3 questions to three readings:USING THE ATTACHED READINGS AND DOCS, briefly respond to each of these questions in three or four sentences.

Heidi Gengenbach

Tattooed Secrets: Women’s History in

Magude District, Southern Mozambique

Forms of bodily adornment and decoration have frequently assumed a central position in cross-cultural encounters and understandings of gender. Arguing that women in southern Mozambique have historically used tattoos (tinhlanga) both as a way of responding to social change and to express the importance of female a≈liations in a male-dominated world, this essay charts the transforma- tion of ‘‘traditional’’ practice and the heightened significance of tattooing for women adversely a√ected by colonial rule. The persistence of tinhlanga chal- lenged Portuguese colonial and missionary e√orts to reform local customs and cultivate ‘‘civilization’’ through the propagation of new standards of feminine beauty and bodily adornment. The ensuing struggle over women’s bodies reveals the gendered meanings of racial di√erence and the limits of European power in colonial Mozambique, reminding us that the cultural projects of colonialism frequently focused on practices that embodied identity and a≈rmed the ‘‘tradi- tional’’ bonds of community.

The Lenge and the Tsopi women have the story of their lives

written on their own flesh.—E. Dora Earthy, Valenge Women: The

Social and Economic Life of the Valenge Women of Portuguese Africa

Some of the most innovative work in African history in recent yearsscrutinizes the body—the gendered, dark-skinned body—as text,social object, and field for the inscription and operation of colonial power. Focusing on the range of practices through which African bodies were disciplined and commodified by European regimes, this literature

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254 Heidi Gengenbach

has paid particular attention to the role of Christianity, clothing, and biomedicine in the transformation of African lifeways between the late nineteenth century and today.∞ Discussions of colonized bodies also spring from, and flow into, wider debates about colonialism itself, prod- ding us to rethink European conquest of Africa as an intervention of the most intimate kind, an embodied experience where power engages even ‘‘private’’ identities, behaviors, and a√ections.

Writing the history of colonial bodies has necessarily involved new kinds of evidence as well as novel approaches to conventional sources. Advertisements, letters, gossip, household objects—all have been mined as texts that reveal the corporeal meanings of colonization for the men and women who were its victims, and in some cases, its agents. Conspic- uously absent in this literature, with its emphasis on the unstable quality of the colonized body politic, is interrogation of the historical meanings etched on African bodies unclothed, above all, the signs of personhood worn in the form of body markings or tattoos on men’s and women’s skin. This essay argues that the body markings of women in southern Mozam- bique are indispensable sources for understanding women’s experiences of Portuguese colonialism and a vital form of evidence for African colo- nial history more broadly.

Reading history from women’s body markings is not as strange a prop- osition as it might appear. There is a thin trail of documentary evidence of tattooing in southern Mozambique, beginning around 1800, when Euro- pean visitors to the busy port town of Delagoa Bay caught sight of tat- tooed men and women in and around the Portuguese settlement. Euro- pean ivory hunters and explorers similarly noted the decorative scars on ‘‘native’’ skin as they roamed the region in the turbulent nineteenth cen- tury, especially after the conquest of much of this area by the Gaza Nguni in the 1820s, and as imperial competition for the territory heated up from 1880 on. The spread of Swiss Presbyterian missionaries from the Trans- vaal into southern Mozambique during the 1880s and Portugal’s defeat of the Gaza king Ngungunyana in 1895 ushered in the period of formal colonization and stimulated a flurry of reports detailing ‘‘native customs and traditions’’ among the ‘‘Tsonga.’’ In these texts, too, tinhlanga at- tracted European attention, but by this time, the majority of men in southern Mozambique were migrating to work in South Africa and had begun to abandon the habit of body marking. Tattooing became, in Euro- pean eyes, a frivolous if intriguing feminine practice, a holdover from the

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‘‘primitive’’ past, though one that showed a curious persistence through- out the colonial period.

If two hundred years’ worth of written evidence is available, why focus on body marking as a source for colonial history? Interviewees’ stories about tinhlanga expose some of the most intimate—and ambitious— reaches of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique; while other invaders and immigrants reacted to local habits of body marking, only the Euro- pean colonizers (and, revealingly, their African ‘‘middles’’) turned the elimination of women’s tattoos into a near-religious crusade. Yet the in- tensity of this struggle was due less to a priori colonial determination than to women’s awareness that their e√orts to ‘‘make themselves beautiful’’ were as threatening to European power as they were precious to the women themselves. Memories of tinhlanga center the colonial moment, in other words, because colonialism simultaneously undermined and en- couraged women’s tattooing. Tinhlanga may have predated and outlived European rule, but it was the European presence that cast their gendered value in sharp relief.

Tattooing was valuable to women for two reasons. First, tinhlanga provided an idiom both for mediating androcentric social structures and for asserting female-centered networks of a≈liation, whether in the pri- vate spaces of friendship, the uneven playing field of patrilineal kinship, or the high-stakes realm of colonial race relations. In the waves of crisis and conflict that swept the region after 1800, women used their skin to map a social world in which boundaries of belonging were rooted less in as- cribed familial or ethnic identity than in shared feminine culture, bodily experience, and geographic place. Under the mounting pressures of the twentieth century, ‘‘blood ties’’ forged through tattooing—more flexible and inclusive than those dictated by birth or marriage—became an im- portant resource for women in need.

