Flows of ‘sexual substance’ and representation

of the body in South Africa

Professor Robert Thornton
Department of Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand

Incidents
In the remote city of Uppington in the far north of the sparsely populated near desert
province of Northern Cape, four men went on trial in 2001 for the rape of a baby. The
mother had left the child alone while she was drinking, and came back to find it
crying and bleeding. The baby survived after major surgery, and after many months
the men were eventually found not guilty. Later that same year in the Johannesburg
neighbourhood of Joubert Park, another baby was similarly raped when its mother left
it in a squalid room in the tenement near downtown Johannesburg in which they lived.
These two cases stirred, but not for the first time, a huge outcry in the press and in
parliament about how and why these horrible crimes could have happened.
Eventually, consensus formed around the notion that many men—especially poor
uneducated black men—believe that AIDS could be cured by having sex with a
virgin. It was believed that they had selected babies of around one or two years old
because they were guaranteed to be virgins. This ‘explanation’ has never been
confirmed as a motive by the actual perpetrators of these crimes, and may therefore be
more the stuff of ‘urban legends’. Whatever the status of this belief, and whether or
not it actually motivates rape of this kind, it has captured the South African
imagination. The claim that some people hold the belief has, at least, the status of
fact. It has been targeted by AIDS interventions and education programmes. The
newspapers and TV channels carry ‘educational’ messages that ‘sex with a virgin will
not cure you of AIDS’. Community education literature on HIV/AIDS similarly
carries warnings that this is not the case. Whether or not it is actually believed, or that
it actually motivates some criminals, it appears to be sufficiently plausible to be a
belief, and some, indeed, might act on it. The intense focus on this apparent
absurdity, however, directs our attention to the connection between sex and healing,
sex and age or life -stage, and values attached to the presence of absence of sex in the
process of healing and illness. Specifically, it points to a notion that sex has a power
to ‘heal’ and that some ‘power’ or ‘substance’ in female virgins can effect changes in
the male.
In another time and place, I sat with a group of African traditional healers, or
‘sangomas’ (isangoma), who were atte nding a training workshop on HIV/AIDS. The
facilitator told them that they should advise all of their clients to use condoms, and as
is usual in such workshops, demonstrated how a condom should be put onto the penis.
He used a broomstick to demonstrate although this caused much derisive laughter
about how unrealistic a broomstick was as a model. Discussion, however, centred on
the dangers of condoms. Condoms, it was declared, could cause a dangerous ‘back-
up’ of semen in the male and therefore lead to dangerous illness. Furthermore,
condoms could come off and ‘disappear’ inside the woman. It was held, however,
that condoms could be useful in preventing male contact with menstrual blood, a
substance that was truly dangerous, and could also prevent contact with women who
had recently attended funerals and who thus carried a dangerous impurity that could
kill men. ‘We are killing our men’, one woman declared, by not being sufficiently
careful about preventing such dangerous contact. The discussion of HIV had been
sidetracked into discussion of other kinds of dangerous substances that could be

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absorbed by men through sexual contact with women. 1 A Zulu sangoma, Makhosi
Sibuko2 told me,
Our culture does not allow us to have sex during mourning periods or when you
are menstruating. When a man sleeps with women during her periods the men
tends to get cold and shivers a lot.
Or, Traditional Dr. D S Mthembu comments in a similar vein:
For instance, after a funeral other people do have sex when they are actually
mourning which is totally wrong. In that cases they tend to get a disease called
umahamba nendlwala. It happens when again you sleep with a widower.3
Indeed, it seems that many if not most African traditional healers prefer not to
recommend condoms, partly because they believe that their own medicines are more
effective in preventing HIV transmission or STIs, but also because they believe that
condoms present significant dangers. Many people in South Africa believe that
lubrication on condoms, or so-called ‘condom oil’ was absorbed by both men and
women during sex with condoms and that this led to impurity of the blood that could
only be treated with traditional medicines (Wojcicki and Malala 2001). I have heard,
too, that some people fear ‘worms’ in packaged condoms that can be seen if a small
amount of water is placed in the condom and it is held up to the sunlight.4 Others say
that condoms can ‘get inside’ women, or that it can ‘blow up in the uterus’ and cause
damage or death. Some fear that the semen that ought to flow out is forced back into
the man’s blood by the condom and thus causes a new form of illness. All of these
beliefs limit use of condoms, and thus may have consequences for public health, but
they also point towards some important cultural truths. These cases and beliefs
suggest strongly that substances—menstrual blood, ‘pollution’ from death and
funerals, or substances from the condoms themselves—can be absorbed into the
bodies of both sexual partners. Some informants suggest that sex with a condom is
not really sex at all (Collins and Stadler 2001:333, Stadler 2002).

Towards a model of sexual meanings

These notions of sex and sexuality point towards a cultural understanding of sex and
sexuality—widely current in southern Africa—in which some sexually transmitted
substance flows between both sexual partners. It is embedded in a specifically
cultural discourse of persons, values, bodies and exchanges rather than in the bio-
medical discourse of bodies as biological organisms, or the psychiatric and
psychological discourse of cognition, desire and repression. We already have in
anthropology a rich tradition of theory about the person, values and exchange (e.g.
Lambeck and A. Strathern 1998; M. Strathern 1988), but this body of theory has not
been widely to understanding of sexuality in Africa. This may help to expand our
conceptualisation of sexuality as culture in a way that goes beyond the more
simplistic notions of ‘cultural influence’ (Vance 1999:44-46, 48). A theory of

1
This case was observed in Acornhoek, Northern Province, at a meeting of the Traditional Healers Organisation,
led my the founder of the organisation, Nhlavana Maseko, in 1995.
2
This is her professional name as a sangoma, possessed by the spirit named ‘Sibuko.’ Her name is Luzile B
Sithole of West Central Jabavu, Soweto. Interview Thursday 28 Feb 2002.
3
Tr. Dr. D S Mthembu, Umnonjaneni section in Tembisa. Interview 10 March 2002.
4
I have tried this. If a small amount of water is put into a condom and it is held up to a strong light, cloudy white
streaks that look something like worms can indeed be seen. This may be the result of partial mixing of the
lubricant and water that causes differential refraction of sunlight through the swirling mixture, or from reflections
from the latex sides of the condom.
 3

