2018, 22 teachers and four government officers started a six-month development process, designed to integrate a gender-equity lens into sex education in Eastern Province, Zambia. The initiative was funded by the Dutch Government. In this article, I explore the emancipatory potential and limits of this gender transformative approach. Civil society privileges the empowerment of women’s and girls’ voices through participatory methods. This situated women-led ‘encounter of change’ between men and women addressed the ‘harmful practices’ of Chewa initiation, transcending patriarchal opposition in the process. Using an applied anthropological lens, I explore what enabled this contingent change in narrative among teachers, but I also question the coloniality inherent in efforts to transform the gender and sexuality of others through the ubiquity of voice.

Kuchokera ku mphepete

Mu chaka ca 2018, aphunzitsi makumi awiri ndi awiri ndi amai anai akulu-akulu amuboma adayambitsa ndondomeko ya chitukuko ya miyezi isanu ndi umodzi yokonzedwa kuti aphatikize ku maphunziro po linganiza nchito pakati pa amuna ndi akazi kuti ikhale ngati mandala amaphunziro kwa amuna kapena akazi kundela la laku m’mawa kwa dziko la Zambia. Nchitoyi idathandizidwa ndi boma la chi Dutch. Poyankha Connelly ndi Messerschmidt anapempha kuti apange kafuku-fuku pa zokhuza kugwirizana pakati pa bungwe la azimai ndi malingaliro ya mphamvu za amuna. Mu nkhaniyi ndikufufuza momasulira ndi kuika malire pofuna kuthetsa nchito za chi badwidwe pakati pa amuna ndi akazi. Mabungwe osiyana-siyana amapereka mwai wopititsa patsogolo mau a zimai ndi atsikana kudzera mu njira yotengako mbali pa kupanga chisankho ngati chida coyenelera. Ici chidapangitsa bungwe la zimai kukhala ndi manso mphenya pa nchito ya chibadwidwe ya amuna kapena akazi, kunena pa miyambo yoipa ya a Chewa, mopitiliza kutsutsa chikhalidwe cosayenera cotengera kumakolo awo pa nthawiyi. Pogwiritsa nchito mandala a chikhalidwe ca umunthu, ndina fufuza zomwe zidzetsa sintho lotengera polankhulana ndi aziphunzitsi, koma ndi nakayikiranso za makhalidwe otengera kwa atsamunda pofuna kusintha nchito za chibadwidwe ca amuna kapena akazi kudzera mu mau onenedwa mu makwao. Mau afungulo: chitukuko pa kusiya chikhalidwe ca atsamunda ndi kugonjera makhalidwe abwino, nchito za chibadwidwe ca amuna kapena akazi ndi chitukuko, kukula kwa mphamvu ya amuna,bungwe la azimai, maphunziro a amuna kapena akazi ku Zambia.

Implications

Integrating critical thinking on gender and power within sexuality education has been praised for its ability to reduce unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. The Dutch government has been investing in this ‘gender transformative approach’ by strengthening the capacity of 64 schools in Zambia.

I draw on findings of a multi-sited ethnography on the experiences of 22 male and female teachers and government officials in Zambia, who underwent training in this approach from 2018 to 2019. Female teachers and government workers utilized this training to critique and change harmful initiation rites of the Chewa peoples. However, this attempt at norm change was hindered by the ‘fluidity of patriarchy,’ which refers to the ability of powerful men to adapt to outside interventions. In this case, they undermined the project. Labeling this resistance simply as ‘dealing with opposition’, as Western NGOs have started doing recently, overlooks the ways in which traditions are reimagined and reinvented to sustain patriarchy and gender inequality.

In this article, I critique the way Western programs listen to the voices of the young people they aim to support. Due to NGO jargon and a focus on evidence and effectiveness, these voices often go unheard. I urge policymakers and practitioners to ask self-critical questions about who gets to set the research agenda, whose voices are prioritized, and (ironically) how their own masculinist leadership norms and neoliberal practices may embody expressions of coloniality and patriarchy.

Social Media Statement

Lorist explores the link between women’s agency and ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in Dutch-funded sexuality education in Zambia, highlighting transformative impacts and limitations. #GenderEquality #Education #Zambia

Keywords:

• Gender and development
• patriarchy
• sexuality education
• women’s agency
• Zambia

It is February 2018. The first teacher training on gender equality in sexuality education is about to start in an overcrowded conference room in a village setting in Eastern Province, Zambia. I am drinking instant coffee with the most senior people in the room, and feel the usual nervous anticipation I get before the start of a training process. I am distracted from my nerves when Mercy (all names in this article are pseudonyms), the co-facilitator of the training, introduces me to Mary. I sense her authority. As the senior government official, Mary holds the most powerful position of those gathered, perhaps equal to Sam’s status as the Zambian senior NGO officer.

Sam is responsible for implementing the program activities envisioned, designed and funded by NGO alliance members in the Netherlands.¹ We invited Sam to officially kick-off the workshop, be present as a role model, and advocate for gender equality. We knew from both research (Cornwall, Edstrom, and Greig 2012) and years of experience that if senior men do not buy into programs, gender equality often remains unseen, unimportant and underfunded. To our surprise, Sam ended his speech on integrating gender equality into sexuality education with a statement of men’s superiority: ‘However, men still remain the head of the household; that is how it has always been’.

