Catholic Women of Congo-Brazzaville: Mothers and Sisters in Troubled Times
280
Catholic Women of Congo-Brazzaville: Mothers and Sisters in Troubled Times
280Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253220554 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2009 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Catholic Women of Congo-Brazzaville
Mothers and Sisters in Troubled Times
By Phyllis M. Martin
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2009 Phyllis M. MartinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35281-1
CHAPTER 1
Mothers at Risk
Christianity arrived in the lower Congo in troubled times. Those living along the Loango coast and in its hinterland experienced the full impact of a colonial occupation that was violent and deeply disruptive. For many, daily life was full of risks, and it is within this context that the attraction — or lack thereof — of the arrival of Catholic missionaries needs to be addressed. Overall, the records suggest that although some came to the missions as "a place to dwell secure," they were in the great majority young men and boys. The absence of young women of marriageable age and opposition of families to sending girls for Christian training are a constant refrain in the early reports of the Holy Ghost Fathers and the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny who established communities at Loango in 1883 and 1886. Since Monseigneur Carrie, vicar apostolic of lower Congo, advocated the training of boys and girls and the establishment of Christian families as the "indispensable," "solid," and "enduring" base for the advance of the Congolese church, the problem of recruiting girls and young women threatened to undermine the evangelical project before it got off the ground. This situation certainly bears investigation not only for an understanding of Catholic beginnings in Congo-Brazzaville but because it seems to differ from much of the experience of early Christians elsewhere in Africa, summed up by Adrian Hastings, the prominent historian of the African church, that "it is noticeable that the first converts were often women" and that this was the case "again and again in a mission history."
One explanation would point to the importance of "people power" in equatorial Africa and the resistance of men who needed to control the human resources that women and girls represented. The missionary priests generally put this in the context of "polygamous old men." Certainly, the importance of women's labor and reproductive powers is not in dispute here, especially in view of the demographic crisis that existed in the early years of colonial occupation in a region already thinly populated. Jan Vansina has estimated that by 1920 equatorial Africa had lost half of its population to the ravages of colonial conquest, with lower Congo one of the hardest hit areas. Particularly destructive was the passage of large French expeditions that forced their way along the 580-kilometer trail from Loango to Brazzaville en route to Ubangi-Shari and Chad in the north. Chiefs competed with each other for tolls from passing caravans, and the requisitioning of food and supplies by Europeans and their militias could turn violent, with women seized as hostages, resisters shot as "rebels" and "bandits," and whole families fleeing into the bush to avoid the predations. Fights broke out between porters and guards and those living along the trail as they vied to maximize profits. Reports by colonial agents from the coast through the Mayombe to the Niari valley and to Brazzaville tell of pillaging, retaliations, and chaos (see map 2). Writing of his experiences while attempting to force open a path for the Marchand expedition, Colonel Baratier, one of the few Europeans to address the reality of the colonial conquest, wrote of the "illusion that is called peaceful penetration ... to refuse to admit the bloodshed behind the ideal is a beautiful but, unfortunately, unrealizable dream."
Adding to the disruption throughout the lower Congo was the spread of disease. A series of droughts and famines induced by the exactions of expeditionary forces weakened villagers and made them susceptible to sickness. Smallpox, carried on ships from Luanda and Sao Tomé, affected coastal populations in the mid-i88os and again in the 1890s and spread along the caravan routes. Greater labor mobility took workers to new health ecologies. Most devastatingly, sleeping sickness, first reported at the end of the nineteenth century, brought high mortality rates. Whole communities were wiped out, and those that lived struggled to produce the wherewithal to survive. At the Bouanza mission above the caravan route through the Niari valley, three-quarters of the population in the surrounding countryside died or left, and the mission was forced to close and relocate at Kimbenza in 1907. Reports from the southern Mayombe graphically conveyed the awful conditions: "The people have not been able to look after their farms since they are so busy burying the victims." And, following a prolonged drought in a once well-populated region: "With the famine, sleeping sickness has struck the region in frightening proportions. In the interior, villages once densely populated are now abandoned. Corpses everywhere, dried, smoked and wrapped in cloth, are waiting to be buried." Communities recovered gradually, but it was the 1920s before the colonial health service brought the epidemic under control and the 1930s before population levels began to recover from the early decades of colonial occupation.