‘cultural influence’ holds that ‘culture’, as an external and separate domain compared
with sexuality, may influence the specific content of sexuality, but maintains the
essentialist premise that sexuality is ultimately universal and biological. A theoretical
position that holds that sexuality is part and parcel of culture and that sexuality itself
has its own cultural tenets and structures (we could also say a ‘discourse’ or
‘ideology’) goes beyond such a cultural influence model towards a model of sexuality
embedded in culture and the culture embedded in sexuality.
This enquiry seeks to develop a model that will help to explain what may be local and
culturally different meanings associated with sexuality and the practices of sex in
southern Africa. As a model, it is necessarily abstract—a conceptual or heuristic
system developed on the basis of observations, interview data, casual conversation
with diverse people, and from the sources of popular culture. Like other models —
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, the ‘Iroquois system of kinship’,
the “law” of supply and demand, the theory of ‘contagious magic’, or monotheism—it
is rarely, if ever, found in a ‘pure form’, fully instantiated in practice. Instead, it seeks
to isolate a set of related phenomena and to construct an explanation based on rules of
internal consistency and critical coherence rather than empirically demonstrable
‘truth’. The power of such models is their heuristic value in discovering ‘underlying’
(that is, not empirically ‘visible’) orders of meaning that can be said to shape life in
complex ways. This is also the weakness of the ‘model’ in social science: it is often
difficult if not impossible to fully evaluate its validity. This is true of most of the
‘grand narratives’ as well as of lower level theoretical constructs that seek to deal with
issues such as witchcraft, interpersonal violence, or literary genres, since these take
their form through practice and their own genealogies rather than through specific
command or explicit specifica tion (as law or bureaucratic order does, for instance).
Nevertheless, the model that is developed here is intended to explore specific areas of
cultural difference associated with a geographical and cultural community, that of
southern Africa. As such, it does not specify race. The actual ‘distributions’ of
meanings associated with this model’s ‘system’ remains an open question.

South African conceptualisation of sexuality and the body

Contemporary southern African representations of the body and practices of sexuality
point toward a concept of ‘flows’ of bodily substance and gifts that go both ways in
the (hetero-)sexual5 encounter, that is, both men and women absorb the sexual fluids
of each other in a sexual contact. This implies a concept of the person that is
permeable to both physical and ‘spiritual’ substances of other persons, rather than—or
perhaps in addition to— a (‘Western’) concept of ‘the individual’ (cf Niehaus
2001:15). Specifically, South Africans seem to understand sex as involving a
permeation of the body by any substance involved in sexual contact, and that this is
potentially a threat to both males and females. It suggests a different concept of the
biological boundaries of the person that is rooted in cultural concepts of the body,
especially the sexual body. This has far-reaching effects in decision about use of
condoms, but more that this, points towards a set of distinctive beliefs about sex that

5
The ‘hetero-‘ designation here is neither prescriptive nor descriptive, since I am not certain to what extent what I
say here applies equally well to same-sex sexuality. It is clear, however, that same-sex sexuality can not be
entirely classified under the European semantic categories of ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’, since many people in such
relationship do not consider themselves to fall under these categories. Black South African same- sex relationship
often adopt the cultural gender patterns of ‘male’ and ‘female’ regardless of the biological sex of the participants
(e.g. Dursuweit 1999, Donham 199x, Moodie et al. 1988, Moodie 1994). Whether what I attempt to say applies
equally to same- sex sex, I cannot say. I leave the question open.
 4

must be understood in terms of representations of the body, of sex and sexuality, and
of the notion of the nature of the person in southern African society.
According to the cultural precepts of South African traditional culture, sex itself is
part of human nature, something everyone engages in.
People do have sex because it is nature and it was created. It is part of life.
Women and men … it really does not matter who you are. (Traditional Dr. D S
Mthembu, Umnonjaneni Section, Tembisa.
God created sexual activities; he even knows how people are going to die
because people have become very stubborn, and it looks like a punishment to us
people. (Makhosi Sibuko, Jabavu, Soweto; sangoma )
Sex is for pleasure. It is for the nation and people (Nomxolisi Dandaza, nursing
sister and mthwasa, sangoma ‘initiate’)
Typically, South Africans believe t hat the body fluids that result from sexual arousal
and orgasm derive from the blood. Blood is ‘hot’ and is ‘heated’ by sexual desire and
arousal causing a portion of it to be secreted. In a study of adolescent sexual attitudes
and behaviour in Acornhoek, Limpopo Province, Collins and Stadler concluded that
male ‘sexual desire was considered to stem from the need to drain … increased
volume of blood from the body [while] semen and vaginal secretions were believed to
be ‘blood that is hot’. They found tha t the group of adolescents with whom they
worked believed that ‘during sexual intercourse the ‘blood’ of a woman and a man
were … exchanged or mixed together’ (Collins and Stadler 2001: 330). In the same
context, female desire is similarly understood as deriving from the blood: ‘Her blood
will tell her how to act’ said one young woman in Acornhoek. ‘She will think she is
old enough for sex once she begins to menstruate’ (331). Jeannerat (1997: 72) reports
that older Venda women say that once she stops me nstruating a woman no longer has
sexual desire since ‘her blood is no longer coming.’ Sex under these circumstances
becomes dangerous:
If she would engage in sexual intercourse, the semen of her husband could no
longer be washed out of her uterus by the menstrual flow and its accumulation
would cause her stomach to swell up as if she were pregnant. After nine months
the stomach would burst and the woman would die.
Thus semen and vaginal fluids are no different from menstrual fluids, or blood itself,
in the folk models of their derivation. The SeSotho word madi may mean both blood
and semen6 (Niehaus 2001; Ingstad 1990:34), as does the Zulu word for blood/semen,
igazi. Since blood is also what is passed down to subsequent generations through
conception a nd birth, and since this is what connects the ancestors with the living, it is
a source of power that is comprehended cosmologically.