Some men involved in the daily on-the-ground management of the project lived in Eastern Province amongst the Chewa, the dominant group in the region. One of these men became involved with two young unmarried female teachers, despite the gender training (designed in the Netherlands by Dutch gender experts) being about gender equality and not abusing power in sexual relationships. Later, I was told by one of my Chewa interlocuters that while being a teacher in a rural government school does give some status, it is very poorly paid, which made these young women susceptible to reproducing the unequal power relations that were being critiqued during the sex-ed training. Possibly feeling his behavior was no longer accepted by others in the group, the man who had made the advances started to frustrate preparations for the last two weeklong training sessions. One female participant stated that ‘they [men who helped organize the training] do not believe in gender equality’.

The first training, like most NGO trainings, was based on participatory pedagogics through which participants are actively motivated to voice their thoughts and feelings. In preparation for the ‘training of trainers’, 22 male and female teachers, randomly selected from 22 of the 64 public schools, were expected to extend their newly learned participatory teaching methods on gender and power to the rest of the 64 schools in the region, as part of the project’s aim to capacitate 64 secondary schools in the region on teaching gender equality within sexuality education. Mercy proposed introducing storytelling as a participatory method to help teachers reflect on and change their attitudes about child marriage and related initiation rites. The idea was that Mercy, who was from the region, would tell a personal story of how she had broken with community norms around early marriage and initiation. Ideally, through voice and empathy, teachers would critically reflect on these practices as these affected their own lives and those of their students.

After Sam’s opening speech, the air-conditioning stopped working, so we sat outside in the shade of the trees on the hotel’s grounds. As we settled around her, Mercy recounted her life story. We were captivated. These words were shared at the crescendo of her story:

When I turned twelve, I ran away from home with my sister. They [her parents] wanted me to marry, but I did not want that. We ran away to my uncle who had money, but even though we begged him he sent us away. We had to walk for many hours. He refused to help me and my sister, but our aunty, who also did not marry, finally took care of us. She pushed hard for me to finalize my A levels (high school). In the end I even managed to do my master’s in the UK. After my studies, I got a call from Zambia that my uncle was dying. I immediately flew back home to Zambia from the UK, paid for the funeral, and my uncle was buried in the suit that I bought him.

Both male and female teachers, with tears in their eyes, listened in silence. Mercy then explained why she opposed early marriage and what she considered harmful parts of initiation rites for boys and girls becoming men and women – whilst advocating for preserving what she called the ‘positive aspects’ of these Chewa traditions and the cultural identity and cohesion that comes with them. As an NGO worker, she had adopted the term ‘harmful practices’ from widely used human rights and NGO discourse (UN Human Rights 2020).

Following her openness, which went against assumed community norms against speaking openly about gender and sexuality, several other teachers shared their personal stories. These stories, initially by women teachers but later on by men also, focused on gendered violence in relation to initiation rites for girls and boys, especially for boys.

Initially, after six months of training, teachers reported that they talked more about gender and sexuality with their high school students (Simbaya et al. 2020). However, after two years, most teachers had stopped discussing gender and sexuality, due to fear of reprisal by the Nyau brotherhood, among other factors. The Nyau Brotherhood conducts the initiation for Chewa boys, as I describe in greater detail below.

Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) call for more research on women’s agency in relation to what they term ‘hegemonic masculinity’. In this article, I explore the agency of women such as Mercy and Mary and how, in their role as leaders among the matrilineal Chewa people in Eastern Province, Zambia, they facilitated changes in narrative, Simultaneously, perhaps ambitiously, but certainly because of my positionality as a white, middleclass man and Dutch ‘gender expert’, I aim to point to the always lurking ‘coloniality of silence’, or ‘operations of power that eviscerate deep silences of their depth and complexity’ (Ferrari 2020, 125), when western donors see ‘rationality and voice’ and its logocentrism as the predominant way to transform the gender and sexuality of the ‘other’.

Zambian sexuality education and the privileging of voice

In 2014, the Zambian government initiated an improved and ambitious framework for a countrywide Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) for children and youth enrolled in grades 5–12 (Zulu et al. 2019). The word ‘comprehensive’ in CSE denotes that it informs students on more than biology or sexually transmitted infections and diseases, and also includes psychosocial aspects of sexuality (Kakal et al. 2022). This western funded and research-informed narrative privileges evidence-based ‘rational’ approaches and ignores or aims to transform other ways of transferring knowledge on gender and sexuality. It favors youth empowerment and youth being motivated to voice their rights as its key organizing principle (Kakal et al. 2022).

‘Rational’ one-dimensional data are commonly used in development proposals to convince (western) donors to fund a program proposal. Statistics for Zambia, for example, point to an estimated 31% of young people aged 20–24 reported married before the age of 18 (MoGE 2013), and to an estimated birth rate for girls between 15 and 19 years of 135 births per 1000 adolescents; the world average for this age group is estimated at 44 per 1000 (MoH 2016). The development of the Ministry of Education, Science, Vocational Training, and Early Education 2014 CSE initiative – aimed to address child marriage, prevent early, unwanted pregnancy and reduce the risk of HIV infection – was supported by UNESCO and informed by other western funded international players including the WHO and UNFPA (Zambia Statistics Agency 2019).

