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Journal of Southern African Studies
A Threat to the Nation and a Threat to the Men: The Banning of Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe,
1981
Author(s): Amy Kaler
Source:
Journal of Southern African Studies,
Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 347-376
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2637531 .
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Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 24, Number 2, June 1998 347
A
Threat to the Nation and a Threat to
the Men:
the Banning of Depo-Provera in
Zimbabwe, 1981
AMY KALER
(Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota)
In
this
paper,
I
discuss the prohibition of the injectible contraceptive Depo-Provera in
Zimbabwe in 1981
by analysing the
confluence
of events which led both to
its
popularity
amongst
Zimbabwean women
and to
the
suspicion in
which it
was
held
by many
Zimbabwean men. I argue that the prohibition of Depo-Provera must be seen both as an
act
of
nationalist
self-assertion by the newly victorious majority government
under
ZANU
(PF)
and also as a
significant moment
in the
gendered politics of reproduction
in
Zimbabwe.
During
the era
of
the
white minority government
in the
1960s
and
1970s,
Depo-Provera was constructed by Africans as a form of medical colonisation of African
women's
bodies
and,
because
of
its
centrality
to the
white regime's population
control
strategies,
as a
weapon for cutting down
the
African
nation
by preventing future genera-
tions
of
Zimbabweans
from being born.
At the
same time, Depo-Provera was
associated
with 'subversive' conduct
by women,
as
Depo
enabled these
women,
with the assistance
of
sympathetic family planning workers,
to
regulate
their own
fertility
without
the
permission
or
knowledge of
their husbands
and other relatives.
Consequently, despite
the
pernicious
side
effects
and
negative political
connotations
of Depo,
it became
the
most
popular
contraceptive
method
among African
women
in the
1970s.
I
argue
that national
politics
and
fear of 'disorderly' women, along
with
the
genuine
health
risks
posed by
the
synthetic
hormones in
Depo,
led
to its
banning by
the
Minister
of
Health. This article is based on
archival research in
English
and in
Shona,
and on interviews
with
former family planning
educators and with
middle-aged
and
elderly
Zimbabweans
about their memories
of
the
social
dynamics
which attended the
introduction
of Depo
into
their communities.
Introduction
In
1981,
the new
government
of Zimbabwe banned the use
of the
injectible contraceptive
Depo-Provera.
In
most accounts
of
the
transition,
this decision
appears
as a
minor
administrative
episode:
The
Ministry
of
Health
...
assumed
in
1981
the
responsibility
of
running
the activities
formerly
undertaken
by
the
Family Planning
Association.... There was
one other
very important
reason
why
the
Ministry
of
Health
took over
the activities.
The
government
wished
to have the
Association
stop
the use of
Depo-Provera,
a
highly controversial, long-lasting
birth control
drug.
The
government
was
concerned about the
safety
of the
drug.
The Association
balked,
which
gave
the
government yet another,
if
not the
principal,
reason for
its takeover.'
1
P. Manga, 'The Transformation of Zimbabwe's Health Care System:
a
Review of the White Paper
on
Health',
Social Science and Medicine, 27, 11 (1988), pp. 1131-1138.
0305-7070/98/020347-30
?
1998 Journal of Southern African Studies
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348 Journal of Southern African
Studies
However, there is much more to this decision than bureaucratic relations between different
branches
of
the state and
parastatal organisations.
This bland mention of an
administrative
transfer of responsibilities conceals complex cultural and political dynamics involving men,
women, the making
of children and the
making
of decisions about
making children, which
illuminate the complicated relationship between the liberators of the new state of Zimbabwe
and the reproductive powers of the women of Zimbabwe.
A
perspective
which
assigns priority only
to state
actors
is
inadequate
for
explaining
the
particular
heat
that
the
Depo-Provera controversy generated
in
Rhodesia
and
Zimbabwe.
Nonetheless, examining the actions
of
state
actors and the
ideological
and historical
context
in which they operated is still an important part of the Depo story. With respect to the
actions of the Zimbabwean state
and
the
debates over
national independence
from
which
they emerged,
I
argue that
the decision
to
ban this
drug
cannot be understood
solely
in
terms of its safety, but must also be seen as
a
product of
different
sets of political forces,
played out in arenas ranging from the family
to
the global system.
In
historical terms, it was
the product of
the
political forces operating at
a
specific moment,
when African nationalists
after their electoral
victory
were
re-establishing
control over the resources of the
country
which had
been appropriated by
the white
regime:
resources
which
included the
repro-
ductive
abilities
of African women.2 The
Depo
decision was also a
product
of
long-standing
ideological opposition between the liberation forces and the Family Planning Association of
Rhodesia (FPAR). The international political
forces in
operation included the global politics
of
reproduction
of the
early 1980s,
when
Depo
was
cast
as a
symbol
of
the
intrusion
of
Western
imperialism
and racism into the bodies of Third World women. These two sets of
political
forces
are the
focus
of this
paper, demonstrating
that
'in
a world
in
which
contests
over
gender relations, population control, eugenics
and
opposition
to Western
imperialism
are
often seriously intertwined,
"the
politics
of
reproduction"
cannot and should
not
be
extracted
from
the examination of
politics
in
general'.3
The controversy over Depo's place
in
Zimbabwean
society
was
deeper
and
broader than
nationalist fears about white use of family planning methods to reduce the African
population.
As
a
technology, Depo possessed qualities
which set it
squarely
in
the centre
of
struggles within marriages,
families
and communities over who would control the timing
and
pacing
of
childbearing. Among ordinary Zimbabweans, Depo-Provera
in
the hands
of
nurses and
paramedical workers, dispensed
at the
request of
individual
women,
was
clearly
understood as a threat to idealised notions
of
male control
of
female
fertility.
The
threat
Depo posed was two-fold
-
the
widespread promotion of
this
contraceptive
was
perceived
as a tool of the Rhodesian
Front
to
keep
the African
population
in
check;
and the
secret use
of
Depo by
individual women boded
ill
for male
decision-making power
over
women's
fertility.
The
manner
in
which
it
was
delivered
-
one
injection every
three
months
-
meant
that use
of
Depo,
more
than
other forms
of
contraception
such
as
the
pill
or
the
IUD,
was
known
only by
the women
in
question
and their health care
providers.
It could
thus spread
invisibly and,
in the
opinion of many Zimbabweans, invidiously, through communities, and
be
kept
secret
from
husbands,
in-laws and elders.
Many theorists
have studied the
regulation
of
reproduction
as an
aspect
of
state-society
relations,
as the vast amount
of
work on abortion and new
technologies
such as RU-486
testifies.
Analyses
of
programmes
of
fertility control,
in
the context of
global power
2 Ten years later, a retrospective newspaper article about birth control Zimbabwe also made the connection
between
Depo-Provera and white control of black women, suggesting that this equation was lodged firmly
in Zimbabwean
public consciousness: 'For women, [the name] Depo-Provera brings back bitter memories [of]
when the drug
was indiscriminately administered
to Zimbabwean women
by their white bosses to prevent pregnancy
during
the armed
struggle
for
independence'.
The
Herald,
6 June
1992.
3 F. Ginsburg and R. Rapp, 'The Politics of Reproduction', Annual Review of Anthropology,
20 (1991),
pp. 311-343.
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Banning Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe
349
relations, have formed a large part of
this work.4 However, these analyses have been
largely
confined to historical
moments
in
which the politics of fertility control have taken the form
of
attempts by
the
relatively
powerful to impose their desires
in
terms of population
configuration
on the
relatively
powerless,
defined
by
racial
or
ethnic
boundaries,
such as
the
United States government-sanctioned
mass sterilisation of Puerto Rican and native
Ameri-
can
women.
In
Zimbabwe this
particular form of fertility politics lasted from 1965
until
1980, during which time the
Rhodesian Front regime of Ian Smith promoted birth
control
to
Africans through the FPAR. This
endeavour was motivated by a compound of
paternal-
istic
urges to 'modernise' the
Africans,
and
racial fears of becoming
a white
island
swamped by
a
rising
tide of black
population.5
By 1981, however, that moment
had passed. Instead, the new black
leadership of
Zimbabwe faced a transitional
situation
in
which pre-existing power relations were
being
interrogated and
in
many cases
inverted.
At
that time, state intervention
into
institutional
structures of
fertility regulation, such as the FPAR's
Depo-Provera programme,
was defined
as an anti-colonial act. In
analysing the Zimbabwean decision to ban
Depo-Provera,
I
am
thus
dealing
with a
historical moment which is
quite
rare
in
the
literature,
producing
a
variant
on
the
politics
of
fertility
control.