6
In SeSotho, madi may also mean ‘money’ (mali in Zulu), since the /d/ and /l/ phoneme tend towards the same
sound, an rapid alveolar flap, and SeSotho speakers frequently borrow the Zulu word, mali, ‘money’, into their
own lexicons with sound shifts into the SeSotho sound system.
 5

The flows of sexual substance

in social time and space
Ancestors, the past

Lovers, wives Lovers, wives

and husbands and husbands

Children, the future

Figure 1. Flows of Sexual Substance in Social Time and Space

Sex therefore is implicated in flows that move in two directions: through the
generations and through time, and through contemporaneous sexual partners and,
thus, over space. Figure 1( page 5) shows this relation in terms of a model that
displays the vertical dimension of ‘time’ and a horizontal dimension of ‘space and
society’. In cultural terms, time is not necessarily seen as ‘vertical’ since people are
linked to ancestors’ graves and living-sites across space. The dimension of
generational time has a strong ‘horizontal’ or spatial component in the imagined
landscape of the space of life. The landscapes that most people imagine is a network
of places where ancestors and elder family members live, or have lived and are
buried, and includes the places where kin and children currently live and reproduce.
Pathways (roads, highways, footpaths) and frequent travel to visit the living or graves
of the dead make this network real. Similarly, the domain of social relations,
including sexual relations is not separable from time since sexual and other social
relations change through time. The model presented here is meant rather to indicate
the nexus between two separate domains in which the sexual act necessarily takes
place, that is, at a particular moment in time, and with certain cultural intentions and
social implications.
In the temporal (vertical) dimension, blood/semen ‘flows’ down from previous
generations to future generations through the medium of those currently alive. This is
understood to be a real flow of real substances that actually and materially constitute
our bodies. The blood of the ancestors is our blood, and it will be passed on to future
generations as the same blood. Implicitly, it seems that ‘blood’ (and semen) are
transmitted from one person to another through sexual reproduction (and other forms
of sexuality), through time and across generations and therefore are also permanent—
enduring as long as life endures. They are transmissible but non-transitory
substances. As such they constitute a flow of value across the generation and can be
thought of as a kind of currency that is exchanged across generations. They are the
 6

wealth of the nation (mali ya sechaba) that enables people not only to survive, but to
understand their survival as part of an on-going exchange across time that links
generations in a permanent and enduring way.
On the ‘horizontal’ axis of the model, people who are living today, similarly exchange
their ‘substance’ through sexual acts that link persons in networks of relations that
involve exchanges of other kinds of currency in addition to the ‘sexual currency’ of
semen and vaginal fluid. The sexual exchange is necessarily implicated in a broader
exchange of value, and of things of value. Sexuality participates, in other words, in a
network of reciprocal exchange of ‘gifts’ that link people as lovers just as the ‘gift’ of
blood and life from the ancestors links the living and their potential descendants in a
reciproc al exchange network across time. Since blood/semen is both transmissible
and non-transitory, it can play a role, like other durable goods, in such an exchange
and creates the same sense of reciprocal rights and obligations that exchange of other
durable goods creates. A sexual link, created through sexual action, therefore is an
enduring social relation that connects people who have sex (or who have had sex)
with one another in an enduring networks of relations. This is represented in Figure 1
as a ‘horizonal’ dimension.
This linkage puts sexuality, and the partners involved in sexuality, at a crucial
cosmological nexus that involves the flow of ‘blood’ through generations and the flow
of sexual substance (also understood as ‘blood’ or derived from blood) across social
networks of persons that are linked through sexual contact and all of its implications
including trust, mistrust, jealousy, mutual powers and vulnerabilities, and love (or
hate). It also places sex at the juncture between the power of the ancestral spirits and
the power of the ‘bush’ or ‘nature’ that lie in the broader landscape. This is
represented in Figure 2.

The flows of blood and gifts

Ancestors, the past
u
Sceiafs,cir
k

Lovers, wives Gifts Lovers, wives

u

and husbands Sexual fluids and husbands

Bloo d
p
h

Children, the future

a
h

Figure 2. Sexuality as Exchange of Blood and Gifts

l
a
 7

Both movements of the sexual substance, either through time/generations or through

space/persons link persons through ‘blood’, but in different ways. The blood that is
passed down to one’s offspring is thought of as a continuous flow from the past into
the indefinite future, while the flow of semen/vaginal fluid in and through social
networks is temporary and bounded by the limits of one’s social universe. Sexual
flows among the network of lovers or spouses also involve concomitant flows of other
kinds of valuables such as cattle (especially in bridewealth payments), money,
clothes, and other objects of value. Similarly, the flow across generations should be
acknowledged—and often is—with appropriate and regular sacrifices of animals for
the ancestors in exchange for blessings, protection and luck that only the ancestors (or
other spirits) can ultimately bestow.
The two flows may interact disastrously as, for instance, at times of death when
contact with a corpse makes sex with others dangerous because of impurities in the
body of anyone polluted by contact with death. At this point of rupture at the end of
life, sex must also be interrupted. This can also be understood in terms of exchange
of ‘substances’ that occurs in all soc ial interactions, including those involved with
death. People ‘infect’ one another on a daily basis, not just through sexual contact,
but also through their other personal ‘substances’—breath, spirit, and ‘presence’ or
‘shadow’ (seriti (Sotho), or isithunzi (isiZulu). As long as these substances are shared
in daily life, life goes on. But death interrupts these flows and thus leads to
contamination since the reciprocity of exchanges of ‘substance’ through normal
interaction in interrupted, too. If the contamination of death is not removed by means
of ritual intervention, then it can be transmitted to others, especially through sexual
contact. This causes illness and might even lead to death.
An act of sex is, therefore, both a personal joining togethe r of bodily substance and a
simultaneous conjuncture of cosmological principles. These two flows implicate and
entail each other. Any sexual act is potentially a procreative act, but also helps to
mutually ‘create’ the partners themselves through mixing of their bodily substances,
through creating new social identities (‘the lover of X’) and through affirmation of
each partner’s own sexuality and sense of masculine/feminine identity. As a
procreative act—even only a potential one—sex creates the children through whom
one’s own blood will continue to flow. As a ‘re-creational’ act, that is, one that re-
affirms and possibly elaborates on one’s own social identity, ‘recreational’ (non-
procreative) sex is also a creative act. The two acts of ‘creation’ exist as a single
bodily performance—sexual intercourse—that lies at the juncture of two
‘perpendicular’ dimensions in the work of making persons.
It is not surprising, therefore, that sexuality is imbued with both curative or healing
powers, on the one hand, and with special dangers and avoidances (or taboos) on the
other. It is never simply an act of pleasure divorced from the universe of kin, friends
and lovers or from the universe of spirits, god(s) and witches. Both appeals to
ancestors and medicines from the bush (‘nature’) have significant powers to influence
the outcome of sexual acts: to protect against sexually transmitted infections, to
‘cleanse’ pollution that derives from sexual acts, to cleanse unclean conditions that
interfere with sexual relations (such as attending a funeral), or to capture a lover’s
affections, to prevent intercourse with someone else’s lover, and many other kinds of
love magic. The herbal medicines of the ‘bush’, or muti, are used to treat sexual
dysfunction (such as impotence), STIs, infertility, and as love magic because the
power of herbs is linked both to the ancestors and to the landscape in which they are
found. Their powers derive, that is, from both the flow of spirit through generations,
and the flow of spiritual influences across and through the landscape (Thornton 2000).
 8