The Dutch Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights (ASRHR) program that serves as the case story for this ethnography was informed by a similar statistical evidence-base and prior research (Haberland 2015). In her review of CSE evaluation studies, Haberland (2015) argues that human rights based CSE that integrates a critical gender and power lens is five times more effective at preventing STI infections and unintended pregnancies. Evaluation and study design criteria of the included project evaluations were disaggregated by whether they addressed issues of gender and power. Of the 22 sexuality and HIV education evaluations from developed and developing countries published between 1990 and 2012, 10 addressed gender or power, and 12 did not.

From a post-structural lens, I question effectiveness studies that are presented as objective and politically neutral: they are often funded by the same western donors that fund sexuality education interventions. Further, while I do not wish to downplay the social suffering addressed by such public health focused research, I do want to draw attention to the hidden political agenda behind the use of such data. Although presented as neutral and objective, such ‘rational data’ often tie into international biopolitical agendas that elide racial and gender norms that underly some ASRHR interventions (Lorist 2020).

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs has stringent evidence-based requirements for proposals submitted for consideration for funding. Evidence similar to the statistics detailed above were mobilized by the Dutch NGO alliance I discuss in this article, to convince the Ministry to fund the 2015–2020 anti-child marriage program with 33 million US dollars for different countries.

The current new five-year funding stream of the Dutch government is called Power of Voices, highlighting the assumption that voice equals liberation and silence is, by implication, oppressive and disempowering. However, authors like Carol Kidron (2009), Martina Ferrari (2020) and Ramos and Roberts (2021), inspired by decolonial theorists such as Maldonado-Torres (2007), question the emancipatory potential of ‘voice’. They link such coloniality to the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’ – I think therefore I am. They quote Maldonado-Torres as saying that: ‘beneath the “I think” we can read “others do not think,” and behind the “I am” it is possible to locate the philosophical justification that “others are not” or do not have being’ (Ramos and Roberts 2021, 30). These authors link the coloniality of knowledge with the coloniality of being, and argue that without rationality, the (racial) other is assumed to lack ‘being’ within modernity. In other words, other ways of knowing, including ‘deep silence’ or ‘silent memory’ (Kidron 2009), are excluded from being, or from being taken seriously within hegemonic western discourse which privileges rationality and evidence-based interventions and the empowerment of ‘voice’.

This rational approach was employed to convince schools and Mary, as government officer, to responded positively to the Dutch funded anti-child marriage program, and to support teacher training on the gender transformative approach. During training, for example, UNESCO findings were used: ‘It is acknowledged that CSE can provide age-appropriate, culturally relevant and scientifically accurate information, but teachers responsible for providing this subject matter must consider their own value-systems and attitudes to avoid undue bias’ (UNESCO 2015, 152).

Bringing together the recent revival of decolonial thinking and ‘the emancipatory limits of voice and the coloniality of silence’ (Ferrari 2020, 1) with the western canon of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) and gender performativity (Butler 1988), in this article I explore the emancipatory possibilities and limits of this ‘gender and development’ training in Eastern Province, Zambia. I first briefly sketch the basis of the idea of engaging men and boys with regard to gender equality through sexuality education, and consider how these Dutch-funded ideas traveled to a remote rural place like Eastern Province in Zambia.

Exporting Dutch ideas on engaging men

Five Dutch women CEOs convene in a conference room in Amsterdam in 2017. They are gathered with predominantly women staff of their respective organizations for a meeting organized by their international NGO alliance. The goal is to address teenage pregnancy and child marriage in African and Asian countries. These five comprise the steering committee of this international coalition. On the agenda are the successes so far, the challenges, ways forward, and an explanation of the gender transformative approach. This approach aims to address harmful gender norms and their underlying power relations, by engaging boys and men as allies for gender equality (Sonke Gender Justice 2012). Integrating such gender transformation into CSE, as well as MYP (Meaningful Youth Participation) (Melles and Ricker 2018), are key activities within the alliance’s strategy.

These leaders and their organizations are required by the Dutch government to work in alliances, at a time of major budget cuts and increasing competition for scarce funding (Schulpen 2016), while collaborating to address child early and forced marriage. They were themselves in what many in the Dutch NGO scene would call, ironically, a ‘forced marriage’. Collaborating and depending on each other, the NGOs were simultaneously embroiled in a game of win or lose for the next five-year funding cycle of the Dutch government. The NGO leaders talked over each other, cut each other short, and ‘mansplained’ each other’s contributions in view of the silent, attentive and slightly bewildered audience of lower-ranking Dutch experts and development staff. I found it ironic that white feminist leaders who claim to fight for gender equality in practice acted out masculinist leadership norms, in attempts to fix the gender and sexuality of the racial other (see also Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 847).

In the following, I introduce the historical context of initiation rites for boys of the Chewa peoples of Eastern Zambia, as this became the central theme of the sex-ed training on gender which I address in this article.