Second, tinhlanga o√ered women a bold yet ‘‘secret’’ (xihundla) voice for telling history, a silent yet visible language for commenting on social change—for a strictly female audience—in a context where oral tradi- tions did not take women’s perspectives into account, and where women were often not supposed to put their feelings into words. The secrecy of tattooing took on dangerously subversive implications during the colo- nial period, as colonizers strove to implant ‘‘civilization’’ and commodity capitalism in part by forcing women to adorn their bodies in ‘‘white’’ (xilungu) ways. But if colonizers insisted that what women did to their

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skin was a mark of civilization’s progress, women insisted in turn that they could use their bodies to define identity themselves, not by shrug- ging o√ white standards of beauty but by renegotiating, through tin- hlanga, the frontier between ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘black’’ (xilandin) ways, incor- porating colonial things into what they continued to call a ‘‘traditional’’ practice.

My methodology here combines oral history with the insights of femi- nist archaeologists who have teased out women’s pasts from the tracks of social and spatial relationships embedded in feminine material culture.≤

Grounding my arguments in the interface of memory and cultural pro- duction, I interpret transformations in women’s body marking in the context of mission Christianity, schooling, migrant labor, Portuguese ra- cial ideologies, and increasing marriage and family pressures during and after the colonial period. Significantly, women said very little about rea- sons for changes in tattooing; in fact, it is di≈cult to periodize this history from women’s memories alone, which speak in a uniformly ahistorical voice. Yet women’s insistence on the atemporality of their tattoos in fact exposes one of tinhlanga’s boldest claims: that Portuguese colonialism had little if any impact on rural women; that despite the aggressive pres- ence of xilungu attitudes and ways, daily life in the countryside—at least for women—remained essentially the same.

william white, a British merchant who visited southern Mozam- bique in 1798, published one of the first comments on body marking among local men and women: ‘‘They are all tattooed, some down the middle of the forehead, and point of the chin . . . and of their temples, of this shape X: their bodies are so likewise, particularly on the chest, but none of them are exactly alike; those, however, of the same family, are tattooed very nearly in the same manner.’’≥

The tension here between White’s recognition of the uniqueness of an individual’s tattoos and his belief that tattoos showed ‘‘family’’ resem- blances prefigures the central problem with European writings about tinhlanga from 1800 on. Europeans presumed that Africans were divided along ‘‘tribal’’ lines, with ethnicity and its subcategories (for example, clan or lineage) determining how people decorated their bodies—even when decorative marks did not follow such divisions perfectly. Thus, in the early nineteenth century, when European traders met travelers with tattooed faces and chests hailing from anywhere between the Limpopo

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River and Delagoa Bay, they took it for granted that these men belonged to a single ethnic group, labeled by historians later as ‘‘proto-Tsonga.’’ This correlation of particular decorative markings with people known as Tsonga-Shangaan hardened from the 1840s on, when Portuguese hunter and slave trader João Albasini was joined at his military stronghold in the northern Transvaal by refugees from southern Mozambique who bore large keloid scars on their noses and cheeks—described as ‘‘knobs,’’ ‘‘lumps,’’ ‘‘warts,’’ and ‘‘buttons’’—which earned them the epithet ‘‘Knob- nose’’ from residents of the Zoutpansberg.∂

After midcentury, European writings began to include more elaborate descriptions of ‘‘native’’ practices of bodily adornment, from tattooing to teeth filing, lip piercing, jewelry, and dress. These commentaries also became more openly concerned with distinguishing dark-skinned ‘‘sav- ages’’ from light-skinned bearers of ‘‘civilization.’’ Reading tattoos as a ‘‘marker of the primitive,’’ imperial observers believed that di√erences in personal ornamentation reflected Africans’ position on the evolutionary hierarchy, and ranked ‘‘tribal’’ groups according to their cultural resilience in the face of pressures for change.∑ In these discussions, the Tsonga appear to have an unusually plastic ethnic identity. According to Henri Alexandre Junod, a Swiss missionary and prolific writer on the Tsonga, keloid facial tattooing had ‘‘ancient’’ roots in the coastal lowlands around the Save River. When proto-Tsonga groups invaded this area in the fif- teenth century, their subjects ridiculed the ‘‘flat noses’’ of their conquerors so relentlessly that the latter adopted facial tattooing themselves. With the Nguni invasions of the early nineteenth century, these markings assumed heightened political significance when Zulu armies sent in pursuit of the rebel Nguni leader Soshangane targeted men with no ‘‘buttons on their face,’’ and many Nguni soldiers decided to ‘‘submit to the operation.’’ By the 1860s and 1870s, however, when British explorers were criss-crossing southern Mozambique, ‘‘knobnose’’ tattooing had become a scorned sign of inferiority among subject peoples and was being supplanted by the style of ear piercing popular among the Nguni elite. As Europeans saw it, this transformation in body marking signaled a wholesale acceptance of assimilation into a conquering tribe. St. Vincent Erskine summed up the prevailing view when he wrote in 1868 that ‘‘Knob-nosed Ca√res’’ had ‘‘amalgamated with the tribes of Manjaje and Umzeila. . . . In a few years knob-noses will be as extinct as pig-tails.’’∏

Yet amalgamation with respect to tattooing was a distinctly gendered

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process: not only were women decorating their skin more extensively than men at this time, but they also continued doing so even after men adopted plain-skinned Nguni, then European, fashions of bodily adorn- ment. By the early twentieth century, ear piercing was the only form of body marking. Extant among men, yet women’s bodies displayed a ‘‘be- wildering’’ variety of scars. Surprised that this practice was not disappear- ing with the ‘‘evolution of costume,’’ colonial commentators were none- theless certain that the once ‘‘deep’’ ritual meanings of tinhlanga had ‘‘disappeared’’; women’s tattoos were now merely ‘‘ornamental mutila- tions’’ connected with ‘‘nubility’’ or marriage, a way, Junod sco√ed, ‘‘to make themselves prettier . . . as they think!’’π