In
this paper
I
draw on
contemporary sources, including published
and
unpublished
material;
and on
retrospective
interviews with former family planning workers
(FPWs)
and
middle-aged
and
elderly
Zimbabweans from Wedza and Buhera districts, conducted
in
1996.
I
demonstrate that the
history
of
fertility regulation
in
general, and Depo-Provera
in
particular,
led
to the construction of Zimbabwean
women's reproductive
abilities
as terrains
of
struggle
between different
groups
of
political
interests.
By examining
the
Depo
decision
as
part
of an
ongoing struggle
for
control over women's bodies,
I
am
following
the
theoretical lead of other Africanists and
theorists of reproduction. Pedersen
makes a similar
argument
in
her
study
of
the colonial
controversy over
female circumcision
in
early
twentieth
century Kenya.6 She argues
that
women's bodies
can also be constructed as
national
bodies,
sites where
national honour can
be
established,
threatened
and defended.
In
her case
'honour' consisted
specifically
of British
colonial ideas
of
morality, opposed
by
what
they
defined
as African
savagery
manifested
through
the
practice
of female
circum-
cision.7 In
Zimbabwe,
the
physiological
site was
slightly
different
and the
stakes were
fecundity
rather
than
moral or immoral
sexuality. However,
like
the
controversy
over
circumcision,
women's bodies in
the
Depo
debate
were
both
individual and social entities.
The
body
into which
the
FPAR
sought
to
inject Depo-Provera
was
not
only
that of an
individual,
but also that of the Zimbabwean
polity.8
4
See, for example, B. Mass, Population
Target:
the Political Economy of Population Control
in
Latin America
(Toronto, Women's Press, 1976); B. Hartmann, Reproduction Rights and Wrongs: the Global Politics of
Birth
Control
(New York, Harper
and
Row, 1987);
R.
Petchesky,
Abortion and Women's Choice:
the
State, Sexuality
and
Reproductive Freedom (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1991).
5 See
M. West, 'Nationalism,
Race
and Gender: the Politics of Family Planning
in
Zimbabwe 1957-1990', Social
Science
and
Medicine, 7, 3 (1994), pp. 447-471.
6 S.
Pedersen, 'National Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: the Sexual Politics
of
Colonial Policy Making', Journal of
Modem History, 63, (1991) pp. 647-680.
7 See
also
Ann
Stoler, 'Making Empire Respectable: the Politics
of
Race
and
Sexual Morality
in
Twentieth Century
Colonial
Culture', American Ethnologist, 16,
4
(1989), pp. 634-660,
for
a
discussion
of
similar issues
in a
very
different colonial context, that of southeast Asia.
8
Men's bodies can
also
be cast
in
this role, although this is less common.
For
example,
in
1995, rumours
circulated
in
Zimbabwe that USAID was dumping defective condoms (which leaked and burst)
in
the country, with callous
disregard
for
the
African lives
put at risk of contracting
HIV
through the faulty condoms. (One alternate
explanation held that American condoms were simply not tough enough for the superior virility of Zimbabwean
men!). In the winters of 1995 and 1996, when police used teargas to dispel University of Zimbabwe students
who
were protesting about perceived corruption and the betrayal of the Zimbabwean polity by politicians,
wall
posters and rumours held that the teargas contained female hormones which could sterilise its male targets,
rendering them unable to reproduce and symbolically emasculating them.
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350 Journal of
Southern
African
Studies
Depo-Provera and the Symbolism
of
Medicine
In
Zimbabwean, specifically Shona, symbolic systems, the connection between the health
of
women's bodies
and
the
health
of the polity resonates very deeply. Many Zimbabwean
writers have noted the intimate link between women's
reproductive health
and
activities and
the
health of
the
people and communities surrounding them.
Definitions of illness contained a variety of moral proscriptions and,
in
almost all instances, it
was
women's morality
that was so
proscribed.
Women must remain
'pure',
they must be
virgins at marriage, they must be fertile, they must not commit adultery, they must satisfy the
needs of husbands, children and in-laws before their own and so on. Failure to meet these
conditions renders women
-
and,
with
more
serious
implications,
their
families
-
open
to all
forms of
morbidity
and
mortality.9
Women's
fertility
and sexual activities
were
crucial to social health.
Thus,
in
purifying
women's bodies
of a
chemical
tainted
by global association
with racism
and neocolonialism
in
the interests of
bringing harmony
and
liberation
to
Zimbabwe,
the actions of the
first
Minister of Health, Herbert Ushewokunze, were strongly rooted
in
cultural logic.
The
rejection
of the
Depo injection
also
has
historical
roots in
African communities'
suspicion
of
white
medical
interventions
on
the
grounds
that
they
were
Trojan horses,
seemingly
benevolent
things
which in
fact would kill and mutilate the Africans
who used
them. From
the
1940s,
rumours circulated about
the
effects
of both
preventive
and curative
medicines
in
rural
and
urban communities. Many
of
these
rumours
focused
on
the effect
of
white medicine on the sexual
and
reproductive systems
of
Africans,
in
particular
that
these
medicines would sterilise
Africans,
or render
them
physiologically
as
well
as
politically
impotent
-
yet
another manifestation of the
construction
of
sexuality
and
fertility as
a
political
battlefield
in
Rhodesia.
This
phenomenon
is not limited to
Rhodesia.
Across
the continent, medical technologies
appear
to have
occupied
a central
place
in the
evolving imaginations of
both
whites and
Africans
throughout
the colonial
period.10
White
points
out that of
all western medical
technologies, injection emerged
as the
one
around
which African interpretations and
rumours
coalesced
most
thickly.11 Although many contemporary medical writers and
missionaries reported that
Africans
responded
to
injections
with
adulation, White suggests
that the behaviour of the
Africans
who came
to
clinics
in
search of cures does not
represent
the full
range
of African ideas
about
injections.
She found
that,
in
the memories of
elderly
Ugandans, injections
were
regarded
as
sources
of
power,
but that this
power
was not
entirely benign. Injection
stories
'presented grim
ideas about
medical
expertise
and
therapeutic power'
as well as
being
reminders of the alien cultural and
symbolic systems
which
underlay
western
medicine.12 Her
findings
in
early
twentieth
century Uganda
are
similar
to
mine
in
Rhodesia later
in
the
century,
where
the
injectible Depo escaped
from
9 F. Chinemana, 'Liberated Health
in
Zimbabwe? The Experience of Women
1981-1983', in
M.
Wright, Z. Stein
and J. Scandlyn (eds), Women's Health and Apartheid: the Health of Women
and Children and the Future of
Progressive Primary Health Care in Southern Africa (Frankfurt, Medico
International, 1989), p. 94. See
also
M. Bourdillon, The Shona People (Harare, Mambo Press, 1980), pp. 15 and
48, and R. Gaidzanwa, Images of
Women in Zimbabwean Literature (Harare, College Press, 1985).
10 See S. Feierman, 'Struggles for Control: the Social Roots
of
Health and
Healing
in Modem
Africa', African
Studies Review, 28 (1982), pp. 73-148; M. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial
Power and African Illness (Palo
Alto, Stanford University Press, 1991),
and
L. White,
'
"They Could
Make Their
Victims Dull": Genders and
Genres,
Fantasies
and
Cures
in Colonial Southern
Uganda',
American Historical
Review (December 1995),
pp. 1379-1402.
11
White, 'Victims', pp. 1391-1395.
12
Ibid., p. 1381.
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Banning Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe 351
the intentions of its providers and took on meanings of its own, meanings associated
with
immorality and national decline.
Even before Depo appeared on the scene, sterility and the destruction of fertility
were
associated with involvement with white
goods
and medicines. For
example,
in the
1970s,
a
programme
to treat
drinking water to prevent cholera was accused of being
a means of
killing people by actually spreading cholera13 and, throughout the decade,
rumours of
sterilisation
and
toxicity dogged the Ministry of Health's efforts to disseminate pills
and
injections for problems like measles and malaria.14
Family planning programmes appeared to make these problems worse.
In
1968,
an
African member of parliament informed his colleagues that the existence of a government-
funded
family planning programme, coupled
with
widespread suspicion
that
the
government
was
bent on reducing the number of Africans, spelled disaster for smallpox vaccination
and
other
preventive
medicine
programmes:
Mr
Makaya:
For the information of the
house,
this
[voting
to
fund
the
FPAR]
is
something
we
are going to be sorry for because so many Africans, after having heard of this, they will not
go to hospital, they will not turn up at the clinics to be vaccinated.