Initiation rites for boys in the Nyau brotherhood

The Nyau brotherhood has been a feature of Chewa life for centuries and is well researched (Kaspin 1996; Aguilar 1996; Kachapila 2006). Since pre-colonial times, men of the Nyau have performed a masked dance called gule wamkulu or the Great Dance. It has traditionally been performed at funerals and birth ceremonies, and in remembrance of ancestors. More recently, it has been associated with initiation ceremonies for boys becoming men. The initiation ceremony of adolescent boys can last up to two weeks, and takes place in a wooded grove where their ancestors are buried. The gule wamkulu, performed in the course of initiation, reflects Chewa cosmology and religion (Aguilar 2009), in which ancestors play a major role in daily life. Chewa people believe in the presence of God in all aspects of life, and believe that God has both feminine aspects, represented by the earth, and masculine qualities, represented by the sky. Through pemphero lalikulu, or the Great Prayer, Nyau members believe they can communicate with their deceased ancestors. During the performance of gule wamkulu, masked dancers act as the spirits of the dead, who can act with impunity. In this context, violence and occasionally deaths have occurred at the hands of masked Nyau dancers (Aguilar 2009, 105).

The masking practices of the Nyau have been interpreted in functionalist ways, such as expressing political identity, marking a psychological change in the process of becoming an adult, or serving as a form of income generation. They have also been analyzed in terms of gender relations, as women were gradually excluded from the Nyau brotherhood (Aguilar 1996, 310). As described further below, historically women not men were involved in initation ceremonies. Now, with the exception of a few women elders, women and girls who attempt to get close to these ceremonies are chased away and threatened with either violence or curses.

Chewa initiation for boys

Recent studies have foregrounded how Nyau culture has dynamically adapted to social change, including colonialism and Ngoni and Yao invasions. This adaptive quality is attributed by scholars (Kaspin 1996; Kachapila 2006) to the fluidity and hybridity of Nyau culture, which is considered simultaneously modern and traditional.

Initiation rites for boys were not always part of Nyau practices or Chewa culture; they emerged in response to social changes during colonialism, and the subsequent rise of capitalism in Southern Africa. Both matrilineage and the institution of the Nyau in Chewa culture have survived many social upheavals. Under the dominance of the Maravi Kingdom, mid-sixteenth century, and under the patrimonial influences of invaders like the Ngoni and the Yao rulers (mid nineteenth century), both Nyau and matrilineage were suppressed and undermined. Matthew Schoffeleers (1973, 59) describes how the eventual collapse of these outside influences, paradoxically, facilitated the blooming of the Nyau brotherhood, as the dissolution of the patrilineal paramount chiefs left a political void filled by matrilineal Chewa village headmen. Kachapila (2006, 325) writes that ‘with the fall of the Maravi paramount chiefs and the proliferation of senior headmen in their place, the power to grant rights to initiation and death rites, and to organize Nyau, passed on to countless senior headmen’.

Under British colonialism, Christian missionaries and assumptions of the ‘male-headed household’ gained normative influence. Simultaneously, the rise of capitalism in Southern Africa led to extractive labor migration. In response, men and women Chewa elders started granting young men more power to keep them from migrating, while still maintaining the maternal line. The Nyau brotherhood always had an economic aspect to it, as its masked dancers earnt money with their performances and mask making. By allowing Nyau members to perform initiation rites, masculine power and influence further increased, without fundamentally disrupting matrilineal marriage and inheritance (Aguilar 1996, 40). Whereas Nyau and its masked dances had historically been associated solely with burials, communication with ancestors and girl’s initiation rites, socio-economic changes led to new initiation practices for boys in the early 1900s, as described by a Chewa headman in 1974 (Kachapila 2006, 333):

At first only married men were allowed to join the secret Nyau society. Then gradually, much younger men began to be accepted into the dance, until today, (boy) children are eligible for membership originated from chinamwali, which was an initiation institution for women. Seeing this, Chief Mkanthama thought it would be a good thing to have another initiation institution for the boys. And so Nyau was transformed into an initiation to cater for the men.

The adaptation of Nyau to include the ritual initiation of boys meant that almost all

Chewa men would become part of Nyau, whereas this had previously been reserved for only a few. In addition to granting men more power, this change also ensured that men continued to be involved in matrilineage (Kachapila 2006, 320).

Hegemonic masculinities and women’s agency

Structuralist approaches and most gender-equality programs, like the one discussed here, often see patriarchy, and by implication hegemonic masculinity, as static and fixed, existing objectively outside of their own spaces. This view recalls theories of the second half of the last century, when scholars like Waters (1989) and Walby (1989) started using dual-systems theory to make sense of patriarchy. Informed by neo-Marxist approaches and structuralist models, they saw patriarchy and capitalism as semi-autonomous but interlinked deterministic structures.

Building on post-structuralist insights, feminist theorists challenged this duality, arguing that dual-systems theory was essentializing (Connell 1987; Acker 1989). As an alternative, they proposed a more dynamic, relational conceptualization in which gender, and thus masculinities, intersect with other markers of inequality like race and class (Crenshaw 1989).

Almost two decades after Connell’s (1987) initial work on hegemonic masculinity, Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) suggested the concept be reformulated. In their landmark article, ‘Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept’, they stress the need for a ‘more complex model of gender hierarchy, emphasizing the agency of women; (and) explicit recognition of the geography of masculinities, emphasizing the interplay among local, regional, and global levels’ (2005, 829). Responding to and building upon this more complex and relational understanding of gender, in this article I draw attention to women’s agency within matriliny and within the international gender-equality apparatus.

