3 questions to three readings:USING THE ATTACHED READINGS AND DOCS, briefly respond to each of these questions in three or four sentences. 1) In a pa -

3 questions to three readings:USING THE ATTACHED READINGS AND DOCS, briefly respond to each of these questions in three or four sentences.
1) In a paragraph or two, discuss the main differences between early modern colonialism and 19th-century imperialism. Draw on any of the materials from this module (SEE ATTACHED chapter, primary sources, and the video). Discuss at least three differences.

2) In Heidi Gengenbach’s Chapter “Tattooed Secrets: Women’s History in Magude District, Southern Mozambique” fromBodies in Contact,what role did tattooing play in challenging Portuguese colonizing efforts? What does she mean by tattooing (tinhlanga) “exposed the incompleteness of European power”?

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3 questions to three readings:USING THE ATTACHED READINGS AND DOCS, briefly respond to each of these questions in three or four sentences. 1) In a pa

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3) What was the “Scramble for Africa”? What new technology, medicine, or innovations made this possible?

Burbank, Jane. Empires In World History: Power and the Politics of Difference.
E-book, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.30977. Accessed 15 Aug 2020.
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http://www1.udel.edu/History-old/figal/Hist104/assets/pdf/readings/12blackmanburden.pdf

https://web.viu.ca/davies/H479B.Imperialism.Nationalism/Gandhi.HomeRule.1909.htm Heidi Gengenbach

Tattooed Secrets: Womens 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 aliations in a male-dominated world, this essay charts the transforma-
tion of traditional practice and the heightened significance of tattooing for
women adversely aected by colonial rule. The persistence of tinhlanga chal-
lenged Portuguese colonial and missionary eorts to reform local customs and
cultivate civilization through the propagation of new standards of feminine
beauty and bodily adornment. The ensuing struggle over womens bodies reveals
the gendered meanings of racial dierence 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 armed 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 bodythe gendered, dark-skinned bodyas 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 aections.

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 objectsall 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 mens and womens skin.
This essay argues that the body markings of women in southern Mozam-
bique are indispensable sources for understanding womens experiences
of Portuguese colonialism and a vital form of evidence for African colo-
nial history more broadly.

Reading history from womens 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 Portugals 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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Tattooed Secrets 255

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 intimateand 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 womens tattoos into a near-religious crusade. Yet the in-
tensity of this struggle was due less to a priori colonial determination than
to womens awareness that their eorts 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 womens 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 aliation, 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 tattooingmore flexible
and inclusive than those dictated by birth or marriagebecame an im-
portant resource for women in need.

Second, tinhlanga oered women a bold yet secret (xihundla) voice
for telling history, a silent yet visible language for commenting on social
changefor a strictly female audiencein a context where oral tradi-
tions did not take womens 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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256 Heidi Gengenbach

skin was a mark of civilizations 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 womens 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 womens 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 dicult to periodize this history
from womens memories alone, which speak in a uniformly ahistorical
voice. Yet womens insistence on the atemporality of their tattoos in fact
exposes one of tinhlangas 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 countrysideat least
for womenremained 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 Whites recognition of the uniqueness of an
individuals 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 bodieseven
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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Tattooed Secrets 257

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 Joo 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 cheeksdescribed as knobs,
lumps, warts, and buttonswhich 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 dierences 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 Cares 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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258 Heidi Gengenbach

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 womens 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; womens tattoos were now merely ornamental mutila-
tions connected with nubility or marriage, a way, Junod scoed, to
make themselves prettier . . . as they think!

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 womens
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 Earthys 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 womens everyday life, suggests
that rather more was going on. Scissors, keys, watches, waistcoatsfor
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 gentlemans wardrobe, a metonym for the prodigal, yet neces-
sary, expense of a European-style three-piece suit.

Womens 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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Tattooed Secrets 259

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

It is this expressive comment that leads Earthy to characterize womens
tattoos as the story of their lives written on their own fleshyet 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 dierently 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 womans 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, womens raucous stories about husbands comically slavish atten-
tion to tattooed wives (or mistresses) represent male pleasure as an ancil-
lary eect 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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260 Heidi Gengenbach

(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 womens 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-

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