Not even missionary-ethnographers such as Junod or Emily Dora Earthy deemed it necessary to look more closely into the stubborn per- sistence of tattooing among women, or at the meanings of the tattoos themselves. Women, they assumed, were marginal members of patrilineal kinship groups, their body markings passively derived from the clan or tribe into which they were born. Yet Earthy acknowledged that women’s tattoos also followed ‘‘particular fashions of certain districts,’’ and that by the 1920s, tinhlanga depicted an increasingly diverse range of objects: plants, birds, insects, reptiles, seashells, astral bodies, arrowheads, musi- cal instruments, but also scissors, keys, watches, and waistcoats.∫ Al- though Earthy’s informants told her that they obtained these markings to ‘‘do honour to their bodies, to make them beautiful,’’ the inclusion of elements of a masculine foreign world in their tinhlanga repertoire, alongside images from the landscape of women’s everyday life, suggests that rather more was going on. Scissors, keys, watches, waistcoats—for rural women, these items may have represented the gendered mate- rialities of colonialism as it infiltrated the countryside through Portuguese administration and commerce and South African mining capital. Scissors are a labor-transforming household technology; keys stand for new con- cepts of privacy, property, and residential space; watches serve as status symbol and keeper of industrial time (the clocks that keep husbands from home); and waistcoats are the archetypically ornamental component of a ‘‘civilized gentleman’s’’ wardrobe, a metonym for the prodigal, yet neces- sary, expense of a European-style three-piece suit.

Women’s desire to appropriate the symbolic power of these goods is evident from the following testimony, quoted by Earthy: ‘‘If we see any object which particularly pleases us, we go home and have it tatued on our

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bodies—but if other people envy us, and want to make incisions like ours, we do not reveal where we have seen the object—for the spirit . . . of the thing remains with her who has made a representation of it on her body.’’Ω

It is this expressive comment that leads Earthy to characterize women’s tattoos as ‘‘the story of their lives written on their own flesh’’—yet her analysis of tinhlanga stops abruptly here. For Earthy, as for earlier Euro- pean commentators, tattooing may have been ‘‘ancient,’’ but it was cer- tainly not historical. Its value lay in its status as a vanishing ‘‘custom,’’ not in its social dimensions as a living practice among women who were deter- mined to continue ‘‘making themselves beautiful’’ in this particular way.

women in magude tell the history of tinhlanga very di√erently from European accounts, and their recollections challenge ethnographic ste- reotypes on every front. No interviewee gave ethnic or clan identity as the reason for her tattoos, and no two women from the same ethnic group or clan had identical sets of scars. Nor did they portray tinhlanga as aimed primarily at transforming girls into sexually desirable wives. While many women laughingly confided that tattoos ‘‘make your husband happy’’ because when a man strokes a woman’s scarred body he instantly ‘‘wakes up’’ (that is, achieves erection), interviewees clearly linked heightened male excitement with their own sexual satisfaction: tinhlanga not only induced a man to spend more time caressing his wife during foreplay, but they also helped to ensure that he ‘‘woke up’’ (when his penis ‘‘rested’’ against her abdomen or thighs) for a second round of intercourse. Per- haps more telling, many women had their first tattoos cut long before puberty, and some went on accumulating them through adulthood, even after a failed marriage had convinced them to live without men. While the desire to be attractive to men certainly mattered, and other divorced or widowed women who added to their tinhlanga did so in part for this reason, women’s raucous stories about husbands’ comically slavish atten- tion to tattooed wives (or mistresses) represent male pleasure as an ancil- lary e√ect of tinhlanga. One woman who was not tattooed at all chal- lenged me to deny that a man ‘‘needs more than that little hole’’ to enjoy intercourse.

The emphasis in oral narratives on the ‘‘secrecy’’ surrounding the act of ‘‘cutting’’ tattoos also troubles the assumption that body marking was a rite of initiation girls endured under the supervision of female elders. Tinhlanga, according to interviewees, were always done ‘‘in the bush’’

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(nhoveni, khwatini), so that no one would ‘‘see all that blood.’’ Small groups of girls would ‘‘invite one another’’ and make clandestine arrange- ments to meet at dawn the following day, having prepared what they needed for the operation (cloth to staunch the bleeding, for example) the night before. They would sneak o√ in the morning without telling any- one where they were going. The discretionary nature of tattooing was also reflected in memories of how the tinhlanga economy functioned. If a girl wanted to be ‘‘cut,’’ she went to the tattoo artist (mutlhaveli) of her choice, whether a relative, a neighbor, or a stranger with a reputation for not ‘‘hurting’’ too much or causing infection. The mutlhaveli could be of any age, from an ‘‘old woman’’ (xikoxana) to a slightly older girl, and the most skillful among them had ‘‘lines of girls’’ requesting their services. Unless the mutlhaveli was a relative, girls were expected to compensate her with a gift, such as a few hours of work in her fields, a load of water or firewood, a tin of corn, a bead bracelet, or a safety pin to ‘‘wash her eyes’’ because she had seen so much blood. In rare instances, they might give her a small amount of money, but interviewees declared unanimously that cash presents were never a payment (hakelo)—tattooing, they insisted, was not a commercial transaction.