I
am living with
Africans
and
I am
telling you what the Africans are thinking. They say the Europeans are trying to get
rid of the African
population.... We are getting
into
difficulties
when there is an outbreak of
smallpox
in
the
country
and the vaccinators are sent into the
Tribal
Trust Land because we
will
hardly get any people to be vaccinated. They will say there is a certain medicine which has
the
property
to
destroy
all
means of this and that, and their arguments will be hard to correct.15
The racial, cultural and anti-colonial dimensions of the debate should not overshadow
the
gendered
nature of this
particular struggle.
As
Ann
Stoler has
asserted,
'colonial
authority
[was]
...
fundamentally
structured in
gendered terms',
and the administration of
Depo
was
indeed seen as a gender-specific form of colonial power, of white men interfering
in
the
bodies of African women.16 As
such,
it
challenged male
Zimbabwean
politicians
on two
levels: as a threat
to the right
of Africans
to determine the course
of the African nation of
Zimbabwe,
and as a threat to an idealised
gender hierarchy
in
which men had the
right
to
mediate the flow of new
technologies
and new resources to 'their' women.
I
believe
that
this dual
challenge,
as much as
the inherent
flaws
of Depo-Provera,
accounted for the
vehemence
with
which
Depo
was
expelled
from the Zimbabwean
body politic.
Why
Ban
Depo? Health,
Racism and Politics
Depo-Provera was introduced to Rhodesia by the
FPAR
in
1969,
and
rapidly
became the
most
prevalent method
in
the programme, overtaking the contraceptive pill
and the
intra-uterine device
by
the
early
1970s.
By 1974,
more than half
of all
contraceptive
users
were on
Depo.17 However,
on 17 June
1981,
the
FPAR
(then simply
the
FPA)
received
a
letter from
the secretary to the then Minister of Health, Herbert Ushewokunze,
informing
them
that
'Depo-Provera
will be discontinued and withdrawn from use for the time
being'.
18
In
Parliament several months
later,
Ushewokunze was
challenged
on this decision
by
a
group
of
white
MPs.
Ushewokunze,
himself a medical doctor and
a
major participant
in
the
military struggle
for
independence,
had
clearly
been
expecting
this attack and drew on
his
13 National
Archives of Zimbabwe
(hereafter NAZ) F/I 18/5,
Report
of the
Health
Extension
Officer
for
Manicaland,
November 1975.
14 Secretary for Health (Rhodesia), Annual Report of the
Secretary for Health 1973, pp. 2, 18, 39. See also the
Reports of the Secretary for Health
for
1974, p. 32;
1975, p. 25; 1876, p. 24; 1977, p. 29;
and
1979, p.
41.
15 Parliamentary Debates [Rhodesia], 9 March 1966, col.
1497.
16 A. Stoler, 'Making Empire Respectable', p. 635.
17
'Jab Takes Over from Pill', The Sunday Mail, 15
December 1974.
18 Family Planning
Association
of Zimbabwe, Annual
Report 1981 (Harare, FPAR, 1981), p. 5.
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352 Journal of Southern African Studies
knowledge of contemporary global debates on Depo-Provera
in a
long, detailed and
passionate response.
In
explaining
his
decision, Ushewokunze used
two
different lines
of
argument. The first
was based on medical research
finding
that
Depo
was hazardous to women's
health.
Ushewokunze
was
obviously
familiar with
contemporary
medical debates
over the effects
of
synthetic progestin,
the hormone
in
Depo
which
suppressed
ovulation. He informed
Parliament that Depo was suspected
of
causing breast tumours and liver cancer
in
experimental
animals
in
the United
States,
and
argued
that it was
too
dangerous
to
allow
into the
bodies
of Zimbabwean women.
Of
greater
salience
to this
paper, however,
is
Ushewokunze's second line of
argument.
In
this, he invoked 'the politics
of
Depo-Provera'
and
argued
that its
provision was an act
of
racism and imperialism,
one which
his
government
was determined to
redress. According
to this line of reasoning, Western governments and their allies, including the management
of the FPA
(which
was
still
homogeneously white),
were
guilty
of
two
things: experiment-
ing
on African women
with a
drug they
deemed too
dangerous
for their
own
women,
and
treating
African women's
reproductive systems
as
expendable
casualties
in
a racist
battle
to
keep the African population from growing
out of
control:
Africa is
certainly being
used
as a
dumping ground
for some of the
most
dangerous drugs
in
the world, drugs
manufactured
in
the so-called
developed countries,
and
Depo-Provera is one
of these
drugs.
You will hear stories of
people telling you
that this
drug
is
being
used
in
70
to
80 countries
in
the world. Look
carefully
at
the
70 to 80
such
countries,
and
you
will
find
they
are all
in
the
Third
World,
not in the
developed
world. In
Britain,
our
erstwhile
colonial
masters
[the
drug
is banned for birth
control]....
Prohibited from
selling
the
drug
in
the
United
States,
the manufacturers
Upjohn
marketed
it
through
their subsidiaries in
Asia
and
Africa and
in
Third
World
countries ...
[In
Rhodesia]
this
drug
was
being given predominantly
to
black
women,
and this
is
something
I
have
noticed, only
to black women. No
prescription,
but
given
willy-nilly
to black women
in
the
countryside....
Now
who
says
the
Zimbabwe
women are
going
to
be
experimental
animals? Who
says they
are
going
to
use our women as
guinea pigs?19
Ushewokunze was not
actually
correct
in
his assertion that
Depo-Provera
was
only legal
in
the
Third
World
-
in
1978,
for
example,
it was
legal
in
ten European countries.20 Yet the
association of
Depo-Provera
with
genocide
was also
present
in
other southern
countries. For
example during
a debate on
the
drug
in
the
US
Senate Committee
on
Population, a
Thai
representative complained:
Are the Thais becoming rats
in
an experiment?
...
The
Thai
government has received more and
more complaints
in this same vein. One
journal
...
said,
'It's
good, isn't it,
[from
the presumed
point
of view of the
United
States]
to have a
drug
like
that,
not
only
to
plan
births but to kill
people
as well.
It means with
one shot of the
gun
we
get
two
birds'.21
In
Parliament, Ushewokunze also accused
the
white purveyors of Depo-Provera of
obsessive interference
in
African women's
fertility:
Mr
Chairman,
this
is a
very
sensitive issue ... sometimes
you
barter the health of
your child
for
Depo-Provera.
Mothers
go
to the
clinic
to have their children treated
and are told:
"If
you
do
not
agree
to
being given
this shot of
Depo-Provera your
child will
not be treated".
-
(Mrs
Chinamano:
Shame)
-
(Mr.
Goddard: Unfounded
accusations)
-
(Mrs
Chinamano:
Shame).22
I
have found
it
impossible
to ascertain
whether
or
not
Depo really
was
administered without
19 Parliamentary
Debates, [Zimbabwe] 8 September 1981, col. 47.
20 Testimony of Dr Fred Sai
to Senate Committee
on
Population (US
House of Representatives), The
Depo-Provera
Debate (August 8,9,10,
1978), 95th Congress, 2nd Session
(Washington, US Government Printing Office), p.
21
1.
21 Testimony of
Mr
Tieng Pardthaisong, assistant professor of Preventive and Social
Medicine at Chiang Mai
University,
to Senate Committee
on
Population,
The
Depo-Provera
Debate, p.
109.
22 Parliamentary
Debates, 8 September 1981, col. 61.
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Banning Depo-Provera in
Zimbabwe 353
consent
on a
large scale.
In
interviews conducted
in
1996 and 1997,
some former
participants
in
the
family planning
movement
insisted
that
it
was.
These
included
the
Minister of
Health,
Dr
Timothy Stamps, who sat on the executive committee of the FPAR
until he
resigned
in
1974.
He
says his resignation was prompted by his
realisation that the
Rhodesian Front government was interested only in population control rather
than women's
health. Others, including, not surprisingly, the former white administrators
of the FPAR,
insist that their checks and balances were such that lack of informed
consent was
impossible. Nevertheless there is evidence that coercive use of contraception
occurred on
white-run Rhodesian commercial farms. One former family planning fieldworker
reported:
The
[commercial]
farmers, they wanted strong workers ... they were motivating
their workers
to be on family planning. The farmers kept on saying, "I want strong workers. If
you have
children
year
after
year
that
means
you are
not
going
to
be strong,
or else
I
will
chase
you
from
work".