Sexually transmitted diseases are communicated through the blood, too, according to
traditional healers and traditional health beliefs.
STDs are caused by the uncleanness of the blood such as, when people sleep
together and one party is not pure you can transmit the disease to the next
person. 7
STD can be transmitted sexually but basically it is the impurity of the blood.8
The power of herbs in treating sexual problems is thus also linked to the two
dimensional flow of ‘blood’ and spirit that characterise the African cosmological
conception of man’s place in nature.
Sexuality is thus not ‘natural’ in the Euro-American ‘biological’ sense, but specific to
human nature and to a life of and through nature. It is experienced as an organic
‘need’ like hunger. Pervasive metaphors in African languages for sex involving food,
foodstuffs and eating testify to this. Yet, it is fundamentally inter -organic, taking its
form through multiple organic persons, and transcends the ‘mere’ organic by
involving spirits of ancestors and the creation of children for whom one’s (sexual,
reproductive) self will eventually stand as ancestor. It is creative of humans and
created by them, but not by them alone. Sexuality provokes intense arousal and
desire, but also dread, fear and loathing. The act of sex creates bonds between
persons, but also dissolves them through jealousy. It is, like most other human or
spiritual powers in the southern African cosmologies: inherently socially unstable and
morally ambiguous. It is both bad and good, desired and feared, therapeutic and
pathogenic.
Sex also creates personal identities. A female virgin become a ‘woman’ through sex,
but more than this, a ‘wife’. When a female person’s identity changes from ‘girl’ to
‘woman’ she acquires not only an identity but also a role. She enters into a web of
diffuse and multiplex relations with the man with whom she has had sex. Except for
thoroughly modernised or ‘westernised’ women, this implies a complex set of duties
and obligations. There is little sense in more traditional African communities of an
isolated sexual act merely for the sake of pleasure. The exchange of bodily substance
implies other exchanges and the relationship thus constituted is open-ended and multi-
stranded. Minimally, a woman who has sex with a man—unless it is a purely
commercial transaction, that is, prostitution—is expected to cook for him, clean for
him, and above all ‘respect’ (ukuhlonipa) him. Such relationships may segue into
what is regarded as ‘traditional marriage’ or ‘customary marriage’ if they endure long
enough. They do not necessarily imply sexual exclusivity. Thus a woman may have
such a set of complex duties and expectations with several men. This is part of being
a ‘woman’, that is, playing the role that the identity conferred by sex entails. While
male persons acquire their identity as ‘men’ in some black South African
communities through circumcision, they acquire their masculinity—and through this,
their ‘respect’—through sex. They also acquire a set of diffuse, usually unstated,
obligations to ‘support’ their woman by giving them gifts such as clothes, food, and
other benefits. Stereotypically, these are the ‘three Cs’: cash, cars and cell-phones.
Ultimately, should they formalise their relationship ‘traditionally’, they pay larger
sums of bridewealth (SeSotho/Tswana: bogadi; Zulu/Swati: lobola) to the woman’s
family. In all cases, sex creates social identities and embeds persons in dense social

7
Tr. Dr. D S Mthembu, Umnonjaneni section in Tembisa. Interview 10 March 2002.
8
Makhosi Vikizitha, West Central Jabavu. Interview 6 March 2002.
 9

networks of duties, expectations and obligations that are all held to be creative of the
true (African) person (Zulu: umuntu; Sotho/Tswana: motho).
These concepts are fundamentally the same as those that inform the work of
traditional healers whose ‘indigenous knowledge system’ (Thornton 2002). These
systems of knowledge are shared by all types of traditional healers, that is, the
isangoma who heals through possession of spirits that enable him/her to dream and to
perceive illnesses in clients, and the inyanga (SiSwati/isiZulu) or dingaka (SePedi)
who is not possessed by spirits but utilises knowledge of the indigenous
pharmacopœia in healing with herbs. Both types of healers preserve African
traditional philosophies and medical knowledge and elaborate on them (Ingstad 1990,
E Green 1999, 1996a, 1996b, 1994). The South African indigenous healing system
with which I am most familiar is the widespread ‘ndzau’ cult of the lowveld and the
urban Johannesburg/Pretoria/Soweto area in the highveld. 9
In synoptic form, the work of the traditional healer in the South African lowveld
generally involves manipulation of four co-ordinated substances of the body. These
are the spirit (SePedi: mmoya, Zulu/Swazi: umoya), the body itself (SePedi: mmele ,
SiSwati: umtimba , isiZulu: umzimba), the blood (SePedi: madi, SiSwati: ingati,
isiZulu: igazi), and ‘shadow’/ ‘aura’/ ‘presence’ (SePedi: seriti, SiSwati sitfunti,
isiZulu isithunzi). These interact in ways that are similar to the sexual system of
flows that I have outlined above. This is represented in Figure 3, below, as the
‘sangom’s model of the body.

A Sangoma’s model of the

body
Enduring Transient
Blood Body
Substance (madzi/igazi) (mmele)

‘Spirit’ ‘Shadow’
Non-
substance (moya) (seriti/isithunzi)

fluid presence

Figure 3. The Diviner's (Sangoma's) Model of the Body

9
This system differs in many ways from the Zulu/Xhosa system and that of the highveld Sotho and Tswana
cultures, but there are many similarities as well. The following discussion is based primarily on my knowledge
of the lowveld systems. People speaking four main languages practice this healing cult: SiSwati (‘Swazi’),
lowveld SePedi or Pulana (closely related to the highveld northern Sotho), XiTsonga (‘Shangaan’) and isiZulu (a
lingua franca in the region as elsewhere in South Africa). I give linguistic equivalents in the three languages that
are spoken widely and that are used by healers in the region.
 10