When asked to explain why they cut tattoos, interviewees’ most com- mon first response was ‘‘to make myself beautiful,’’ ‘‘to beautify [kux- ongisa] my body.’’ Beauty is, of course, historically specific, constituted by ideals shared among people with a sense of common social location and cultural identity. Indeed, the relational content of tattooed beauty in Magude was clear in the comment that usually followed women’s first response: ‘‘Well, I saw what my fellow girls had, and me, I longed for it too.’’ By ‘‘fellow’’ (kulorhi), women meant other females in their age group (ntangha), with divisions based on puberty, marriage, and moth- erhood. However, the fellowship of tattooing was also contingent on shared geographic place. Interviewees recalled women of all ages wander- ing quite freely across the agrarian landscape, their horizons of mobility defined formally by the tiko (chieftaincy) where they resided but shaped informally by paths traversed with female peers or relatives for long- distance visiting and trade. During the colonial period, as the Portuguese administration tightened its grip and male migrancy took its toll on the countryside, girls and women may have begun traveling more out of need than recreation; but whether motivated by sociability or survival, their overlapping movements enabled them to create new networks of female

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‘‘fellowship’’ through the crossing of physical and visual paths beyond the confines of home.

Whether at home or on the road, the key site of female connection was at the river’s edge, where girls and women went to draw water, wash clothing, and bathe every day. Like the bush, ‘‘at the river’’ (combeni) was a pivotal location in tattooing stories, the place where fellow girls and women compared the beauty of one another’s tinhlanga and where tattoo-based friendships were negotiated and sealed. Indeed, as Albertina Tiwana explained, the imperatives of friendship left many girls feeling they had little choice where tinhlanga were concerned: ‘‘Don’t I long for what my friends have? When we’re swimming around in the water, they show each other, ‘Eh, look at my tattoos!’ ‘Eh, look at mine!’ Well . . . when I see that woman is cutting tattoos again, shoo! I go.’’ The desire to belong to communities of female friendship (xinghanu), whose bound- aries were marked by shared standards of tattooed beauty, was just as compelling when young women moved to their marital home (vukatini), typically some distance away from where they had grown up. Anxious to shed newcomer status and forge a√ective bonds beyond the precarious circle of her in-laws, a bride often found that tinhlanga were an e√ective means of laying the groundwork of friendship among women with whom she might have nothing in common besides the geography of virilocal marriage.∞≠ That tattooing was perceived as one constituent of gender identity is implied more directly in some women’s recollection that they were called ‘‘men’’ until they were tattooed. Yet, here again, oral accounts make clear that painfully inscribed standards of feminine beauty were targeted more at a female than a male audience.

The central feature of every tinhlanga story was a graphic description of the ‘‘su√ering’’ the operation entailed. In voices that ranged from melodramatic whisper to comic shriek, women narrated how their skin was ‘‘stabbed’’ and ‘‘chopped,’’ how their ‘‘blood ran everywhere,’’ how they thought their ‘‘bowels were coming out,’’ how some girls had to be held down by their friends so that their squirming would not ‘‘spoil’’ the scars. Girls who sat through the process stoically were considered ‘‘strong’’ or ‘‘steady’’ (kutiya) and ‘‘courageous’’ (kutimisa); women who were cut repeatedly wore on their skin permanent proof that they had no ‘‘fear’’ (kuchava). In a context where menstrual blood is believed to en- danger the health of men and cattle, where menstruating women are considered so ‘‘taboo’’ (kuyila) that they are denied not only sexual access

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to men but also physical contact with anything that might touch and so ‘‘pollute’’ men, interviewees took almost defiant pride in their willingness to shed nonmenstrual blood in copious quantities. The prominence of this image in oral narratives suggests its centrality to the meaning of tinhlanga for women and invites a closer look at the gendered symbolism of blood (ngati) in these circumstances.

According to these sources, nonmenstrual blood possesses a number of contradictory powers. A metaphor for both the deepest obligations of kinship and the e√ort required to fulfill one’s goals in life (‘‘There is no tattoo without blood,’’ that is, no achievement without struggle), blood is a positive force, a substance that guarantees personal well-being just as it heals illness, misfortune, or spirit possession when spilled through animal sacrifice or consumed as part of a ritual cure. Yet blood is also the most treacherous of the body’s fluids: the loss of blood saps one’s physical and moral strength (someone who is corrupt or cowardly is said to have ‘‘weak blood’’); blood that has fallen on the ground must immediately be cov- ered with sand because ‘‘wizards’’ might use it to make deadly ‘‘charms’’ (called tingati, the plural for ‘‘blood’’); and life-sustaining liquids such as milk and beer can be made life-threatening by being magically trans- formed into blood.∞∞ With these apparently contrary meanings in mind, women’s panegyrics about voluntary blood loss take on complex impor- tance. Being tattooed means giving up one’s blood and allowing it to fall freely on the ground, which makes one vulnerable to supernatural, physi- cal, and social threats of all kinds. However, blood shed to obtain tin- hlanga brings valuable rewards: new bonds of kinship (a kind of ‘‘blood sisterhood’’); proof of nerve and bravery; and, ironically, a kind of dually regendered prestige, for if tattooing contributes to the making of girls into women, it does so in part by mimicking the battlefield heroics of men.

In other words, the experience of being tattooed was just as crucial to its social and historical meaning for women as the tinhlanga themselves. The essence of this experience was a test—a trial by ordeal—undertaken and judged by a circle of female peers. Aimed both at marking girls’ bodies feminine and at demonstrating that femininity was a quality girls had to achieve through their own strength and su√ering, the operation generated shared memories that, like shared tinhlanga designs, trans- formed peer pressure and competition into bonds of intragenerational female community.