So
they
[women
farmworkers]
were
motivated
in
another
way
that
they
were
frightened....
the farmer will
provide transport
to
go
to
the clinics
so that
his production
won't
suffer.23
Another fieldworker, when asked if the commercial farmers used
pressure
to
force the
workers
to
go
on
family planning, said, 'Yes, they used to
do
it
everywhere',
but
pointed
out that
with
pills people
could
just
throw them
away.24 However,
once
the
injection
became the
dominant method of birth control provided by the FPAR, workers could no
longer
evade their
bosses' control of their reproductive lives. The injection
was thus a more
potent
means of
coercion and intrusion into African farm labourers' lives.
It
appears
therefore
that coercion of women
to accept Depo did occur quite commonly
on white-run
commercial farms
during
the
1970s at the behest of the farm owners rather than as a
policy
or
practice
of the FPAR.
I
cannot establish whether
coercion
took
place
in
other
settings.25
Ushewokunze
ended
his
parliamentary
response about
Depo
with a rhetorical flourish
which
implicitly painted
the
settler
regime
as one which
held
Africans to be
on
a
level
with
animals:
We are
going
to
put
to
good
use the
supplies
of
Depo-Provera
which remain
in
the
country
in
the sense that
we have
negotiated
with certain
veterinary organisations
elsewhere
which will
use this
Depo-Provera
on
horses,
not on human
beings,
at the
rate of
10
vials
per
horse when
they
are
in
heat.26
The
production
of
an
anti-colonial
line of argument against Depo-Provera
meant that
in
public commentary
its
banning
would not
be treated as
simply
a
public
health
measure. In
the
months
following
Ushewokunze's
announcement,
the
reproductive systems
of Zimbab-
wean
women
became constructed
in
the media as the site of
a battle
between
two
political
forces:
the
former colonial
masters,
who
were
accused of
disregarding
Africans'
health and
autonomy through
the
promotion
of
Depo
and the new
government,
who
portrayed
themselves as
agents
of liberation
in
this
as
in
many
other issues.
Despite
this
portrayal
many people,
both
inside
and
outside Zimbabwe, argue that the
new
government's
apparent
commitment to
emancipation
and
social transformation
stopped
short of
actualising
the
promises
of
gender equality
made
during
the
period
of armed
struggle.
Despite ground-
breaking
and
important legislative
initiatives such as the
Legal Age
of
Majority
Act and the
Matrimonial
Causes
Act,
ZANU-PF's decision not to devote
more effort to
changing gender
23 Interview with Mrs Lucy Nyamini. All the interviews cited in this article were conducted by the author with
research assistants between September 1996 and May 1997. All names of family planning workers (FPWs) are
pseudonyms.
24 Interview with Mrs Henrietta Takundwa. Mrs Takundwa worked in the commercial farming areas near Bindura,
80
km
north of the
capital.
25 See A. Kaler, 'Fertility, Gender and War: the "Culture of Contraception" in Rhodesia 1957-1980' (PhD thesis,
University
of
Minnesota, forthcoming).
26 Parliamentary Debates, 8 September 1981, col. 65.
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354
Journal of Southern African
Studies
hierarchies in Zimbabwe are
interpreted
as a
move by
both
governmental and
private
bodies
to
reinscribe
women in
the domestic
sphere.
However
post-independence
social activism
did
generate
a
new
kind of
gender consciousness
among
women, leading
to the
ongoing
growth of
an
indigenous women's movement.27
Nevertheless,
whatever -their
government's
true
motivations, the fact that Depo-Provera was banned
in
the United
States,
that it
was
used around
the world as
a
white
man's
drug
to control black
women,
and that it
was
beloved
by population-control experts
in
South
Africa,
all
combined
to
damn
it in
the
eyes
of
the
Zimbabwean
African
public.
In comments outside the House
of
Parliament,
Ushewokunze was free to
go
much
further
in
making
this case. He was
reported
in
the
government-controlled
newspaper,
the
Herald,
as telling cheering women at a
training
course at Silveira
House
in
Harare that:
'The application
of Depo-Provera
is
racist because the
contraceptive
is aimed
only
at
black
women',
and
calling
on all women
using
the
drug
to ask for other
contraceptives,
saying,
'in
Zimbabwe, only
black women are advised to
try
it. White women do
not use it. It is
all
part of
a
plot by
our former
oppressors.
It is
racism'.28 His
analysis
was echoed on
the
paper's editorial
page:
When a
drug
is banned
in
its
country
of
manufacture,
when
it is
revealed that the racist
authorities
in
Pretoria
are
prescribing
the
drug
to African
women without their
knowledge
-
it
is time for
any
sensible
government
to
sit
up.
Which is
precisely
what the Government
of
Zimbabwe did
when it
decided
that the
contraceptive drug
is not safe.... This
sounds
like
a
typical case
of the
developing
countries
being
treated as
dumping
grounds
for harmful
drugs.
Zimbabwe
should
watch out for more such 'convenient'
Western
products,
most should be
dumped
right
back
where
they
came
from,
the
trash
can of
crass commercialism.29
Other
popular
media took
up
Ushewokunze's
cause, including
non-government-controlled
periodicals.
The Catholic-owned
weekly
Moto insinuated that the
FPA
and
its
director,
Dodds,
were trying
to retain a racist
colonial
grip
on
the bodies of Zimbabwean
women.
After
listing the various side effects
associated
with
Depo-Provera
and
noting that the
drug
was banned in
many Western
countries,
it
noted:
Asi Peter Dodds
anoti ngaushandiswe chete
pavatema.
Nemhaka
yeiko? Tinovimba kuti
murume
uyu
haasi
kutora vanhu vatema
samaBobejaan
nanhasi wese.
[But
Peter Dodds
says
it can
be
used
only
for the blacks. What
is
the
reason for this? We
hope
that
this
man is
not
taking
blacks for the
baboons
of
today.]30
The drug also
played
a
key
role
in
Dodds'
resignation after
nine
years
as director of the
FPA. He
quit
in
protest
at
Ushewokunze's
allegations
about the
dangers
of the
drug
and
about Dodd's
complicity
in
endangering
the
lives
of African
women. In an
interesting
parallel
with
Ushewokunze's assertion that
Depo
was a
foreign poison
inserted into
the
Zimbabwean
polity,
Dodds
also blamed
foreign
influences for
the
problems surrounding
the
banning
of the
drug.
In
an
interview,
he
theorised
that
ideologically-motivated objections
to
Depo
were
brought
to Zimbabwe
by
women
who had been
studying
in
the
United
States,
and that the
foreign
ideas about distrust of
modern medicine and
global
racist
conspiracies
were
imported
to
wreck
a
harmonious
and
well-accepted
family planning programme:
27 See G.
Seidman 'Women in
Zimbabwe: Post-independence Struggles',
Feminist Studies 10, 3
(1984),
pp.
420-440; S. Jacobs
and
T. Howard, 'Women
in
Zimbabwe:
Stated
Policy
and
State Actions', in H. Afshar
(ed),
Women, State and Ideology
(Binghamton, SUNY Press, 1987); E. Batezat and M.
Mwalo, Women in
Zimbabwe
(Harare, SAPES, 1989);
T.
Lyons,
'Written in the
Revolutions: Zimbabwean Women in the
Liberation
War'
(PhD
thesis, University
of
Adelaide, forthcoming);
and the
ongoing
work of
Christine
Sylvester
for
elaboration.
28 'Birth
control drug on way out', The
Herald, [Zimbabwe] 6 July 1981.
29 Editorial,
The Herald, 15 July 1981.
30 'Sekuona kwedu'
[As
we
see
it,
Editorial], Moto,
18
July,
1981.
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Banning Depo-Provera in
Zimbabwe 355
This goes back to the States, that fellow Stephen Minkin, he was the spokesperson
for that
fairly rabid women's organization [left-wing periodical]
Mother
Jones, and they
conducted this
rabid war
with
Depo or anybody who used
it
... you had this emotional rabid
ill-informed
opposition
led
by
Minkin
and Mother
Jones.