The body itself consists of ‘flesh’ (nyama) and is the transient locus of the other
substances that can be thought of as flowing through the body while, at the same time,
constituting it. Blood and spirit are both enduring substances that survive the death of
the transient body in which they reside. Spirit, moya (also meaning ‘air’, ‘wind’,
‘breath’)—a non-material substance or essence—comes from the ancestors (amadlozi)
and passes on to the succeeding generations through birth, growth of children and
their own subsequent procreation. Blood passes in the same way, but unlike spirit it
only flows through direct lines of (biological) procreation. Spirit, especially the
ancestors, also follow the lines of blood, but can be selectively activated through
ritual and/or prayer or ‘de -activated’ by ignoring them until they possibly make their
presence felt by demanding attention. Spirits, however, can cross lines and ‘flow’
across the landscape. They can be detained at specific geographical points where
people have met unexpected death—such as in automobile accidents—or in battle.
They can thus ‘flow’ across bloodlines and affect others who may not be directly
related to them. Thus, several different spirits of different ethnic/linguistic groups
may possess sangomas, those who are possessed by spirits and heal through
possession trances. Like the body, which dies, the ‘shadow’ is a non-material
presence or aura that the body projects. It is identified with the smell of the person,
by the bodily ‘dirt’ that is present in the person’s clothes and living space, and by the
sense of presence, character, or charisma that the person has. Each of these
‘substances’ is utilised in different ways in healing. The body and blood may be
treated with herbs that are drunk or rubbed into small cuts. The shadow and spirit are
treated through washing with herbal baths, steaming and sweat baths, and by smoke
or foam made from plants that produce a froth when infused and stirred. Each must
be ‘balanced’ in the person to ensure hea lth, with excesses of blood or spirit being
purged (through enemas, vomiting, or sweating), and with deficits being made up
through ritual treatments involving ‘calling’ of the spirits (pahla), sacrifice, or herbal
and ritual ‘strengthening’ treatments. All of these entail an adjustment of flows of
substance (material or non-material/unobservable) through and in the body. Health
results from a balance of substances both within the body and between others
involved with the person’s social and sexual network of kin, friends, lovers, and
associates.
Like the healing system, the sexual system is similarly conceptualised as balancing
flows of substance. Health requires adequate sexual activity that allows the person to
absorb the sexual substance of others and, for men especially, to ‘drain’ excess
substance (sperm as ‘hot blood’) into others. Both women and men acquire the
‘shadow’ of their partners in this way, and thus augment their own bodies with the
valuable substance of others. As the often-quoted proverb says: ‘a person is a person
through other people’, the sexual exchanges that create flows of substance among
ones lovers creates the person. Sexuality and healing, then, are parallel systems of
flows that create healthy persons. Without either sex or ‘traditional’ healing,
traditionalists maintain that the person will sicken and die. Nevertheless, sexual flows
must be contained and channelled. If the person is ill, and being treated by a
traditional healer, they are generally told not to engage in sex. Sexual exchanges and
the linkages of one’s own shadow and blood with others can interrupt the healing
process that attempts to balance and manipulate these flows in order to achieve health.
The parallel nature of these systems of flows can be seen from the proscription on sex
while being treated or healed. In effect, one can either be healed or have sex, but not
both. The practice of both would produce unpredictable results since they are part
and parcel of the same bodily systems.
 11

Sexual culture
Sexuality, then, has its own cultural dimensions that shape its practice and the values
associated with it. While many aspects actual sexual practices are universally human,
preferences and frequencies of acts are not. More importantly, the meaning of
sexuality differs. Sexual meanings are central to concepts of self and of the person,
and to the values we associate with others. The values we attach to pleasure also
differ. Accordingly, where social structures, concepts of the person, and values differ,
we may find differences in sexual culture that co-ordinate with these differences.
Since some aspects of sexuality are certainly universal, however, we must expect that
sexual cultures will differ not absolutely but as a matter of degree and emphasis.
While this claim is similar to Michel Foucault’s project in his History of Sexuality , I
seek here to explore an African sexual discourse where he explores the European. In
the first volume of History of Sexuality , Foucault shows how various discursive
practices in the West (the Catholic confessional, the political economy of population,
the literature of desire, and the medicalisation of sexuality, and law) worked, contrary
to the supposed ‘repression’ of sexuality that is associated with ‘Victorianism’, to ‘put
sex into discourse’, that is, to elaborate a new, modern and European ‘explosion’ of
sexuality in many different cultural (or ‘discursive’) contexts. This clearly did not
happen in Africa, but we are entitled to ask what a specifically African (or in this
case, South African) discourse of sexuality might look like just as Foucault has done
for Europe. Foucault declared that he was less interested in sexuality per se than he
was in the ‘incitement’ to a sexual discourse that eventually generated a growth of
‘perversions’, that is, new disparate and heterogeneous sexualities, and ‘new rules for
the game of powers and pleasures’ (Foucault 1978: 48). Thus, we ask in our own
Afican context, what are the rules, values and meanings of sexuality. Foucault
answers the question of values—that is, why we have sex—in terms of the ‘uses of
pleasure’. In the African context, it seems appropriate to answer this question in
terms of ‘flows of sexual substance’ that are, in part, constitutive of the person.

Sexual Discourses
The discourse of sexuality in South Africa is a ‘discourse’ of acts rather than of
words. It takes place between two people who do not generally discuss their acts with
others or with each other.
With the exception of relatively recent ‘rediscovery’ of sexuality research into
sexuality in Anthropology (Vance 1999) —research that is not widely known outside
of the discipline because it is either too ‘culturally relative’ or too arcane —formal,
public knowledge of sexuality is minimal in Africa. With the advent of the AIDS
pandemic, efforts to discover the nature of African sexuality have acquired urgency
(Booth 1989)
Beyond the secret knowledge of traditional healers in Africa (Ingstad 1990:28), there
is little formal knowledge of sexual behaviour and values in Africa. Christine Obbo,
for instance, remarks that ‘Hard studies of sexuality among African groups are non-
existent and most analyses have not gone beyond looking a polygyny, promiscuity
and sex work’ (Obbo 1999: 75). This is not to say that there is no system of
indigenous knowledge that deals with sexuality. It appears that traditional healers do
have an indigenous philosophy of sexuality and of sexual therapy, but this is a secret
domain, and has only rarely been committed to paper. Although there are, too,
indigenous intellectuals who have pondered the shape and dimensions of a
specifically African sexuality—for instance in novels, in indigenous theologies, and in
the media—little if any of this has resulted in a focused consideration of sexuality.
 12