Malleability and silent multiplicity

Building on Hegel and speech act theory, Judith Butler (1988, 520) states that gender should not be seen as ‘performative’ in the theatrical sense of the word. Countering essentialisms, she argues that there is no essential self behind any ‘role’; instead, a person brings about the reality of gender by its utterance. ‘Uttering’ in this case is more than speaking; it encompasses embodied performance and ongoing processes of becoming, which entail both the idea and the embodiment of gender. Performing gender involves not only a person’s expressions, but also others’ attribution of norms and social sanctions. Sam, for example, in declaring his disapproval of gender training, was trying – unsuccessfully – to reinforce gender norms, and as I describe later, to sanction men and women from talking about taboos such as initiation.

Actor and role, Butler (1988) argues, should be seen as a malleable unity co-constituted by the context in which gender performances and utterances take place. Following social constructionist and post-structural thought, Butler argues that gender identity is neither only natural nor only fictional (i.e., symbolic), but rather, in-between. She writes, ‘What is called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status’ (Butler 1988, 520; my emphasis). Gender, then, requires ongoing and continued performance. This implies its fragility and malleability, and makes gender transformative practices theoretically a possibility.

I would like to introduce the work of Ramos and Roberts (2021) here. They propose a feminist pedagogy of wonder. Inspired by trailblazers such as Irigaray (1996) and Moreton-Robinson (2000, 351), they quote the latter as saying ‘our ability to know and our experiences are limited, therefore standpoints are partial and so are the knowledges we produce’. Challenging the coloniality of knowing and being, they quote Sarah Ahmed: ‘Many feminisms means many movements … It might be assumed that feminism is what the West gives to the East’. That assumption is a travelling assumption, one that tells a feminist story in a certain way, a story that is much repeated; a history of how feminism acquired utility as an imperial gift. That is not my story. We need to tell other feminist stories’ (Ahmed 2017, 2–4). Perhaps future research on women’s and girls’ empowerment can also explore these ‘stories of silence’, or the agency of deep silence and the complexity of silent embodied practices as resistance (Kidron 2009).

Ramos and Roberts (2021, 35) propose a feminist pedagogy of wonder as ‘a passion without an opposite’, challenging the colonial patriarchal binary logic of knower/known. In their pedagogy of wonder, which resonates strongly with participatory NGO methods, they propose Shereen Roshanravan’s (2014) concept of ‘the plurilogue’. Going beyond the binary of the dialogue, in a plurilogue, many different voices converse with each other. By expressing themselves differently and beyond the single dimension of rationality, it is assumed that through respectful attentive engagements and deep listening, change can occur. This is as long as ‘all voices are co-implicated in the struggles they are discussing’ (Ramos and Roberts 2021, 37).

Methods

In this article, I draw on findings from operational research commissioned by the Dutch funded project and led by Dr. Joseph Simbaya at the University of Zambia (Simbaya et al. 2020). Researchers followed 20 of the 22 men and women teachers who participated in sex-ed and gender workshops for a period of six months after the last training workshop ended. Development projects often use operational research to inform the design, and improve the effectiveness of future interventions. Operational research findings are furthermore used as evidence for future fundraising efforts (what Lorway 2017 terms an ‘evidence-making’ approach), as required by many Western donors, including the Dutch. Throughout this Dutch-funded operational research, teachers completed questionnaires and kept diaries to reflect on their gender roles and attitudes. These data were complemented with data from focus group discussions. The development project was pleased with the semi-longitudinal results, as the men teachers reported doing more household work and women teachers reported that they started to address perceived inequities at home and in church. For the sex-ed project the most positive outcome was that teachers now felt more comfortable to talk about sexuality, gender and power with their students (Simbaya et al. 2020).

The three week long participatory workshops were attended by 11 men and 11 women teachers and four government officers (who all identified as women). The teachers were selected from schools in two participating districts in Eastern Province. I conducted participant observation during the three workshops; my various roles as Dutch man, PhD student and gender expert will have had influence on my perspectives/findings and may have resulted in responses affected by desirability bias. My position may also have restricted access to some critical information, as I was also viewed as representing the Dutch donor NGO on which the project depended financially. On the other hand, my complex positionality allowed me unique access to multiple in-depth perspectives on the fields of study. Multi-sited ethnography, including organizational ethnography at the donor NGO in Europe, and participant observation both in Europe and Zambia, helped me to understand participants’ reactions to the training content and potential discursive frictions. After the trainings, I conducted follow-up interviews with two of the women teachers and with the senior Zambian gender expert.

Findings

In the introduction, I briefly described the dynamics of the gender training for the sex-ed teachers. Despite Sam’s attempts to prevent the teachers from publicly talking about gender and sexuality, Mercy’s example of ‘voice’ made it possible for some women teachers to share their own stories of gendered suffering. Chimwemwe, for example, shared what she had learned about initiation practices for boys over dinner that night. The next morning, she decided to share her story with her fellow teachers. Motivated by Mercy’s storytelling, Chimwemwe told her colleagues that:

As a female teacher I was surprised that the boys in my class would no longer respect me after they had gone for initiation as part of the Nyau. After this rite of passage, for which they spent two weeks in the bush, they now felt they were men and no longer had to respect me because I am a woman. This made teaching impossible and I wanted to know what happened during this initiation. I asked one boy in my class to explain to me what had changed for him.