The assurance of adequate human resources was also less certain with competition for labor. The first three to four decades of missionary activity coincided with a time of economic uncertainty as male workers were drawn or forced into European enterprises and rivals scrambled to retain control of the labor and trade that was the essential basis of political power. The slave trade did not stop with the end of the trans-Atlantic trade (c. 1870). Family heads and village chiefs now concentrated on turning their labor force to service the factories that stretched along the coast or mobilized slaves to work on the production of palm oil, palm kernels, and rubber, now the principal exports. Competition from French recruiters for porters to man the caravans was intense. Writing of his experiences in the early 1890s, the administrator Jean Dybowski estimated that 7,000 porters were out on the trail each year. Pierre Vennetier, reviewing official and unofficial sources, reckoned that on an average some fifty caravans and 1,160 porters per month made the journey from Loango to Brazzaville between 1890 and 1895.
These aspects of colonial occupation might seem sufficient to explain the value of women's labor and the resistance to missionary demands for girls, but a closer look at the sources from women's perspective provides additional reasons. According to missionary nuns, women were their principal antagonists, and it becomes evident that the European sisters were challenging the very areas on which local women's position rested: the daily practice of mothering, girls' education, and ensuring of fertility. To send daughters to the sisters' mission was to alienate maternal responsibilities, endanger social health, and put future mothers at risk.
Women's Worth
Women's contribution to the household economy was richly documented by the German ethnographer and geographer Eduard Pechuel-Loesche, who lived several years on the Loango coast in the 1870s as a member of a German scientific expedition and then, again, in 1882–83. He was an acute observer and collector of oral traditions, and was familiar with the published literature. Proverbs he collected testified to the importance of female labor: "the most beautiful girl is useless"; "an industrious woman is prosperity"; and "a slovenly woman is like a pot without a bottom." Sources going back to the seventeenth century and continuing into the twentieth document women's work: cultivating basic food crops such as manioc, corn, and vegetables of all kinds; carrying water; cutting and hauling firewood; preparing food; cleaning and doing maintenance work around the compound; contributing to domestic economies by making pots and baskets; and collecting charcoal for blacksmiths. Such responsibilities likely fluctuated with historical conditions, but the basics were quite constant according to European observations and testimonies of present-day informants. Men had essential and complementary tasks: hunting, fishing, clearing land, tending palm trees that produced wine and raffia materials, building houses, trading, providing porterage on long-distance routes, smithing, weaving, carving, and growing their own crops such as tobacco and sugar cane. Some work might be carried out cooperatively, with women helping men to set up nets to trap animals, and women fishing streams, ponds, and marshes while men concentrated on larger fishing projects in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Men might also help with heavy work in the planting season. Other divisions of labor were ingrained in custom so that infringing boundaries might bring problems: for example, a mango or avocado tree climbed by a girl or woman was doomed to bear less-tasty fruit.
Women's work was laborious, for during rest days and the dry season they still prepared manioc and carried water and firewood; on the other hand, they had clearly defined rights and could refuse if men asked them to do more. Women "are almost like the slaves of their husbands," wrote an eighteenth-century missionary observer, but the same account is contradictory in saying that "women usually have a house and fields and gardens and slaves themselves over which the husband has no right." Wealth accumulated through their productive activities remained under their control. Pechuël-Loesche stated graphically: "Whatever she harvests above the meal requirements of her husband, whatever she gains from animal husbandry is hers. The spouse may not take a bulb from her basket, not an egg from her chicken coop. ... It would be completely wrong to view the wife as the husband's beast of burden, as is customarily done." In the household, co-wives shared the cooking. Similar themes emerge from descriptions of Mayombe settlements, where a European observer in 1913 noted, "a woman owns her cooking and farming utensils. The produce belongs to the woman who has worked or sowed the field. ... Everything the woman acquires belongs to her." Farming was a communal effort when women came together to maximize their production. In some regions of the lower Congo it was done in teams under a leader who negotiated disputes and instructed young women on the best techniques. Such bonding together for women's work could transfer into managing relationships with men. Another Vili proverb said, "whoever strikes his wife strikes all women."