The
theory
we
had was that among the
women
who returned [from political exile] to Rhodesia when
it
became Zimbabwe were a
substantial
number who had been working for medicine in America and they came under the
influence of
Minkin
and
Mother
Jones and they were all chums of Herbert [Ushewokunze] who
put them
into positions of authority
in
the ministry when affirmative action came in and they
fed
him
the poison.31
Public Reaction to the Depo Ban
The racial and political issues
that
crystallised
at
the end of the period of racial
oligarchy
in
Zimbabwe and
that
were implicit
in
the decision to prohibit this drug were
manifested
in
a series of debates
in
the letters' columns of the Herald, the Sunday Mail
and other
Zimbabwean periodicals. White writers framed the issue as one of African
jealousy of white
competence
and
success
in
medicine, much
as Dodds
himself framed it, while African
writers saw the administration of
Depo
to black women
as a metaphor for
genocidal
tendencies
among
whites and for white domination of an
asset dear to the African nation:
the
fertility
of its women. Some
representative excerpts help
to illustrate the nature
of
the
debate:
Mr
Dodds' direction of the
FPA
makes
him
one
of this
nation's prime assets, which
is more
than can be said of our
egregious
Minister of
Health,
whose
every public
utterance causes
another wave of skilled whites to
snap
their suitcases shut and
head for our
borders,
convinced
that the
policy
of
[post-war]
reconciliation
[between
blacks and
whites]
is a
mockery.32
The
majority
of whites
in
this
country
continue to insult and
humiliate Africans by
calling
them
names. The use of
Depo-Provera
is a continuation of insults
against the African
population.
The
whites do not use
Depo-Provera
... the fact that African
women were compelled
to use it
clearly implies
a sinister
attempt
to control the African
population
...
[Ushewokunze
is]
eliminat[ing] injustices against
the African
population by
the former
colonial
Ministry
of
Health.
We would
be
happy
to
be
rid of white
racism,
white
arrogance
and human insult.33
We whites
are fed
up
with
watching everything
that
goes right
attributed to
the
present
administration
[of
the
country]
whilst
previous
administrations
are blamed for
everything
that
goes wrong.
We are tired of continuous threats and insults....
Example:
a
drug
used for
family
planning
is to
be
discontinued. This
may
be
accomplished by privately
withdrawing
it and
replacing
it
with
an alternative
(in
adult
society).
But instead
the
minister
responsible
takes
advantage
to
gain cheap publicity by proclaiming yet
another
racist
plot
and
in the
process
doing
maximum
damage
to
both
family planning
and race
relations.
For Heaven's
sake,
why?34
Only
a
person
not concerned with the welfare of his
patients
would
...
concentrate
on
stopping
babies
only.
Indeed the vast
majority
on whom
Depo-Provera
is
used are black.
Could it be that
black
babies must
be
stopped irrespective
of the risk?
I
am
pleased
that the
controversy
has
come
to
light
and the
government
has saved the women of
Zimbabwe.3s
These different
framings
of the
Depo-Provera
issues
were
the
products
of
a
specific
point
in
Zimbabwean
history,
the first moment of the
post-colonial
era. Each
racially
defined
'side'
perceived
itself as the
victim of the other: Africans
pointing
to the
experiences
of the
past
under white
domination,
and whites
interpreting
the
present (and
their
expectations
of
31
Interview with Peter
Dodds, January 1997.
Minkin was a
journalist
who
published
reports
that
Depo
was
being
dumped on
Third
World women. See
B.
Ehrenreich, M.
Dowie and
S.
Minkin, 'The Charge: Genocide.
The
Accused:
the
United States Government', Mother Jones (November 1979),
pp. 26-37.
32 Dr Richard MacGowan, 'Contraceptive Drug is not Cause of Illness', letter
to The Herald, etc 30 July 1981.
33 P. Zvombo, 'Depo-Provera
is a Relic of
Colonialism',
letter to
The Herald,
10 August 1981.
34
'X
Matter', 'Claim
of Plots
Causes Damage',
letter to
Sunday Mail, 26
July,
1981.
35
'Concerned',
'Welcome Article
on
Birth
Drug',
letter to
Bulawayo
Chronicle,
10
July,
1981.
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356
Journal
of Southern African
Studies
the near
future)
as one
in which
they
would suffer under
a
zealous new black
government.
Both
sides were
speaking
out
of
their
perceptions
of
an
inequitable
power relationship,
in
which their side was
maligned
and
abused
by
the
other.
However,
as I demonstrate
below,
the
debate
over
Depo
cannot be reduced to
simply
racial
antagonism.
Within white
and
African communities, as well as
in
the contested conceptual
spaces between those
communities,
the use
of
Depo
for African women was a
highly politicised
issue.
Family Planning Debates
in
Parliament
Opposition
to
new methods
of
fertility
control and
suspicion
of white
motives
for
introducing it had been part of nationalist political culture for decades before the
liberation
war. As early as 1957,
at a
time
when
dissemination of
birth
control had
not
yet
diffused
outside the circles of
elite
white
women,
the
Bulawayo
branch
of
the
early
nationalist
organisation,
the Southern Rhodesia African
National
Congress
(SRANC), passed
resolu-
tions
against any
kind of birth control
sponsored by
the white
regime.
This
followed
a
visit
to
Bulawayo by
Edith
Gates
of the Pathfinder
Fund,
an
American
organisation
devoted
to
the global promotion
of
contraception.
These
resolutions, coming
nearly
ten
years
before
the white
government
made its
first inroads into
family planning
promotion,
foreshadowed
later nationalist criticism. The Bulawayo
SRANC's resolution
stated
that,
'birth control
among
the African
people [is]
...
ungodly
and
unChristian,
fighting against
the laws of
nature. The Congress
views this
with
great suspicion
in
that
there
is a
political motive
behind
the
scheme
of
birth
control'.36
The white
regime
was
accused
of
'trying
to destock
human
beings
as
they
were
doing
with
African cattle' under
agricultural
'modernisation'
schemes
in
force
at
the
time. Five
years later,
nationalist leader Joshua Nkomo
(later
the
leader of the Zimbabwean
African
People's Union) fulminated that
family planning was
a
form
of
genocide,
and threatened to burn down
any government
clinic
that
dispensed
it to
African women.37
Even Africans who worked within
regime structures,
such as African
Members of
Parliament,
could be roused
by
the
subject
of
birth
control. This
was demonstrated year
after
year during parliamentary
debates
on the health
budget,
which
regularly
included
a
grant
for
the
FPAR,
with the
reiteration
of variations on
the themes of
white fear of an
increase
in
the numbers of black bodies and black fears of
white
genocidal
tendencies.
White
parliamentarians expressed
these fears
in
the form of
concerns over the economic
implications
of
the growth
of the African
population, insisting
that
use of
family planning
was
a
necessary
technical
measure to ensure
development,
modernisation and
progress
for
Rhodesia as
a
multi-racial nation:
Do
they
not realise
that
they,
the
Africans,
will
be
far
better off as a
family
unit if
they
restrict
the numbers of their children to those that
they
can afford
to have
and
not to throw into the
world
parasitic
members
of
the
community
who
will
always
be a 100
per
cent burden on both
the
family
and the
economy?38
The
greatest problem facing
Rhodesia
today
is not
the form
its future
government
will
take,
or
who
is
going
to
govern
the
country,
it
is
going
to be the
disastrous
programme
of
how this
country by
the end of the
century
will be
able to
cope
with
and care for its
population.
We
will
not have the financial
means,
the natural
resources,
nor the
food
to
look after our children ...
36
'Congress Says
Birth
Control
is
Ungodly', African Daily News,
2
December,
1957. See also from
African Daily
News, 'Bulawayo Opinion Varied
on
Family Planning', 19 November, 1957; 'Family
Planning' [Editorial], 20
November, 1957;
'Government
is
Not
Concerned',
2
December
1957; 'Highfield
Trading',
3 December
1957;
'Birth
Control Again' [Editorial],
4
December
1957;
'Women Not
Opposed
to Birth
Control', 9
December
1957.
37 West, 'Family Planning', p. 14.
38
Mr
Owen-Smith, Parliamentary
Debates,
5
September 1967,
col. 41.
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Banning Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe 357
if
we do not do something about it, this
country, without any shadow of a doubt, is facing
absolute disaster.39
These sorts of speeches, referring to an
African population explosion, were often an
obstacle to the best
efforts of African
family planning fieldworkers when they tried to
explain that,
in
their opinion, family
planning was
a
benign project for the health of the
whole family. As one former family
planning worker recalled:
The thing that was hammering us was that there
were some whites who could talk in Parliament
that "Oh, these Africans are too many". In
Parliament! "These Africans are so many, they don't
even know what
family planning is". That
was going to be a barrier for us. Some educated
people
in
the rural areas, they knew. They
said,
"You are
talking
of
this [pointing
to a FPAR
pamphlet about the happiness brought by
planned families] but why are you also saying that
[referring to the alleged African population
explosion]?" They said,
"Ah
no, people, there is
something
behind this".