Under threat of an ancestral curse, she narrated, boys are pushed into sexual initiation practices that many of them do not like. As I did not conduct research into the lived experiences of these young men, I do not want to risk what Spivak calls ‘naming too soon’² (Sharp and Spivak 2003, 619). I therefore choose not to include the details of what Chimwemwe shared with the group, only that with which she was comfortable.³ After the training session, Mercy told me that initiation rites for girls and boys used to be conducted at the same time, so that potential marriage partners could find each other through celebrations like gule wamkulu. Reflecting on how the tradition had changed over time, and why she was an advocate for change, she complained that ‘nowadays they do not happen at the same time anymore, and now boys just use it (initiation) to go on a rampage’.

Mercy’s movement: situated norm change and its limits

During the second training, in December 2018, Nyau initiation rites took center stage on the training agenda. Mary, the government official, had become a strong advocate for change. She stated several times that she was a feminist, and strongly supported integrating the newly learned participatory exercises that critique and challenge masculinist power in sexual and gendered relations within the sex-ed curriculum. She supported these statements by signing a letter, formally approving gender-transformative sexuality education in all 64 schools in her district. Her status as a government official allowed other women teachers also to speak out. Barbara, a government officer who had conducted her master’s thesis on the chinamwali initiation ceremony for girls, became Mary’s ally. Barbara argued that she wanted to retain the practice of initiation, which she felt was good for social cohesion and Chewa cultural identity, but to get rid of some of its ‘harmful aspects’. She specifically argued against the well-researched tradition of fisi (hyena, in Chewa) (Kamlongera 2007), in which a man as initiator has sex with initiated girls. This was also the key conclusion of research she had conducted earlier.

Summarizing the morning’s discussions, Mercy shared that alongside her work as facilitator, she was involved in another civil society initiative, which she called her ‘women’s movement’. Its aim, she declared, was to maintain positive aspects of Chewa culture, while changing harmful aspects related to initiation and sexuality. She officially invited all women in the room to join her movement and become members, saying: ‘You as teachers are respected in your communities and are leaders teaching our youth and future leaders about our traditions, but also about the importance of gender equality and keeping our girls safe’.

After lunch, Mercy, Mary and Barbara called all the women outside. They gathered behind the dining room of the hotel; the men in the dining room could see but not hear their colleagues. Later, Mercy told the participants that all of the women had signed up for Mercy’s women-only WhatsApp group so that they could keep in touch on the subject.

On our seven-hour drive home to Lusaka after the training, Mercy shared that, as leader of her ‘movement’ and a respected senior citizen, she wanted to request an audience with the Paramount Chief of the Chewa peoples, who she knew personally. The meeting was to discuss how traditions could be changed to be more gender equitable and less harmful. ‘In patriarchy, men listen to their leader and only if the paramount chief changes the tradition, (the initiation for boys) will be changed’, she said. In a follow-up interview a year and a half after the program had ended, Mercy lamented that she had still not spoken to the Paramount Chief. She explained that this was due to protocol, or formal bureaucratic obstacles that prevented access, although Covid and illness of the Chief were likely also reasons.

Failed situated patriarchal opposition and limits to change

The final workshop, in 2019, took place in the same rural hotel. By then the trust between men and women in the group had grown and teachers were encouraged to share personal stories through the participatory exercises designed to promote empowerment through ‘voice’. A young woman teacher told the group that her older sister was in a violent marriage, and that she felt powerless to help her. Encouraged by her openness, one of the men teachers admitted that he was sometimes beaten by his wife and had ‘scars to show for it’. Some of the other men also shared that, having gone through initiation themselves, they felt bad about what they now also considered harmful practices.

After this open discussion, Sam, who had been silently listening in the background, stood before the group and declared: ‘In Zambia we do not talk about these issues and our feelings openly. It is not part of our culture’. The audience went quiet, but most, including most men, no longer seemed to agree with Sam. In the prior few months, some of the men involved in organizing the training had tried to derail the six-month training process in other ways. They did not respond to emails and agreements to organize follow-up training sessions, and transport for the last training session was not organized. A colleague shared that one of the men had left the development scene for a while to pursue business, but having failed, he had returned to the NGO for financial reasons, not because he believed in gender equality. One of the female teachers believed that the reluctance to cooperate (by the other male NGO officer) had to do with unprofessional behavior with young underprivileged female teachers, that was noticed by the other participants during the training period.

While I was writing this article, Chimwemwe, with whom I communicated regularly around how much to share about boys’ initiation, told me that most teachers no longer speak about the harmful aspects of Chewa initiation in the classroom. Perhaps this was because Mary was promoted in 2020, and stopped serving as government officer and main advocate of the process. Chimwemwe said, ‘They (men and women teachers) know that it (harmful aspects of boys’ initiation) is not a good practice, but they are afraid of landing into trouble. The working place (school) is more like their homes, where people around them could rise against them’.