While the essential productive activities of women started with the sustenance of their husband, children, and other household members, the expectations of good mothering went far beyond a woman's labor, potentially bringing her respect in the community beyond her own household and matrilineal kin. If proverbs from the 1870s were reminders of women's labor, they also conveyed the responsibilities of parents: "those who don't dry children's tears will cry themselves," and, "if you like the daughter, look at the mother." Proverbs collected more recently stress similar themes: on parenting, "the fruit grows because it remains attached to the stem" and "the woman is a blessing." The latter is explained by Mavoungou Pambou, a Vili scholar: "The woman is a blessing in the measure that she contributes to the prestige of the clan; she is a person without whom the survival of the clan cannot be certain." Tales of mothers saving children in great danger and a dead mother returning unseen to protect orphans and feed her baby were part of folklore.
Even without the exigencies of the times, elders might hesitate to give up control of girls and young women, for their productive and reproductive activities were infused with specialized knowledge relating to essential customs, rituals, and prohibitions. Ignorance and disregard of these cultural practices could endanger the spiritual and social well-being of the whole society. Mothers had knowledge passed on by their own mothers, given to them by older, experienced, and respected women during the time of their initiation, and shared with each other in daily life experiences and special occasions. From their mothers, her co-wives, their grandmothers, and matrilineal relations, daughters picked up practical knowledge about household management, hygiene, and health care, about the education of their children, and about technical matters associated with everyday tasks from manioc bread preparation to farming techniques, and from basket weaving to knowledge of plants associated with medicinal care. Boys as well as girls stayed close to their mother until they were about five or six years old, when they would go to live with their maternal uncle and have relatively independent lives with their peers, going into the forest to catch birds an gather eggs and fruit, and by the age of fifteen learning house building, weaving, fishing, and other specialized activities.
Girls continued to live in a woman's world, adding to their knowledge until the age of puberty and their preparation for marriage. Affairs relating to sexuality, such as withdrawal to a special house during menstruation, proper relations with a husband, advice relating to pregnancies, and other knowledge relating to adulthood were the subject of intensive education. For many of the northwestern Kongo this occurred during a girl's seclusion for weeks or months. Bodily fluids associated with sexual acts and biological reproduction were considered dangerous and unless properly dealt with could threaten the whole social body with contamination. From the onset of pregnancy, and long before if conception proved difficult, a woman would consult with a nganga (pl. banganga — priest, healer, diviner, magician) who specialized in gynecological matters and child-birth. Such individuals, both men and women, were skilled manipulators of the nkisi (pl. minkisi) associated with fertility. According to Wyatt MacGaffey: "There is no good translation for the KiKongo word nkisi (pl. minkisi) because no corresponding institution exists in European culture. In Kongo thought a nkisi is a personalized force from the invisible world of the dead; this force has chosen, or been induced, to submit itself to some degree of human control effected through ritual performances." One of the best known nkisi associated with fertility, tranquility, and justice was the nkisi Mabyala ma Ndembe, into which nails were driven (nkisi nkondi). Noted on the Loango coast in the 1880s, its representations, authority, and proscriptions had spread inland along the Niari valley to Malebo Pool by 1910.
Women were also centrally involved in the most powerful therapeutic association in lower Congo. Lemba had developed in the face of declining royal power as an association of merchants, chiefs, and powerful men to regulate markets, structure trade, and give protection against witchcraft that might be activated by their prosperity. Recognized by the seventeenth century on the coast and in the Mayombe, its influence spread over the next two centuries as far as the Pool as its members consolidated their interests and alliances through intermarriage, rituals, insignia, and portable shrines. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with concerns for declining populations relating to the slave trade and the early colonial occupation, lemba specialists had broadened their therapeutic practices from a generalized medicine that included the fertility of the land and of women to a range of medicines and treatment for preg and childbirth.
Thus, expectant mothers, in consultation with appropriate nganga, followed special practices such as the avoidance of certain foods, the observance of certain rituals, or the wearing of special amulets: whatever experts recommended to undertake the perilous journey through pregnancy and to avoid miscarriages or the birth of children with physical and mental disabilities. Following child-birth, customs and proscriptions relating to all aspects of a child's life from the naming and first out-dooring ceremonies through the growing-up years to the transition to puberty had to be learned and respected, and passed on to the next generation of mothers. The whole process was "highly instructional" as "anxious mothers ... drilled their offspring in essential knowledge."