Most of this tends towards moralising—or, at best, moral philosophy, or is couched in

narratives of shame and lust—or, at worst, denial. There is no indigenous African
Freud or Kraft-Ebbing, no Alfred Kinsey or Sherri Hite. Beyond some vague gestures
towards race and sexuality (Stoller 1995) , Michel Foucault did not touch on Africa.
Only with the development of HIV and AIDS has there been any data at all on sexual
behaviour, and this is all very recent. There are, of course, endless ‘agony aunt’
columns in virtually every African popular magazine. These go back to at least the
1960s when Drum magazine and other African popular magazines began to be widely
circulated throughout the continent. These however focus on relationships not
sexuality itself, although recognition and treatment of sexually transmitted infections
(STIs) have also been a part of this literature. These are not formal sociologies of
sexual behaviour, nor philosophies of sexual values, however, and do not give us a ny
historical baseline from which we can judge contemporary sexual behaviour.
Research on sexuality in Africa has yet to begin.
We need then to know what research on sexuality in African might be. Research into
sexuality divides into relatively autonomous sub-disciplines that frequently have little
reference to each other.
There is first of all the medical discourse on/of sexuality that treats it as a purely
biological phenomenon. Bodies engage in sex with their ‘sexual organs’ that are
essentially no different from the liver or the appendix. There is a list of physiological
responses, and a list of symptoms of disease, all couched in the generalised and very
powerful scientific discourse of biology and medicine. Pathogens are transmitted
during sex in essentially the same way they are transmitted during other kinds of
social activities or during the excretion of waste, that is, through exchange of bodily
fluids and social proximity. Here people matter less than organs, the vectors of
disease, measurable physiological responses and tendencies of populations. This is
not the study of sexuality we have in mind.
The second is the literature that has grown up around sexual behaviour in response to
the pandemic of HIV/AIDS. Much of this is ultimately reduced to whether or not
sexually active people use a condom. This research is primarily concerned with
public health interventions. It is summed up in the phrase ‘Knowledge -Attitute-
Practice’, or KAP, which implies that sexual behaviour can be ultimately derived, and
therefore controlled, by the ‘attitude’ one has towards it, and from the knowledge one
has about it. Advertising campaigns (such as Love Life in South Africa), community
education campaigns, provision of free condoms and extensive media coverage all
revolve around the notion that sexuality, or sexual ‘behaviour’ comes at the end of a
causal chain that begins with knowledge that is transformed into attitudes ultimately
resulting in sexual behaviour. Despite what all of us know—that sex is drive n by
passions and desires that can rarely be called ‘knowledge’, or reduced simply to
attitudes—this approach dictates the forms of research that are directed towards
sexuality and that shape the patterns of intervention designed by public health
practitioners and funded by international donor agencies and governments. These
approaches have not yielded and understanding of sexuality, and seem unlikely to do
so in future.
A third area of research that skirts the issue of sexuality is the long established
literature on kinship and marriage. But the social control of sexuality and
reproduction through systems of marriage and kinship must not be confused with
sexuality itself. This is altogether a different matter. Some excellent ethnographic
accounts exist such as Isaac Schaperas ‘Married Life in an African Tribe (about
Tswana in South Africa and Botswana), and Henri-Alexandre Junod’s Life of a South
 13

African Tribe’ (dealing with Tsonga-speaking people in Mozambique and

northeastern South Africa. These contain some valuable data about specifically
sexual practices and values, but do not deal with sexuality in any rigorous way.
A fourth area, of course, must be the research that exists on gender in Africa. There is
a sizeable literature that deals with rape, sexual violence, family violence, child abuse,
and other aspects of violence and abuse that has a more or less central sexual
dimension, but again, it does not deal with ‘normal’ sexuality. Work on gender has
emphasised the dynamics of social power between men and women, and has yielded
some important insights into the nature of male-female relationships in daily life.
Sexuality is only part of any relationship, however, and the relationship between
sexuality and violence in rape, for instance, is still contested. But however useful this
has been, genders (as social category) do not have sex though people of different
genders do. This immediately raises the question of how social categories or
identities ultimately motivate and guide social behaviour. Gender is a complex
phenomenon, and pervades every aspect of social life. It can not be easily isolated
from any and all other cultural categories or types of social interaction. Although
sexuality is fundamental to an understanding of gender, a sociological understanding
of gender does not necessarily allow us to predict sexual behaviour, attitudes or
values.
Finally, there is a literature on the techniques of sexual pleasure. Every bookstore
these days has a section on ‘Personal Growth’, ‘Relationships’, or ‘Sexuality’ that
contains at least some books dealing with specific techniques for giving or receiving
pleasure, and advising on their appropriate use in ‘keeping your man (or woman)
happy’, ‘finding a partner’, or self-actualisation and healing. Similarly virtually every
magazine for women, or for men, has its mandatory article on ‘Your sex life’. While
this literature specifically sexual, it does not link sexuality to the sorts of things that
sociologists, anthropologists and historians are interested in. It exists as if it were its
own autonomous domain. As anthropologists (or more generally sociologists and
historians) we want to know the context of sexuality, how it interacts with the other
sorts of cultural categories, social characteristics or historical trends that we concern
ourselves with. This literature decidedly does not do this.
Thus, we find that the approaches of the medico-biology, public health (KAP),
kinship and marriage studies, gender studies and the popular literature on DIY
sexuality do not deal with sexuality in a way that can inform an anthropology of
sexuality. Despite the vast literature in several areas, all of which contributes some
knowledge about sex, we are still in the dark about sexuality itself.
As a starting point, I want to suggest that sexuality be thought of as an autonomous
analytical domain just as ‘politics’, ‘society’, ‘culture’ and ‘economy’ are. Once
thought of as ‘mere biology’, sexuality is now understood to be a relatively distinct
domain of human action. We can speak of cultures and sub-cultures of sexuality (gay,
lesbian, SM, swingers, hookers, etc.) that have their own social organisations, NGOs,
political activists, ethical and moral systems, identities, social boundary markers.
Sexual rights are guaranteed by the South African constitution, which also protects
anyone from discrimination on the basis of sexual preferences. We speak
knowledgeably about the economy of sex (prostitution, sex tourism, pornography
industries, etc.), and of the politics of sex (sexual power, reproductive and sexual
rights, male/female power differentials). Sexual symbolism and motives are
identified in religion, politics, business, advertising, literature, art, dress and fashion
… even food and cuisines. In short, it seems to constitute as fundamental a part of
human life as the other canonical domains in terms of which we are used to assign
 14