Tinhlanga were a medium of feminine connection that refused to obey

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or perpetuate other kinds of social boundaries. Shared notions of tattooed beauty often crossed generational lines, because older vatlhaveli influ- enced girls’ choice of designs, and because girls ‘‘looked over’’ the bodies of senior women for inspiration as well. One of the tinhlanga Rosalina received in Chibuto, for example, was identical to a tattoo worn by her mother and a paternal aunt, which they had obtained some thirty years earlier. More surprising is the eliding of ethnic di√erences in women’s selection of tinhlanga. Lucia Ntumbo, who identifies herself as Nguni, had her tattoos done by her maternal grandmother’s sister, Qimidzi Man- dlaze, an Ndau woman from north of the Save River and a popular mutlhaveli, in whose household in Chaimite (Gaza province) Lucia spent her adolescence. Qimidzi, Lucia remembers, learned her repertoire of tattoo designs from other vatlhaveli in the predominantly Shangaan com- munities of Chaimite. Lucia’s daughter, in turn, has di√erent tattoos from her mother ‘‘because she was born in Xitezeni [in northwest Magude], and cut tinhlanga there.’’

while interviewees’ recollections of tattooing were vividly detailed, women had little to say about how or why tinhlanga changed over time. Yet a history of change was visible in their body markings, which were patterned in conspicuous if not immediately comprehensible ways. Tinhlanga, in fact, speak with a ‘‘voice’’ all their own, and the story they tell casts startling new light on rural women’s engagement with, and understanding of, Portuguese colonialism. As women struggled to hold their own against colonial power, tattooing remained an activity defined through and for intragenerational female relationships. However, it also underwent a multilayered shift, from a painful and bloody process that utilized mainly indigenous materials and that was oriented in part to enhancing relations between the sexes, to one that involved less physical discomfort, the use of mainly xilungu materials and designs, and a con- cern with interracial rather than intergender contests.

Certain kinds of tinhlanga followed a straight trajectory of decline during and after the late nineteenth century. As European commentators noted, keloid facial scars had largely disappeared from the region by the 1920s. Keloid tattoos on women’s shoulders and backs were widespread until the 1920s, but became less common after the 1930s, as did the most extreme form of cicatrization on the lower abdomen, pubic area, and thighs, which sometimes produced scars over half an inch in diameter.∞≤

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Not one of the interviewees, nor any of their daughters, had acquired a pubic tattoo (vusankusi) after around 1950. This dorsal and hypogastric tattooing, which women described in especially gory detail, was done by lifting the skin with a fishhook, thorn, or the fingers, and then slicing across it with a razor blade or broken glass. A mixture of ground charcoal or ash and castor oil or red ochre was then rubbed into the wounds to darken the scars. Normally, these marks would be recut and -colored at least once to heighten the tattoo’s visibility and ensure it would last. More painful, more bloody, and more susceptible to infection than other types of tattoos, these tinhlanga were also preeminently tactile in nature and most closely associated with male sexual interest. Another name for the dorsal tattoo, xikhoma nkata—to ‘‘clutch your darling’’—makes this meaning explicit.

Incised scarification of women’s epigastric area, though, remained more or less constant during this period (late 1910s–1950). All inter- viewees bore some version of an incised design referred to as nxurhana (a geometric pattern consisting of triangles and parallelograms) and/or the xilova (sets of parallel and oblique lines). These tinhlanga were made by ‘‘drawing’’ the desired pattern on the skin with charcoal or a stick and then making small cuts along the lines, coloring the scars in the manner de- scribed above. Nxurhana tattoos range from simple designs based on four or five lines to expansive networks of geometric shapes that wrap around the woman’s torso on both sides. In addition, many interviewees also had one or more smaller tattoos incised on their stomach or sides, and these tinhlanga were much more diverse. About one-quarter of the group had a tattoo they called xinkwahlana, a type of lizard. Katarina Matuka, who was born around 1910 and spent her youth near the heartland of the former Gaza state, had a tinhlanga representing the Nguni warriors’ oval shield (xitlhangu) on her side. Women in their eighties from the western border region of Magude recalled girls there tattooing their ‘‘bellies’’ with images of flowers and shrubs; two slightly younger women from Facazisse, the community near Magude town where I resided during fieldwork, had a chevron pattern that, according to Earthy, represented an arrowhead or snake, and one of these two women also had a tattoo she called a ximusana (small wood pestle). In another trend reminiscent of Earthy’s findings, several women who had grown up near Magude town had a symbol they called xikero, or scissors, on one or both sides.

Between the 1920s and the 1940s, depending on the area, a dramatic

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shift occurred in female tattooing: the introduction of a new method of producing scars using bunches of needles instead of sharp-edged cutting tools. Less painful, messy, and dangerous, needle tattooing also produced much less tactile, and more narrowly visual, transformations of the skin, and seems to have had no overtly sexual implications; at least, no inter- viewee mentioned male sexual interest when talking about these tin- hlanga. This revolution in tattoo technology led to critical changes not only in tattoo aesthetics but also in the social relations of body marking. By the mid-1920s near Magude town and the mid-1930s further out in the countryside, women remember younger and younger girls, ‘‘even chil- dren,’’ using needles and ash to give one another a new style of facial tattoo known as swibayana, which consisted of clusters of three or four small round scars on the cheeks, forehead, and chin. More revealing still, women who grew up near the Swiss Mission station at Antioka (Fac- azisse), where the Swiss and their African evangelists had been proselytiz- ing since the 1880s, recall a popular fad among young girls in the 1920s: having one’s European first name ‘‘written’’ on the right forearm, and one’s clan name (or the name of ‘‘the boy you loved’’) on the left. In the hands of older girls and women, needles were used to create more com- plex patterns representing objects from the agrarian landscape, such as women’s trusty iron hoe (xikomu).