We tried our level best to make them understand
that,
"Of course
they
might be saying that we are too many, but the
problems [of having a family too large for one's
means] are still yours. It is you that is
facing those problems, no matter what is said
in
Parliament you are still going to be having
those problems".40
In
Parliament, African members responded to the
'population explostion' speeches
with
allegations that the development and
modemisation rhetoric of the Rhodesian Front
masked
a
secret agenda of cutting down African
numbers and undermining the
moral fibre of
African women. These issues reached a peak
of vehemence on 9 March 1966, when a white
member had
introduced
a
motion
'that
the
house supports the promotion of a national
campaign
to
encourage family planning'
:41
Exterminating us, is that the idea?42
I
am
completely opposed
to
the terms
of
the
motion.... The European wants birth control
because ...
they
are
anxious to reduce the
population
ratios between black and white. This is
to make
it
easier to control the
African.
This
motion is aimed at the African generally,
with
the result that the African should not
swamp
the European by sheer weight
of numbers. This
motion could not have been aimed at the
Europeans
whose
birth
rate is
already
about two and
a half
children
per family,
and the Government is
enticing
as
many Europeans
as
possible
to
come here. No wonder the
Europeans
have been referred to as a
dying
race.43
For the
information of this house, this motion
gives
ammunition to
people
who have been
against
the Rhodesian Front
government
and
they say
we are
trying
to create a sort of human
destocking
... I
would like to tell the House that the
interpretations
Africans are
giving
to
this
motion are too
[very]
serious.
They say
it
is not at all
in
the national interest of the
people
of
Rhodesia
but
it has a
political motive behind
it....
This
motion
is
against
the command of God
and is also
against
African customs and African will. As far as this motion is
concerned,
it
is
a racial
motion....
The
Europeans
are
trying
to
get
rid
of the
African
population.44
It
seems the mover is afraid of this "one man one
vote";
he can be swallowed
up by
the
Africans and it will take
years
for him to
number
[outnumber]
them.45
A
careful examination of the statements of African MPs
opposed
to
family planning
reveals
39 Minister of Health, Parliamentary Debates, 30 September 1977, col. 394.
40 Interview with
Mr
James Doro.
41
Mr
Owen-Smith, Parliamentary Debates, 9 March 1966, col. 1467. The motion was never voted
on as
Owen-Smith,
a
vociferous
fan of
family planning
for
Africans, withdrew
it after he
judged
that it had stimulated
debate adequately. The vehemence which the subject evoked was remarked on by the Minister of Health,
in a
rather inopportune turn of phrase, as being 'pregnant with undesirable features, characterised by
an
amount
of
ignorance, bigotry, prejudice and naked racialism that I have never witnessed before in my eight years in this
House'. Parliamentary Debates, 20 April 1966, col. 1903.
42 Mr
Majongwe, Parliamentary Debates, 9 March 1966, col. 1473.
43 Ibid., Mr Mhlanga, cols. 1489-1490.
44
Ibid.,
Mr
Makaya, col. 1496.
Mr
Makaya went on to compare the intentions behind the
motion
with
Hitler's
extermination of the
Jews.
45
Mr
Samuriwo, Parliamentary Debates, 20 April 1966 [continuation of debate from 9 March 1966], col. 1893.
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358 Journal of
Southern
African
Studies
other concerns
besides the belief
that the white interest
in
family planning
was an
attempt
to defuse the demographic superiority
of Africans. African MPs were also
concerned
with
the destabilising effects
of
the
new
family planning technologies
on gender
relations.
Attempts by white proponents of family planning to frame their arguments
in
terms of
concern
for the
well-being
and
emancipation
of
African
women,
for
example,
were attacked
for
presuming
to
dictate to African men how
to treat their
women. Two
excerpts
from
debates of 9 March 1966
are
suggestive
of the tussle between white
and
African men for
the prerogative
of
organising
African women's
fertility:
Mr
Owen-Smith:
I
would
submit that
until the
status of the
African women
in
this
country
is
raised there can never be any true or appreciable raising
of
standards
or
advancement
of the
African population as a whole
-
[An Honourable Member: Lip service]
-
If
the African family
were limited to
a
reasonable
size
-
[Mr Majongwe:
What
is
reasonable?]
-
the
wife,
instead
of
being
a
perpetual
slave to continual
pregnancies year
after
year
-
[An
Honourable Member:
How
untrue]
-
would have the
opportunity
to
improve herself,
she
would
have
a
chance to
improve
the whole environmental
background
of the home
[Honourable
Members: inaudible
interjections]
-
She could be someone
that the African husband could be
proud
of instead of
being
in
her
present
state of
almost
chattel-like
subservience
[An
Honourable Member: Utter
nonsense]
-
[Mr
Samuriwo: We are
proud
of
our
wives]
-
[Mr Chigogo:
That is
utter
nonsense]
-
[Mr Chipunza: You
stink of colour
bar]
-
[Honourable
Members: inaudible
interjections].46
Mr Alexander:
I
do not think
enough emphasis
has
been
put
on the
part
that women have to
play
in
this matter.
I
think the honourable members opposite here
are
in
for a
rude awakening
because
it is their women and their women alone
who are
going
to force them to do
something
about this
[family planning]
-
[Mr
Behane: Are
you going
to tell
my
wife what to
do?]
-
...
If
the honourable members
here do not take heed of what
I am
saying they
will
have
to
take
heed from
their
women
in
a
very
short time
-
[Mr
Behane:
Are
you going
to tell
our
women
what
to
do?]
-
[Mr Hlabangana:
How do
you
know so much about our
women?].
47
Within
parliament,
the lines
on the
family planning
issue
appeared
to
be
clearly
drawn
along racial lines: whites
in
favour
of the new
methods, Africans opposed. However, the
experiences
and beliefs
of the two
racial
groups
outside
parliament
and outside the written
record show
a
diversity
of orientations to
family planning,
based on
factors ranging
from
ideological beliefs about 'development' to material self-interest within the structures of
marriage.
Dissent
among
Whites over
Family Planning
Throughout
the
1960s
and
1970s,
internal contradictions
grew among different factions
of
the white
establishment,
even
within the Rhodesian Front
(RF),
with
respect
to
promoting
family planning
to Africans. Tension between those white
government
officials who
supported
the intensive
promotion
of
family planning
and those
who
did not
hampered
the
spread
of information and
technology.
On one
hand,
the
RF
faced
pressures
from its
members to do
something
about Africa
overpopulation, increasingly
viewed
by
the
white
population
as
a
security
threat.
As the nationalist liberation
struggle
accelerated towards
becoming
a
'shooting war',
white anxieties about the
African
political
threat
were
displaced
onto
a
perceived
African
demographic
threat.
This concern was manifested both at the
highest policy-making levels
of the
RF
-
as when rumours circulated that a
'comprehensive
plan
to combat
the
population explosion'
had been
agreed
on
by
cabinet ministers
in
a
confidential session
at a RF
congress48
-
and at
the
party grassroots,
as illustrated
by
this
letter from
the
secretary
of the Sabi
Valley
branch of
the
RF:
46 Parliamentary Debates,
9 March
1966,
cols.
1469-1470.
47 Ibid., cols. 1499-1500.
48 'Plan Details, please', The Rhodesia Herald, 25 September 1973.
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Banning Depo-Provera
in
Zimbabwe
359
This branch is most
distressed with the present population
explosion and appreciates that your
department
is
doing
all
it can with regard to family
planning.
It
appears
however
that the
average
African is not at
all perturbed
with
the situation and shows no
interest
in
family
planning. In fact we
would go further and say that they are
using the population explosion as
a
weapon against
the
future of
the
European
in
this country. We are
most anxious to know
whether your
department has any further plans in mind for
alleviating the situation and
if
so
would
be
grateful
if
you could give us some idea of what
you have
in
mind. We as a branch
of the Rhodesian Front are
eager
to
help your department
in
any way possible.49
The administration of
the
FPAR
often found itself in an
uncomfortable alliance with the
more militantly
segregationist elements within the RF.
Containing the enthusiasm of RF
backbenchers and
their allies for reducing the African
population explosion was one of the
FPAR's most difficult
public relations tasks. Peter Dodds,
the director, could not afford to
alienate the
RF
members on
whose goodwill the
continued existence of his organisation
depended, yet
at
the same time
had
to
avoid having
his
work
identified
with
the
more
overtly racist utterances of
the white
elite.