humans their motives and history its impetus. Nevertheless, we are loathe to grant it
the sort of relative autonomy that economy, society, or culture have in our
sociological explanatory frameworks. Moreover, we lack all but the rudiments of a
theory of sexual structure, process, institutions, practice, agency and motivation. This
is a consequence of assigning sexuality either to biology or psychology, on the one
hand, or of seeing its own properties as simple consequences of other, more
respectable motives: the economic, the social, the political, the cultural.
Unlike the other social domains into which we normally analyse social action,
sexuality is distinguished by a fundamental sociological fact: it takes place in pairs,
neither within the person nor as part of the ‘social’ as we usually understand it. While
psychological events are characterised by their singularity, and the social by their
multiplicity, the sexual is defined by the dual. Sex takes place between two persons,
not (generally speaking) in groups, families, institutions, classes, categories, sodalities
or even genders. Thus it stands between the customary contrast between the social
and individual. In addition it is private; indeed, it is the very core of the private, and
is the irreducible factor that distinguishes the private from the public. While the
‘private’ is often understood as what is NOT public—thus reducing it to a residual
category—it might well be defined in terms of the social space of the dual relation
that constitutes the sexual domain. As contrasted with the public domain, the private
is where sex might take place. This is the space of intimacy, of sexuality as recreation
and above all of reproduction. While the social (and its analytic domains: the
political, the economic, the social, and the cultural) are characterised by relations of
many-to-many, just as the personal is characterised by the singularity of one, the
sexual is characterised by the relationship of pairs. This helps us to define the domain
of sexuality and to account for its apparent autonomy. The private or intimate space
of sexuality is the special domain of fleshly pleasure, of the couple, the pair, of love,
of passion—neither the one nor the many. This fact helps to account for the paradox
of sexuality’s ‘secrecy’, apparent ‘repression’, and its ‘taboo’ status. It is neither fully
social, nor simply psychological. It is not experienced as simply social, and its
knowledge is rarely communicated directly in ‘normal’ social intercourse. Nor can it
be experienced by the person alone; it is driven my psychological and biological
factors peculiar to the person, but can not be actualised by one. It stands between the
personal and the social, therefore, and possesses its own characteristics.
In sum then, we cannot expect sexuality to be fully explained by either psychology or
sociology however broadly we construe these intellectual methods. It constitutes a
separate domain of analysis, therefore, and we cannot expect, either, that any
reduction of sexuality to political, social, economic or psychological motives can
account for its force. This must be sought in what, for lack of a better term, we might
call the erotic. The lack of an erotic analysis in studies of condom use, sexual risk,
reproductive strategies, STI transmission, and so on, may doom all of these to
ultimate failure.
But how can we study the erotic? This question requires an understanding of the
bases for the un-spoken-ness of sex: Why we do not talk about it. While many
scholars have investigated this is in the context of European cultures, it is likely that
African cultures react in culturally specific ways that are different. While there are
universal features of sexuality, including our pan-human tendency to ‘hide’ sexuality,
the specific ways in which this is done appears to differ broadly between cultures.
 15

‘Respect’ vs ‘Repression’
Michel Foucault’s path-breaking study of sexuality in late modern Europe effectively
debunks the notion that repression is the mode by which the relation between sex and
society can be understood. ‘Repression’ of sexuality since the time of the Victorians,
it was held, prevented people from knowing much about sexuality or from talking
much about it. It was not proper to do so since religion, medicine, law and
educational techniques seemed to forbid it. But Foucault, in what we now take to be a
blinding flash of insight, has pointed out that the very ‘techniques’ or ‘discursive
strategies’ that aimed at limiting and ‘repressing’ sexuality had the effect of
elaborating and inciting a burgeoning discourse on sexuality in order to repress it.
Thus, he saw repression not as an independent cultural movement that forced ‘natural
sexuality’ to be hidden, controlled and secret, but rather as one of several discursive
strategies that had the effect of generating the very object that it ostensibly sought to
eliminate from our bodies and minds. The result, according to Foucault was an
‘explosion’ of not just an increasingly elaborate discourse on sexuality—and
especially on the methods to ‘control’ it through medicine, religion, education, law
and other disciplines—but also to the creation of new and myriad ‘perversions’ which
the emerging discourse helped to define and thus to fix in the cultural imaginary.
In the light of Foucault’s insight, can we ask what might be at work in African society
and cultural that might have a similar effect? If we do so, it appears that the co-
ordinate cultural moment to ‘repression’ in the West is ‘respect’ in Africa. While
these are not equivalent, they have a similar effect. ‘Respect’ is what younger people
owe older people, especially their parents, their parents, siblings and cousins of the
same generation (parallel or cross cousins or both depending on different kinship
traditions in South Africa), and members of ascending generations. It is also what
women owe men, especially in rural areas. People say that parents cannot talk to
children about sex because of respect, and children can not use sexual language or
refer to sexuality in front of those they must respect. Respect and the expectations
associated with it generally require the suppression of speech of any kind that refers to
sex or any direct, frank talk about it. This creates barriers between age classes and
between generations. Traditionally, sexual knowledge could only be legitimately
communicated during initiation schools and rituals. Mothers do not discuss
menstruation with their daughters, expecting their daughters to discover this aspect of
their bodies by themselves. In a study of female knowledge, ritual and attitudes
towards sexuality in Venda culture in Tshiendeulu village, Limpopo Province, for
instance, Jeanerat (1997: 66) notes that
The reason that a girl is not informed beforehand about the nature and meaning
of mestruation is that she has to experience menstruation ‘by herself’: the girl
should reach a knowledge of the meaning of this even through her own
experience.’
The suppression of sexual discourse between mothers and daughers, and between
those of different ages in generally, it is said, is because elders ‘respect’ the right of
younger people to discover sexuality for themselves, while elders regard sexual talk
among juniors as a lack of respect. In many instances this also makes it impossible
for juniors to discuss sexual abuse by elders with anyone. A girl who is sexually
abused by an uncle, for insta nce, cannot discuss this with any one senior since it
would show lack of respect. It is extremely difficult for them to go outside the family
to make a complaint, since this would show lack of respect for the uncle or older
cousin.
 16

At the same time, the re are specific institutions and places where sexual discourse is
required and elaborated. In KwaZulu-Natal, the recent renaissance of formal virginity
testing by older women, usually traditional healers, young girls gather to be examined
by specialist who determine whether they are virgins. Wearing short traditional skirts
only, they are led one by one to a healer who performs a vaginal inspection to
ascertain whether the hymen is intact. If it is, the girl is given a formal certificate,
signed by the chief and the tester, which states that she has undergone the test and was
determined to be a virgin. Girls who submit to this test are also advised about
sexuality during the examination. One tester, the traditional healer Makhosi Sibuko,
also advises girls how to place their boyfriend’s penis between their thighs, rather
than in their vaginas during pre-marital sex. 10 Girls are also inspected for virginity
during the vhusha initiation ceremony in Venda, Limpopo province, during which
they are also taught elements of sexuality and sexual performance (Jeanerat 1997: 48).
Boys initiation rituals in many parts of South are also instances where sexual
knowledge is given and demonstrated by elders to juniors. This knowledge is, in all
cases, considered to be secret, although it is an open secret.