By the 1940s, needle tattooing had encouraged an even more radical departure in women’s body marking, especially in the villages ringing Magude town. Older girls and women began to acquire needle-cut tin- hlanga on their chest, arms, and thighs; these designs represented objects of European origin, incorporated new xilungu materials such as ink and shoe polish, and in nearly every case were tattooed onto women by men. Migrant workers who returned home from South Africa or Swaziland with ‘‘notebooks’’ of tinhlanga styles popular among women in their place of employment, these men o√ered their services to female kin and neighbors whose memories of this event stress the excitement of choosing among a wealth of new tattoo possibilities on the basis of what ‘‘the girls had over there.’’ The most common male-cut tattoos among interviewees were images of factory-made flowerpots, bevelled diamonds and stars, and a cross-like design representing the trademark of Blue Cross con- densed milk. Occasionally, the mutlhaveli would also include signs of the xilungu identity he had acquired while working away from home: his European name, and sometimes the year the tattoo was done.

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In a society with stringent controls on male access to women’s bodies, where it is still taboo for a woman to bare her thighs in public, the fact that some women permitted men who were not their husband to have intimate contact with their body demands explanation in itself. Changes in tattoo technology, then, were interwoven with both changing gender relations and an expanding notion, at least for some women, of the social and cultural world to which they belonged. As conventional boundaries between the sexes were being crossed for the purpose of making women beautiful, so were boundaries among women—in this case, political, eth- nic, and geographic boundaries—breaking down as they looked farther afield for models of beauty to make their own. Riverside appraisals, moti- vated by conflicting desires to imitate, outdo, and claim a≈nity with prospective ‘‘fellows,’’ had moved from a local to an international stage, with tattoos still as powerful a medium as ever for building and broaden- ing feminine communities through the changes of the mid-twentieth century.

To understand these transformations in tinhlanga practice, we need to look at the context in which tattoo styles waxed and waned and at the changing social complexion of the tattooed population. At the same time as girls and women were adopting new methods of body marking, they were also confronting new, sometimes violent pressures to cease decorat- ing their bodies altogether. Lise Nsumbane was born around 1910 near the Antioka mission station and remembered that at the mission school, ‘‘Oh, we hid these things, you know! From the teacher. We hid them, or he beat us, there at school. . . . When . . . your friends, they cut tinhlanga, he beat them. He says, ‘What’s that? Say, are you cutting one another?’ . . . Those things, they forbade them! You were beaten for them, truly.’’ When I asked why, she replied, ‘‘Ah, they say they’re for heathens.’’

Women who attended the Portuguese Catholic mission school in Magude town in the 1920s told similar stories of freshly cut girls being beaten by priests and African teachers. As Christianity presented a new physiology of the human body as God’s creation, as the ‘‘temple of the Holy Ghost’’—a vessel not one’s own and not to be ‘‘disfigured’’ in any way—church girls ironically risked corporal punishment by European mission personnel or their African evangelists, lay leaders, and teachers if they were caught with tinhlanga. Women’s stories often allude to this theological conflict, which swirled as much around meanings of blood and bleeding as around contending ideas about the body itself. For the

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missionaries and their converts, ‘‘finishing’’ one’s blood for the vain pur- pose of physical beauty not only defied the will of God (who ‘‘doesn’t want you to change the body He gave you’’) but also mocked Chris- tianity’s symbolic equation of blood loss with sacrifice, redemption, and the gift of everlasting life. Faced with the threat of harsh punishment, some church girls decided not to be tattooed, especially when they hoped to marry a boy from a prominent Christian family. Yet, evidence from Magude suggests that these girls formed a very small minority; adoles- cence in the countryside rarely entailed the luxury of bodily privacy, and peer ridicule was less easily avoided—and sometimes more cruel—than disciplinary sanctions girls encountered in the public domain.

Other girls, however, rejected tinhlanga not because of religion but for reasons they presented in terms of ethnicity or ‘‘race’’ (muxaka). Sara Juma, born in 1942 to a Shangaan woman and her mestiço husband, refused to be tattooed because ‘‘I wasn’t . . . of that race, those Shangaan people’’:

I was di√erent, I was—those Shangaan things, I didn’t follow them well, because I didn’t know anything Shangaan. . . . Because I didn’t want that . . . well, there were these things, eh, cutting tinhlanga, I don’t know what else. Now I, no. [laughs] Even my mother didn’t want that. I wasn’t one of these people to go around doing tinhlanga. Mmm. My mother didn’t want me to follow those xilandin [black] ways. [hg: Why not?] Ah, it’s my mother who didn’t want it, because I wasn’t . . . of that race, for me to run around, to know things that those people were doing. My sisters, those daughters of my [mother’s] sis- ter, they went, but I went to watch, what they were doing there! [laughs] They went to do those tinhlanga, to cut them. . . . I went to watch, truly. They beat me! They always chased me away. When you don’t go there to do it, they don’t allow you to watch there. They beat me. . . . Well, when I reach [home], I say, ‘‘I saw her! They’re cutting each other!’’

For Sara, tinhlanga were the principal metonymic di√erences separating her from the embellished bodies of her ‘‘black’’ mother and sisters. Sara’s mother’s desire to define her mixed-race daughter as ‘‘white,’’ a status she was not entitled to in colonial law, may have been shaped by her own upbringing on the grounds of the São Jerónimo mission station in Magude town, and would certainly have been reinforced by Sara’s atten- dance at the Catholic primary school in the late 1940s.

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Indeed, women’s narratives suggest that by this time the place of fe- male body marking in mission Christianity’s definitions of sin and hea- thenism had converged with Portuguese colonial discourses vaunting the benefits of assimilation while articulating the di√erences between civi- lized and native in increasingly racialized terms. In the aftermath of the 1928 Indigenato labor code—a bundle of laws designed to maximize state control over African labor by formalizing the distinction between (white) ‘‘citizens’’ and (nonwhite) ‘‘subjects’’—assimilado status was re- garded by most Africans, according to historian Jeanne Penvenne, as ‘‘the best of a bad deal.’’∞≥ Available only to those Africans who were literate in Portuguese, had traded tribal for European culture, and were engaged in the colonial economy as artisans, traders, or skilled workers, assimilation promised all the rights enjoyed by Portuguese citizens, including exemp- tion from forced labor. Although these opportunities were meaningless for the vast majority of the African population, it appears that the shadow of this legislation had fallen on Magude by midcentury, so that ‘‘white’’ was a condition to aspire to and ‘‘black’’ was one to be discarded or despised. Thus, for many interviewees who had contact with mission schools or colonial urban centers in their youth, tinhlanga embodied all that civilized women were supposed to abandon; whether for God or the myth of attainable whiteness, black female skins were to remain smooth and unmarked.