Discussion and conclusion

Women’s agency and hegemonic masculinities

In response to Connell and Messerschmidt’s call (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) for more research on the relationship between women’s agency and their influential concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ within international gender and development activities, I have explored the influence of women’s agency on masculinist initiation narratives within the Dutch funded sex-ed training in Zambia. I have foregrounded participatory methods such as Mercy’s storytelling, and her ‘movement’, and described situated change in narrative on harmful aspects of initiation, and the structural barriers and persistence of such practices. Barbara’s research and Mercy’s agency addressed the sexually exploitative aspects of initiation rites. These moments became (potential) sites for situated norm change. The limits of this ‘encounter of change’ were represented by the impenetrability of the structures surrounding the paramount chief, the (failed) attempts of male NGO staff to frustrate the process, and the lack of sustainable change in the classroom, as teachers gradually stopped talking to their students about initiation and sexuality in fear of Nyau reprisal.

International NGOs are preoccupied with ending patriarchy, calling it ‘dealing with opposition’. Opposition is often imagined as static and monolithic, but as I illustrate, such structures are more dynamic and malleable than dual-systems theory imagined. The dynamic invented tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) of Nyau within Chewa matriliny has survived centuries of social change. Nyau practices have fluidly adapted under the influence of the patriliny of Yao, Ngoni and Maravi colonial rule, British colonial rule, and the subsequent rise of capitalism and Christianity, to maintain the influence of men within matriliny (Aguilar 2009).

Men’s failed attempts at frustrating Mercy, Barbara, Mary and Chimwemwe’s agency could be theorized as ‘failed patriarchal opposition’ or, in positive terms, as a ‘situated encounter of change’. Johannes Fabian (1998) was one of the first to write of similar potentialities to disrupt hegemonic narratives in context, and called them ‘moments of freedom’. Mercy, Barbara, Mary and Chimwemwe created similar moments of freedom when they transgressed hegemonic patriarchal narratives, despite Sam’s normative voice and actions. They argued for harmful practices to be adapted if not avoided, and for qualities such as social cohesion to be maintained. The inherent malleability and ‘fragility’ of gender performance (Butler 1988), the fluidity of patriarchy (Lorist 2020), and my findings here argue against the determinism and rigidity of dual-systems theory and monolithic concepts like ‘opposition’. The dynamism of patriarchy and hegemonic masculinities also implies that in theory, such encounters of change can lead to wider structural transformation, though there is no evidence of such events in this case study.

The coloniality of gender empowerment through voice

Besides pointing to ‘encounters of change’ and the emancipatory limits of gender reflexive practices that privilege voice and logos, I have linked such western funded ideas – as reflected in the gender transformative approach for CSE – with thinking on the coloniality of knowledge and being.

Martina Ferrari (2020, 130) describes the tension I have struggled with in my dual role as western development worker and anthropologist learning about decoloniality and the emancipatory limits of voice. She writes:

In sum, uncritical appeals to voice do not allow the critical distance (which not so paradoxically can actually be obtained by remaining grounded in concrete lived experiences of those who speak up) necessary to question the (colonial) world in which language and naming are power, and ‘voice’ a colonial tool. Quite the contrary – they play into existing power structures by deploying tools, like language, naming and voice that are normed by and effect the norming of coloniality, giving voice exclusively to the modern, split-separated, and rational lover of purity.

Western funded and designed attempts in change, such as the gender transformative training for the Zambian teachers, appeal to modernist split-separated measurement and voice as the main agents of change; these development attempts are at risk of similarly lacking this critical distance.

As I have suggested, the concept of plurilogues is similar to participatory methods favored by western funded NGOs, which in principle could also create a democratic and inclusive space. However, it is questionable that one can create non-hierarchical respectful plurilogues if there exist obvious (or hidden) onto-epistemic and financial inequalities within the wider gender and development apparatus that funds such activities. I quote Martina Ferrari’s (2020, 130) work again:

The claim that coloniality undermines the conditions of possibility of dialogical emancipation should not be taken to suggest that the colonized do not have a ‘voice’ or cannot speak. Such an understanding would play into the same binary and totalizing logic this (work) seeks to destabilize. But to hear these voices and epistemic processes one needs to attune oneself to the echoes reverberating through and fissuring the putative silences to which they are relegated by colonial logic.

The dilemma then remains. How can internationally funded gender equality projects, that operate within a multitude of sometimes conflicting moral frameworks, and bio- and geo-political interests and stories, remain simultaneously respectful of other ways of knowing and doing gender, and aware of the silences their privileging of voice paradoxically exclude?

Here I return to the masculinist, modernist leadership styles performed by Dutch women development workers. Whilst performing such leadership within gender and development, they imagine and voice what ‘good’ gender and sexual relations of the sub-altern should be. Race, gender and hegemonic masculinity are implicated in ways not everyone might see or expect. The anti-political nature of attempts to fix the patriarchy and sexuality of others – who would at face value be against ending child marriage or gendered violence – elides the coloniality of voice, as well as the multiplicity of patriarchy, or how masculinist norms paradoxically operate simultaneously within (the Dutch) feminist spaces through the modernist rational measurement logic Dutch funded development programs employ. Ferrari highlights the inequity in such international relations when she reflects on Spivak’s (1999) famous question of whether the ‘subaltern can speak?’, and writes:

Within a colonial context, ‘speech’ requires conformity to Eurocentric standards that exclude subaltern communicative practices and being. As such the demand to speak places the subaltern in an untenable position. Were the subaltern to speak in their native languages, their speech (and their demands for normative treatment) would lack uptake. But were they to speak in a way that was intelligible to the colonizer, they would, on the other hand, subscribe to and be rewritten by a conceptual linguistic framework that inscribes their culture, language, and being as inferior (Ferrari 2020, 126).