This
necessitated
a
series of damage control
exercises through the
media, as Dodds insisted to the
white and black public that his work
was not
politically
motivated and was not part of the
RF's political agenda, whatever
individual politicians,
both black and white, might say.50
In interviews, former white
administrators
and
board members of the FPAR expressed
great annoyance
with
'irrespon-
sible' statements
by
their erstwhile white
allies
on
the
need
to
rebalance racial ratios in the
country
and
bring
in
more white
immigrants. Statements by white MPs
in
support
of
family
planning
for
Africans,
when publicised among educated
Africans, were said to
have
done
as
much harm
to
the
cause of birth control as the overt
hostility of the liberation forces.51
Supporters
of
the
RF
outside the
party structures also put
pressure
on
the
party
to
work
aggressively to contain
the African population. For
example,
the
head
of
the Salisbury
branch of the Natural
Resources Society
-
an important think-tank
in
an
economy heavily
dependent
on
mining
and
other forms of extraction
-
found it
'disappointing
that
the
recent
Rhodesian Front congress
had only thought
in
terms of
warnings [about African overpop-
ulation]
rather than
of immediate
positive
action ... The
Family Planning
Association
has
a
budget
of
only 23
cents a head
-
the price of one beer!'52
One
controversial issue from which the FPAR
sought
to
distance itself was the
question
of whether birth
control
should
be
compulsory.
Some
RF
politicians
and
others,
carried
away by
either
the
catastrophic
rhetoric
of
ecological
apocalypse
from
overpopulation
or
by
racial
fear of the African
population, urged
that birth control should be
enforced
on some
sectors
of
the
population, namely
on
blacks.
This
was
obviously
a
huge
embarrassment
to
the
FPAR,
whose educators
spent
a
good part
of their time
trying
to
convince Africans
that
the idea that whites
were
attempting
to force Africans
to cut down their numbers was
just
a
rumour.
The
FPAR tried
hard to fend off whites who wanted
to enforce
contraception.
In
1976, for example, Mr Gordon
Handover,
a
member
of the Natural Resources Board
of
Rhodesia told
the
annual
meeting
of the Natural Resources
Society
that
one
of the most
important
tasks
facing
Rhodesia was to:
impress on
our
population
the
dangers
of
uncontrolled
and
irresponsible proliferation.
49 NAZ
B/137/5/
-
Family Planning Policy, Vol. 1, Letter to Mark
Webster, Secretary
for
Health,
24
September
1973. The Sabi Valley branch received in reply a bland statement that the
Ministry
of Health thanked them
for
their interest
in
national affairs, and was very interested in
promoting
the health of all
Rhodesians.
50 For example, 'Plea to Keep Politics Out of Family Planning',
The Herald,
1
January 1974;
'Planned Parenthood
and Popular Fallacies', The Herald, 2 October 1973; 'Time to
Get
Rid of Birth
[Control] Bogeys',
The
Herald,
21 August 1975; and 'Birth Control Claims Dismissed as
Untrue', The Herald, 2 July 1977.
51
Interviews with Peter Dodds, Dr Esther Sapire (former
medical director of
the
FPAR)
and Dr
Timothy Stamps
(former medical director of the city of Salisbury, and
Minister of Health
in
1997).
52 'Cent-a-Pill Plea to Curb Births', The Rhodesia Herald, 22
October 1973.
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360
Journal
of
Southern
African
Studies
Population can be controlled and it must be.
If
it is not done
voluntarily then
I
can envisage
the time that
it
may have to be done by regulation.53
This brought an immediate response from Dodds,
who
stated the
next
day
that
'compulsion
54
can play
no
part
in Rhodesia's birth control
programme'.
Not only
had the FPAR to contend
with
white
population control
zealots
but also with
queasy
white civil servants.
Officials often refused to
put
into action the official
policy
of
approval
for
family planning, fearing
a
backlash
from
the
Africans who
were their
responsibility.
For
example, Margaret Westwater,
the Provincial Medical Officer of
Health
for
Mashonaland and a
strong proponent
of
family planning,
complained
about non-
co-operation,
not from African nationalists
or
irate African
husbands,
but from within her
own
ranks
in
the
government:
There are many thousands
of
African women [in Mashonaland]
who
are willing
and
anxious
to
accept family planning
advice but are unable to obtain
it.
Many government
hospitals
not
only
do no
active family planning, they
do not
even
discuss
family
planning
with the
patients
nor are they able to tell them where to obtain advice.
We do talk
to
nurses and
nursing
sisters
but
they
seem
not
to be
interested....
I
am offered the
film
'Road to Health'
[an
FPAR-
produced pro-family planning film] ...
when
I
advised
that it
should
be
given
to
the
Ministry
of
Information
to
be
shown on their
film
units
[which
toured the
country presenting
educational
films on a variety
of
subjects]
I
was informed that
they
will
not show it
because
it
contains
information about family planning.
If
the head of the Ministry of Information
was
the
Pope
in
Rome, he could not be more implacably opposed to the dissemination of information about
family planning.
If
we had sufficient staff and
the backing of
a
good
information not
propaganda service, we could have thousands
of
African women on
a
three
monthly
routine of
Depo-Provera
and make a
real
impact
on
the
soaring
birth
rate,
what
we are
doing
now is
a
drop in the ocean.55
Dr
Pugh,
the Provincial Medical Officer
of
Health for Matabeleland and a
strong supporter
of the
FPAR, reported
the
same
problems
in
his corner of the
country:
It
has been disappointing that
the
Ministry
of
Information has been too
terrified of
the
subject
to
allow
their
mobile
cinema units to
show
family planning
films or to use
family planning
articles
in
the
African
Times
[the
broadsheet for
Africans produced
by Internal Affairs].56
For
the staff of Internal
Affairs,
the
official government policy of
'community development'
in African
areas
came into conflict with the
promotion
of
family
planning. 'Community
development' provided
for the
shoring up (and
the
creation,
if
necessary)
of
traditional
authorities, allowing
the white
regime
indirect
rule
through
culturally-sanctioned
chiefs and
headmen,
in
the
process cutting
out an
age
cohort of
younger, more radical and more
politically dangerous
men.
This
policy 'brings relatively
elderly
men to
positions
of
authority,
and
in
many
cases such
persons through tradition,
inherited
conservatism,
religion,
or
for
other
reasons,
are hostile
to
the
pressing
need
for
family planning
and are
,57
reluctant
to
promote
its
cause
to
their communities'.
Within
the
Ministry
of
Health, Webster himself
had to
intervene to
pressure
recalcitrant
medical officers
into
accepting family planning
as
part
of
their
work,
or
even
tolerating
the
presence
of
FPAR
personnel
in
their institutions. For
example,
the
Provincial Medical
Officer of Health
for
Victoria Province balked at
allowing
FPAR
personnel
to hold mobile
clinics
at
rural clinics
in
the
province,
on the
grounds
that
no
'respectable'
Africans
wished
53
'Compulsory
Birth Control Hint for
Rhodesia',
The
Rhodesia Herald,
18
May 1976.
54
'Birth
Control Must be Voluntary', The
Rhodesia Herald 19 May 1976.
55
NAZ F/I
18/3,
Mashonaland
Reports,
Vol.
1,
Letter to the
Secretary
for
Health,
13
August
1971.
56
NAZ
B/137/5
-
Family Planning Policy
vol. 3,
Letter
to Mark Webster, 18
September 1972.
57 D. G.
Clarke, 'Problems of Family Planning
Amongst Africans in Rhodesia',
Rhodesian
Joutnal
of
Economtzics,
8
(1972),
pp. 17-38.
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Banning Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe 361
to be seen in the vicinity of a family planning clinic and so the presence of family planning
would deter people from coming for all other forms of medical attention. In response
Webster wrote:
I understand that you take the view that perhaps the presence of family planning people may
keep women away from the clinic. I cannot accept this view and I should be grateful if you
would in future see your way to collaborating with the family planning personnel.58
Webster took a similarly hard line with clinics run by Catholic missionaries who did not
wish to permit family planning on their clinics, telling them that the continuation of their
government grant was dependent on their falling into line. There was to be no more
financial support for Catholic clinics that did not 'fully co-operate' with the Ministry of
Health's agenda for family planning.59
The
FPAR
therefore faced many difficulties in implementing family planning which
were created by various elements of white society as well as certain branches of
government. Under Dodds, the actions of the
FPAR and
the attitudes of
its
leaders
continued to generate other controversies within Rhodesian society. The FPAR leaders
often displayed enthusiasms
which
were quite out of the mainstream
in
the politically and
sexually
conservative white establishment.
Many of
the white administrators
of
the
FPAR
were considered political as well as sexual liberals, by the standards of white Rhodesia.