These disincentives were compounded by the seductive pressures of South Asian (‘‘Banyan’’) shopkeepers who vigorously promoted xilungu dress in Magude from the early 1900s on. Yet even women who fondly re- called the rare occasions when they purchased a blouse or capulana (length of cotton cloth) insisted that tattoos remained an essential method for beautifying female bodies. In fact, perhaps the greatest irony of tinhlanga politics in the colonial period is that the very clothing civilization required African girls to wear made it possible for them to conceal the tattoos European dress was supposed to be replacing.

How should we interpret girls’ and women’s determination to go on cutting themselves through this period? Rosalina Malungana o√ered a cynical reading of Christian elders’ e√orts to throw the weight of a sternly judgmental God behind what was, on one level, a battle for control over how women made themselves pretty: ‘‘Eh! They say . . . it was a sin. ‘These things, they’re for heathens.’ . . . Ah, but that’s just politics. God, what does he know of these things? What he wants, God wants a person

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to have a good soul. What you do with your body, he doesn’t care about that.’’ Few interviewees voiced such bold skepticism; their tinhlanga, however, sketch a similarly defiant, though complicated, story. In the thinly settled cattle country of western and northern Magude district, most girls and women went on being tattooed, following the trends described above, through the 1940s and 1950s. Yet, contrary to my expec- tations, tattooing began to decline earlier in these areas than in commu- nities closer to Magude town and other colonial urban centers. Moreover, the shift to needle tattooing did not make as significant an impact in these more remote areas. In fact, women’s enthusiasm for the xilandin practice of body marking—and, paradoxically, their incorporation of xilungu ma- terials and methods—seems to have increased in proportion to their ex- posure to colonial influences. Nearer mission stations and towns, women were more likely to replace tinhlanga acquired through ‘‘su√ering,’’ blood loss, and ‘‘strength’’ (tattoos aimed, in part, to attract male sexual inter- est) with tinhlanga that were less physically risky, more technically so- phisticated, and more beautiful in appearance than to the touch. The ‘‘ancient custom’’ of women’s tattooing, in other words, became both more popular and more ‘‘modern’’—and less oriented to marriage—as the forces of Portuguese colonialism and mission Christianity stepped up their e√orts to anchor their authority in the countryside. This simulta- neous reversal and confirmation of European predictions about the ‘‘evo- lution’’ of African fashion was accomplished by girls and women who were fully aware that their bodies were not only a critical site for the construction of feminine community, but also a key terrain in a colonial contest in which fellowship among rural women was more necessary than ever before.

This awareness intensified as the twentieth century progressed, as male migrancy, taxation, forced cash crop production, and ecological crises sapped the agrarian economy and required women to extend a√ective networks across as wide an area as possible. Women in southern Mozam- bique had long been using their skin to mediate the exclusionary claims of a dominant culture, but the power to decide how women would make themselves beautiful assumed much higher stakes under Portuguese rule. Tattooed beauty was no longer just about making friends, attracting hus- bands, or proving one’s capacity for masculine valor; under colonialism, it became both part of women’s response to the ailing institution of rural marriage and an optic for defining what was civilized and what was not.

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Such definitions had consequences—for marital options, economic pros- pects, relations with Europeans—even among women who could never hope to qualify for assimilated/civilized status themselves. Yet precisely because the legal privileges of whiteness were beyond their reach, relin- quishing blackness was not a desirable option either. Under these circum- stances, tinhlanga o√ered a medium for women to conduct their own debate about the dividing line between white and black ways. Just as Ntete Khosa, the daughter of one of the African pioneers of the Swiss mission at Antioka, waged a personal campaign to translate the lessons of mission schooling into a new tinhlanga style, women of all ages used tattooing to appropriate elements of the changing world around them without sacrificing the most crucial features of the practice. A woman who had tinhlanga, then, was still xilandin, and enjoyed the wide-ranging webs of feminine connection that tattooed female blackness entailed. Yet because her tinhlanga could include timeless images from the agrarian landscape and writing, flowerpots, and condensed milk, her body pro- claimed—with a defiance she could not safely utter aloud—that she was civilized and xilungu too.

By the late 1960s, tinhlanga were falling out of fashion in the Magude area. Interviewees explained that girls began to ‘‘abandon’’ tattooing be- cause xilungu schooling and improved state medical services had con- vinced them that tinhlanga were dangerous to a woman’s health. Frelimo’s (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) ideological campaigns after independence contributed to the devaluation of tribal practices that were inconsistent with the Marxist-Leninist government’s push for national unity and modernization, and the havoc of the Renamo war made tattoo- ing an indulgence few could a√ord. Yet, in postwar Magude, the stirrings of a tattoo revival confirm the vital role that body marking has historically played for rural women. In 1996, when I interviewed Unasse Sitoi, a former war captive in her seventies who was still living at Ngungwe, the Renamo base camp that occupied the western fringes of Magude and Moamba districts, she mentioned that she had begun tattooing younger female captives in the early 1990s as a way to obtain water, firewood, and help in her fields. When Mozambique’s national elections in 1994 instilled a sense of stability even in this state-forsaken corner of the countryside, the girls of Ngungwe, according to Unasse, began walking back and forth across the South African border to visit relatives living in the refugee communities of the Transvaal. When they came back, newly conscious of

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their status as members of transnationally scattered families, many of whom would like to relocate permanently in South Africa, they told Unasse that ‘‘over there, the girls, they don’t cut tattoos. And we, we won’t cut tinhlanga now either.’’