To be childless was a personal tragedy and a potential social disaster, with consequences for the matrilineage and clan. In such situations, "uneasiness and sorrow are felt and certain measures or practical steps must be taken." Couples might make many visits to a nganga nkisi to try to reverse their misfortune. A childless marriage was grounds for a divorce, with infertility blamed on the woman. Those who had not borne children were a separate ritual category. In the Loango region, for example, the spirit of the ancestor, nkisi nsi, the first to occupy the land, was honored in a sacred grove where the image was tended by a nganga. Pilgrims arrived to perform rituals for fertility of the earth and body, but access was forbidden to certain categories of individuals including girls before puberty (those who had not yet been initiated and were in the category of children), virgins (more or less the same individuals since girls were married at puberty), and childless women. Among the Beembe marriage was a "test" for women that could be "passed" only through having many children. Full payment of bridewealth was only made after the birth of the first child. Sita, meaning sterile," was a term of mockery for a childless woman.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Catholic Women of Congo-Brazzaville by Phyllis M. Martin. Copyright © 2009 Phyllis M. Martin. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1. Mothers at Risk2. The First Generation3. Means of Transition4. Religious Sisters and Mothers5. Toward a Church of Women6. Women TogetherEpilogue: Mothers and Sisters in War and PeaceNotesBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"A fine book and a worthy contribution to the expanding scholarship on women and missions. Martin is especially adept at providing the broad strokes of historical, political, and economic context for her readers."
Martin, co-editor (with Patrick O'Meara) of the immensely popular textbook Africa (CH, Oct'78; 3rd ed. 1995) and an authority on the history of west-central Africa, has written a highly readable history of Catholic women in Congo-Brazzaville that examines the emergence of lay Catholic women's groups and their role, with European and African nuns, in the popularization of the Catholic church in Congo. Initially, Congolese women were wary of the new faith introduced in 1883; a century later, the church had become a 'church of women.' For their part, missionaries saw the institutions of African motherhood (especially the rite of passage, kumbi) as an enemy to combat. Martin (emer., Indiana Univ.) demonstrates the importance of the concept of motherhood in Congo, and how Congolese Catholic women adapted the idea to accommodate their new identities. She discusses the special challenges faced by those who sought to or did become nuns. In the post-independence period, Catholic women initiated new associations (fraternités) that were more independent and inclusive than earlier church groups that had been founded by missionaries. These fraternités combined spiritual concerns with mutual aid. Following the civil wars of the 1990s, the fraternités mobilized, calling for peace and reconciliation. A thoughtful and thought-provoking book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. —Choice
A fine book and a worthy contribution to the expanding scholarship on women and missions. Martin is especially adept at providing the broad strokes of historical, political, and economic context for her readers.
Martin, co-editor (with Patrick O'Meara) of the immensely popular textbook Africa (CH, Oct'78; 3rd ed. 1995) and an authority on the history of west-central Africa, has written a highly readable history of Catholic women in Congo-Brazzaville that examines the emergence of lay Catholic women's groups and their role, with European and African nuns, in the popularization of the Catholic church in Congo. Initially, Congolese women were wary of the new faith introduced in 1883; a century later, the church had become a 'church of women.' For their part, missionaries saw the institutions of African motherhood (especially the rite of passage, kumbi) as an enemy to combat. Martin (emer., Indiana Univ.) demonstrates the importance of the concept of motherhood in Congo, and how Congolese Catholic women adapted the idea to accommodate their new identities. She discusses the special challenges faced by those who sought to or did become nuns. In the post-independence period, Catholic women initiated new associations (fraternités) that were more independent and inclusive than earlier church groups that had been founded by missionaries. These fraternités combined spiritual concerns with mutual aid. Following the civil wars of the 1990s, the fraternités mobilized, calling for peace and reconciliation. A thoughtful and thought-provoking book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. —Choice
A fine book and a worthy contribution to the expanding scholarship on women and missions. Martin is especially adept at providing the broad strokes of historical, political, and economic context for her readers.