UNESCO – though supposedly neutral – also inscribes subaltern cultures as inferior, when it concluded in its publication on Comprehensive Sexuality Education in Teacher Training in Eastern and Southern Africa (UNESCO 2015, 152) that teachers ‘must consider their own value-systems and attitudes to avoid undue bias’. For decoloniality, it is thus not enough to link the potential malleability and fragility of gender that Butler (1988) theorizes to empowerment through voice. This approach is privileged by human rights and gender equality interventions promoted by influential donors including the Dutch. Such an approach would require reflection not only on harmful practices and cultures of the other, but also on the knowledge/power and privileging of voice by powerful donors.

Future research and perspectives on youth empowerment

Given the critique of development practices that ‘name too soon’ and ignore the emancipatory limits of voice and the coloniality of silence (Ferrari, 2020), I asked Chimwemwe to read this article several times; she gave me specific permission to share her previously silent ‘voice’ after several alterations. However, during peer review, and the valuable suggestion to include literature on silence and coloniality, I wondered whether this article was not still ‘naming too soon’. In my reflections, I was inspired by the decolonial feminist pedagogy of wonder of Ramos and Roberts (2021), who point to the always limited make-up of knowledge and envisage a ‘non-appropriative ethical relation of co-existence’. They refer to Irigaray (1996, 112), who said: ‘you can never “know me” – because to know me means to appropriate me – you can however, still perceive the directions and dimensions of my intentionality. Importantly, you can help me become while remaining myself’. This was my intention while revising this article: I am still learning about my own ‘white innocence’ (Wekker 2016). Gloria Wekker refers to this as the Dutch self-image of moral superiority, eliding centuries of coloniality and slavery from the Dutch collective consciousness.

The dilemma in ethnography of silence is that a call for more in-depth ethnography also buys into colonial logic. To do justice to the deep silences and lived experiences, young Chewa ideally should be setting the agenda and be in the lead of the (silent) changes that they may or may not want. This is something civil society also has thought about and called Meaningful Youth Participation, or MYP for short. Current researchers assess MYP from a public health lens, which privileges survey data and interviews, and links findings to the effectiveness of policy outcomes (Melles and Ricker 2018). Future research could complement this perspective by looking into the lived experiences of youth who are ‘meaningfully’ included, since inclusion and voicing youth rights – as I have highlighted – implies buying into the modernist logic and coloniality of voice. Critical questions in such an ethnographic exploration would be – who does the including, and on what terms? And how do youth experience meaningfulness and their empowerment through voice in daily development practices? Can their deep silences be heard, let alone lead to the gender equality promised by approaches such as the gender transformative approach, when such emancipatory efforts are so deeply embedded in the coloniality of logos? And finally, how could Chewa youth set the research agenda without buying or playing into the biopolitical agenda of those with too much (invisible) knowledge/power/voice – the interventionists who, paradoxically, are loudly unaware of their own ubiquity of utterance?

Ethical approval

The research was approved (Ref. No. 2019-Jun-007) by Excellence in Research Ethics and Science Converge (ERES Converge) ethical review board (I.R.B. No. 00005948 F.W.A. No. 00011697) in Lusaka, Zambia.

Acknowledgements

I like to thank Eileen Moyer, Ria Reis, Jonna Both, Joseph Simbaya, the NGO staff and teachers in Zambia, the ‘Becoming Men’ team, the anonymous reviewers, and editor for their thoughtful feedback. This article was written as part of a PhD trajectory at the Amsterdam Instituted for Social Science Research (AISSR) of the University of Amsterdam and the ‘Becoming Men’ research team led by Professor Eileen Moyer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant [647314].

Notes on contributors

Jeroen Lorist

Jeroen Lorist has published on gender and development, focusing on masculinities and decolonializing development. He is a PhD Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development and a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. Additionally, he serves as a senior gender advisor with an international NGO and is interested in the politics of data, linking theory and practice.

Notes

1 The development agenda of the NGO Alliance, consisting of a collaboration of a Northern Alliance of 5 Dutch NGOs, coordinating country NGO Alliances in 6 African countries and one Asian country, was determined by the Dutch funding framework of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The funding framework required intervention on ending teenage pregnancy, addressing child marriage and/or Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), as well as the engagement of boys and men on these issues.

2 In her work on the emancipatory “limits of voice and the coloniality of silence’, Martina Ferrari (2020, 138) writes that Gayatri Spivak, in an interview with Jenny Sharp, advocates for a ‘moratorium on naming too soon’. She argues that as long as ‘liberatory movements championing the imperative to “speak up” do not critically call into question the guiding assumption what counts as reliable and correct speech, the testimonies of survivors whose expressive means do not conform to logical, clear, or persuasive speech will be reduced to nothingness’.

3 Chimemwe read this paper several times, leading to adjustments to the text until she was happy with its message.