In Magude town, the situation was di√erent. In the periurban settle- ments where displaced women of all ages and points of origins were still crowded in ramshackle shelters, supporting children and parents and, often, unemployed husbands through backbreaking work in borrowed fields, survival depended on one’s ability to court extensive networks of friends and kin. Here, tinhlanga were staging a much discussed come- back, and mothers had begun to watch their daughters for signs of cutting when they returned home from the Nkomati River. Conversations about tattooing in these two distant points of the district in the mid-1990s oddly echoed the reminiscences of women who beautified their bodies with tinhlanga during the colonial period. Future research may find that their repertoire of designs and instruments have changed with the recon- figured identities of the postwar world, but what stood out at the mo- ment of tinhlanga’s resurgence in Magude was their enduring value as a means of feminine outreach and historical remembrance, an ine√able record of women’s experience in a land still trying to recover from the ‘‘scars’’ of European rule.

women in the Magude area have used tattoos to re-‘‘write’’ boundaries of di√erence—most strikingly, ethnic and racial di√erence—and build ever wider female communities throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, it was the transformed meanings of female beauty in the colonial period that most dramatically highlighted the contradictory powers of tinhlanga for rural women. Surrounded by Christian dis- courses, Portuguese notions of racial identity, and the battery of prac- tices—literacy, commodified food, potted plants—through which colo- nialism sought to enact its authority, girls and women used tinhlanga to claim more inclusive grounds of common experience and a≈liation. Their e√orts, preserved in personal narratives and in the scars themselves, manifest four important tensions in women’s lives under Portuguese rule. First, while the cutting of tattoos was shrouded in secrecy, and civilized dress supplied a useful layer of concealment for illicitly tattooed bodies, tinhlanga were intended to be seen, their assertions of history and xilan- din identity bolder—because more permanent—than the disposable ac-

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cessories of xilungu culture. Second, perhaps because of the very boldness of tattooing’s claims, women’s stories about tinhlanga are wrapped in secrecy of another kind: an unwillingness, or inability, to articulate their full historical significance. Reticent when asked to explain changes docu- mented in plain view on their skin, women preferred to use the inscribed memories of tinhlanga to prove the strength of their bodies and the resilience of traditional practices in the face of colonial pressures to be- come civilized and modern.

And yet, third, in the most telling irony of all, if the persistence of tattooing exposed the incompleteness of European power, it was the female casualties of colonial society who drew most extensively on xilungu materials and designs, engaging and adapting colonial culture as they transformed the practice of tattooing to preserve its place—and theirs—in a changing world. Finally, if the ultimate value of tinhlanga lay in their role as a medium for girls and women to forge chains of feminine fellowship that transcended boundaries of clan, marriage, class, ethnicity, race, even nationality, how do we explain the memories of competition, envy, and ridicule motivating the decision to be cut? Why, indeed, go to such painful lengths for the sake of beauty and friendship at all? Perhaps the bonds formed through su√ering are truer, and more potent, because of the self-sacrifice they entail; perhaps the price of female community is so high because of the centrifugal forces against it in a male-dominated world, or because the price of living without it is comparably great. Either way, tinhlanga represent a hard-won feminine victory, a declaration that the respect and approval of one’s fellows are more enduring than individ- ual fear, colonial power, or the desires of men. Exhibiting tattooed skin as evidence that they are anything but victims, the women of Magude em- body truths of Mozambique’s colonial history—truths we would not have access to any other way.

Notes

∞. For example, Hildi Hendrickson, ed., Clothing and Di√erence: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996). ≤. Janet Spector, What This Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Wahpeton Dakota Village (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1993). ≥. William M. White, Journal of a Voyage Performed in the Lion extra Indiaman, from Madras to Colombo and Da Lagoa Bay . . . in the Year 1798 (London, 1800), 27.

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∂. Editors’ note: A keloid is a growth of dense fibrous tissue that develops over the site where skin is punctured or otherwise damaged. ∑. Jane Caplan, ‘‘ ‘Speaking Scars’: The Tattoo in Popular Practice and Medico-Legal Debate in Nineteenth-Century Europe,’’ History Workshop Journal 44 (1997): 107–142. ∏. H. A. Junod, La Tribu et la Langue Thonga (Lausanne, 1896), 16–17; H. A. Junod, Life of a South African Tribe (2nd ed., London, 1962), 1: 178–179; St. Vincent Erskine, ‘‘Journey of Exploration to the Mouth of the River Limpopo,’’ Journal of the Royal Geographic Society 39 (1869): 238. π. H. A. Junod, Life of a South African Tribe (1st ed., Neuchatel: Attinger Frères, 1913), 1: 180. ∫. E. Dora Earthy, ‘‘On the Significance of the Body Markings of Some Natives of Portuguese East Africa,’’ South African Journal of Science 21 (1924): 573–587. Ω. Ibid., 577–578. ∞≠. Editors’ note: in virilocal marriage, the husband and wife live with the husband’s kin after marriage. ∞∞. Junod, Life of a South African Tribe, 1: 201, 2: 360, 416, 489, 512. ∞≤. Editors’ note: cicatrization refers both to the ritualistic scarring of the body through the creation of elaborate patterns and the actual biological process of scar formation. ∞≥. Jeanne M. Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877–1962 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995), 467.

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