‘Secrecy and Sexuality

If the so called ‘repressive age’ of sexuality in Europe, that is the period of
‘Victorianism’ (but originating from the beginning of the seventeenth century,
according to Foucault) was in fact, a period of ‘putting into discourse of sex’, and if
the Medieval period (originating in the Classical’ was a ‘remarkably uniform’ concept
of the flesh, then what is African sexuality? Is it discursively created, as in the
Modern European period, or is it is discourse of flesh, as in the Medieval. Probably
both are present, since the Christian and the European intellectual discourses have
permeated the African discourses on sex for so long. However, the underlying and
truly African concept of sexuality seems rather to be developed around the notion of
‘spirit’, or ‘moya’, of ‘air’ or of a fluid exchange of substance. The European
Medieval notions of sex were rooted in the flesh of the person. African notions of sex
seem rather to be located in the flow of values and substances between persons. It is
not rooted in ‘the flesh’—that is, the flesh of the experiencing and will-driven
individual—but rather between flesh and flesh. It is not the root of evil, because it is
not ‘rooted’: the metaphor of ‘roots’ expresses a European preoccupation with sex as
‘natural’ but ‘base’, that is growing from the root of fleshly existence since the
Creation, and subsisting in the interior world of sensation, blood and other humours,
in the base experience of passions tha t appear to come out of nowhere as if from a
deep hole in the ground of our interior knowledge of ourselves. Since an African
epistemology places more emphasis on the exterior constitution of reality (exterior,
that is, to the European notion of the self contained person), especially in and through
the close network of kin and friends by which the person is said to exist, the
knowledge of self and of the passions of the self are less important than the
knowledge of others and their passions, especially of their jealousies and joys
concerning what the ‘self’ is. Thus, the notion of sexuality and of its power is
contained within the social rather than within the person. Knowledge of one’s
sexuality and of one’s sex comes not from a deep natural source within, but rather
from the exploration and combination of one’s own substance with that of others.
The sex act is still secret, but not because of the features of the European modern

10 Interview with Luzile B Sithole, ‘Mahosi Sibuko’ (her professional name as a sangoma) in West Central Jabavu
township, Soweto, Thursday 28 Feb 2002.
 17

‘discursive formation’ that requires just such a fertile secret to drive its ‘endless
telling’ forward. Rather, the sex act is secret because it is one of the most powerful
tests of interpersonal power and self-knowledge in the African epistemological
universe. It exists not as the ‘discursive level’ of talk—whether of ‘whispering on a
bed’ as in Freudian psychoanalysis or of Christian confession, or all the other multiple
and polymorphous forms of the conquest of sex by discourse that Foucault has
pointed out—but rather at a pragmatic level of experiment and exploration of possible
mixings of personal substance and spirit. By ‘pragmatic’ I mean explicitly not
verbalised but rather explored directly through the body, one’s own and with others.
Of course, in an African traditional discourse, the body is never entirely one’s own. It
is always guided and directed by others: the ancestors, the witch, the spirit (now
including the Holy Spirit), and the expectation and constraints of those with whom
one lives. There is little room for the autonomous generation of ‘base passion’ that
arises within the individual, but always room for passion that explores the boundaries
of others through constant experimentation with others’ bodies.

Conclusion
Although sex takes place between bodies that are everywhere fundamentally the
same, it does so within a context of meanings that change over time and across
difference communities of meaning. We have called this the ‘culture’ of sexuality,
but the senses of this use of the term ‘culture’ are different. The culture of sexuality is
largely non-verbal, and though it is shared, it is shared through networks of contact
and communication between couples themselves. These meanings are also ‘public’
and therefore ‘shared’ as other aspect of culture are, but are not publicly shared in the
same way that other ‘cultural’ meanings are. These meanings are specifically
‘performed’ in the non-verbal discourse of bodies in which pleasure is taken and
shared, and in which persons are ‘produced’. The production of ‘persons’ in this
cultural discourse of bodies is two-fold: procreative, in which actual physical human
beings are created and nurtured, and recreative in which we become who we are as
(gendered) men and women through sexuality. It is the act through which males
become ‘men’ and females become ‘women’. This necessarily takes place within the
cultural categories that constitute gender at its deepest and most fundamental level.
While social and political roles make use of this distinction that the discourse of
sexuality creates (masculinity and femininity, or ‘male’ and female’), the culture of
sexuality itself may be a ‘relatively autonomous domain’ of human experience. It
constitutes a set of patterns of behaviour that form ‘root metaphors’ for most other
aspects of political and social life while existing itself partly isolated from the broader
sets of cultural categories and social practices that constitute the rest of daily life.
This makes it especially difficult to study as another ‘aspect’ of human social
behaviour, or as a domain of ‘culture’, but it remains as a fundamental raw experience
of life itself that must be constantly interpreted through cultural frameworks of
meaning, and actualised through myriad social processes.
Here we have attempted to describe a set of meanings that appears to guide and shape
sexual practices among a particular community of people, those of southern Africa.
In this context, however, it is difficult to say precisely who might, as it were, a
‘member’ of this community of meaning. Southern Africa is perhaps one of the most
culturally complex societies in the world, with long-standing embedded influences
from virtually all parts of the globe. Cultural meanings and identities differ even
within families. Consequently, the argument developed here must be taken as a
‘model’, that is, a description of a set of related meanings and practices that has some
 18

salience as a pattern that seems to emerge out of complex and contradictory data, but
that can not be said to be instantiated in full in any particular concrete instance. The
data and experience on which I have drawn for making these claims comes largely
from the ‘margins’ of southern Africa: youth, traditional healers, rural areas, the poor,
and women. As such it is likely to be a marginal discourse rather than ‘hegemonic’.
But the construction of a model allows us to ask further questions, and may guide
research in directions that it might not otherwise go. If it has this effect, and I and
others are able to explore further its validity and scope, then it will have fulfilled its
purpose.

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