Dodds was a zealous crusader for sex education in schools, vasectomy and tubal ligation,
and
for the
free
distribution of condoms. He campaigned for the creation of
a national
scheme for free
surgical sterilisation, only to
be
defeated by Salisbury City Council
which
refused to lend the operating theatres of its hospitals because they did not want to 'become
involved with such a hot potato as surgical sterilization'.60 Leaders of the FPAR also took
relatively radical positions, in their individual capacity, on the question of abortion which
was the subject of a parliamentary commission of inquiry at the time.
Race Ratios and Cutting Down Africans: Nationalist Opposition
to
Population Control
On the African
side, opposition
to
family planning
as
a
political
tool of the white
government
for
reducing
the
African
population
was
tempered by private
interest
in,
and
use
of, family planning by many
of
the freedom
fighters
and
their
supporters.
Since the
1950s,
the
nationalist movement
in
its
many
incarnations had framed
the
topic
of white-controlled
family planning
services as
a
threat to Africans.
A
lengthy excerpt
from
the Zimbabwe Review
depicts many
of
the
themes sounded
in
the nationalist denunciation
of
opposition
to birth control: the idea of
a
'population war',
the
presence
of
a
sixth column
of
family planning agents spreading
malicious
propaganda
in
the
countryside
and the
destabilisation of
gender
relations.
On the
population front,
the settler
regime
is
carrying
out
campaigns among Zimbabweans,
scaring
them
by
tales of
fatal
diseases and
poverty
for
large
families
.... Chiefs
in the
rural
areas are
being
ordered
by
the
regime
to
bring
forward
co-operating agents
to be used to
circulate
in
their
respective areas, preaching
the doom
of
large
families ... .
Every
clinic
has
an office
to advise
every
mother on
family planning
and
offering sterilising injections
to be
applied
without
the
knowledge
of
the husband ...
.
The settlers are
engaged
in
a
population
war
against
the Zimbabweans.
They
see the
power
of the
Zimbabwean
population
and the
armed
58 NAZ B/137/5
-
Family
Planning Policy, Vol. 3, Letter,
26 July 1973.
59 NAZ B/137/5
-
Family
Planning Policy, vol. 3.,
Letter from Webster to the Secretary of
the Archdiocese of
Salisbury,
19
September
1973.
I
have
been
unable
to
discover
whether
the Ministry
ever carried
through
on
this
threat and cut off funds
to Catholic clinics which did not
encourage family planning.
60 Family Planning Association
of Rhodesia, Annual Report
1977 (FPAR, Salisbury, 1978),
p. 44.
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362 Journal of Southern African
Studies
struggle ending
their dreams of a
permanent paradise
....
One
of
the
urgent
needs of Zimbabwe
is a greater rate of population
necessitated ... by
the dictates
of
the armed
liberation struggle....
Next to the insecurity
the
enemy
feels
from
the
gutting
red-hot barrels
of
guns
is the
preponderantly engulfing population increase of the Zimbabweans.61
According
to
the other major
liberation
force,
the
Zimbabwe
African
National
Union,
'the
illegal regime dreads
a
population
as
well
as
a
political explosion
... WE
WANT
BOTH
EXPLOSIONS
FOR
THE
GOOD OF
OUR COUNTRY'.62
Rhetorical opposition to
family planning campaigns
was often connected to
opposition
to rumours
of
other
attacks on
African
health
and life.
Thus
an
article
in the
Zimbabwe
Review that declared
that 'the settler
regime
is
waging
a vicious
campaign
to reduce the
African population'
and
reported
that an African woman would no
longer
be
employed
'unless she
agrees
to
the
government
demand
that she
start
using contraceptives',
also
referred to rumours
that the
regime
was
withholding
cholera
vaccines
from eastern
parts
of
the
country
which
were
suffering
an
outbreak
of
cholera,
as
another means of
reducing
the
number
of
Africans.63
According
to
a former
FPAR
fieldworker:
The political argument [against
family planning]
came
with the war
...
this
is
when
the
topic
really came up....
I
remember
one such address
[by
a
political
commisar
at a
meeting
in
a rural
area].... Well,
the
issue here
was the
land,
the whole
fight
was
about
the land ...
any
idea
which could
be used
in
order to recover
the
land
would
come
in.
'We
are
fighting
for
the
land,
the land is
ours,
but our land
has
been taken.
And now
you people
are
accepting
ideas of
limiting
the
number of your children!
When the
country
is so full of
other
people
and not
you
yourselves, you should have
children.
We
have
plenty
of
ground
for
children to be
in,
and
yet
you
are
being
told to
limit
the number of
your
children. These
people [whites]
want
us
to
be
few so
they
can
fight
us and
take
us
...
if
we are few the
majority [whites]
will
take
over,
as
they have already taken over
the
greater areas,
the
land,
the
farms,
and
we own
very
little even
in
the
poor
areas. And
you
are
limiting
the
number
of children!
There
is no
need to control the
children'
64
Other
FPAR
fieldworkers
reported
attending pungwes (all-night political meetings)
at which
it
transpired
that
family planning
'was
a
big weapon
of the
politicians, they were all saying
"No
family planning!"
"Pasi
nokuronga mhuri!"',65
and
the
importance
of women
bearing
more
children to
replace
the
men and women
killed
in
the
war was
stressed.
Some who
worked
in
the white-controlled
mining
and
farming regions
around
Chinhoyi and Bindura
reported
that
strong persuasion,
if
not
outright coercion,
was used
by
white bosses to
urge
their
employees
and their
employees'
wives to limit
the number of their children. The
political
commissars of the liberation forces used these
instances of white
interference
in
Africans' domestic lives when
they recounted to
the
people their grievances against
colonialism. At
least three
African
fieldworkers
were killed
by the liberation forces
specifically
because of
their involvement with
the
new
methods of
family planning,
and
others
reported
instances of
harassment
such as
being
detained and
questioned, being forced
to eat their stock of
pills
and
having
their
rudimentary
medical
equipment
thrown into
rivers.
The Depo-Provera injection received
special
attention at
pungwes as
a
symbol of both
the
white
regime's
attack
on the
most
valuable
asset
of
the African
people
-
their
women's
fertility
-
and also
of
the
destruction
of Africans as
sexual
beings,
their
virility
and
femininity. Many
fieldworkers recounted the role that
denunciations
of
Depo played
in
the
political
rhetoric of the
guerrillas:
61 Zimbabwe Review, October 1973,
p. 1 1.
62 Zimbabwe News July 1970, p. 10;
cited in West, 'Nationalism, Race and Gender',
p. 23.
63 Zimbabwe Review, October 1973,
pp. 24-25.
64 Interview with
Mrs.
Winnet Togarepi.
65 Interview with Mrs Vimbai Tasekwa.
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Banning
Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe
363
[At
pungwes] the boys
would tell us-they
would say that injections,
that the Depo-Provera
was
made to sterilize the
women so that we
Africans will be less than the
whites, so the whites
can
be
many and take
all
the land.66
However, Depo also
played a role in a more
subtle rhetorical
strategy, that of
establishing
that
the white regime
was stripping Africans
of their essential
humanity, treating
them as
animals. Rumours that
Depo
was
developed
for use,
or
actually used
on,
feral animals
in
order
to domesticate them
proliferated:
they say
that the
Depo was used
in
other
countries to tame donkeys,
and that
message spread
to
people,
this
was the
rumour,
and now
they
are using
it
for
our
wives,
and
so we
[family
planning educators]
have got a very difficult
situation ... when it was
denounced some
people
became
very afraid, that was the
reason, that
Depo-Provera is not good to be used for human
beings,
it was
just
meant for the animals.
Because
they
want to
oppress
us
down
they
are
bringing this to
Africans. Depo is only for the
Africans, not for the
white people.67
The idea that
Depo was
a way of
dehumanising Africans, or as
an
insult to the essential
nature of African
people, had a very
specific gendered
component to it. Many of
my
interviewees told me of
persistent rumours
that
a
man who had
sexual contact with a
woman
who
had
used
Depo would become sick and weak. At
first
I
took this 'sickness' to
be
a
form
of the
non-specific abdominal ailments
which are
said to
afflict
people
who
transgress
moral or social
codes, especially
in
sexual
matters,
in
Shona communities.
However
I
was
enlightened by Mrs Gladys
Chitsungo,
a
former
fieldworker, that this
sickness was
actually
impotence.68
That was a
belief to
men, they thought they
would be weak ... [Their
wives] were told by
them,
'Now
you are going to
make me weak [if you
use family planning],
you are killing me like
witchcraft'.
It
was
very
much
said by the
men
...
.(AK: They believed
if
the
wife
was
taking
family planning the
husband can get sick?)
Not
sick. He doesn't
get sick
exactly,
he
will
not be
strong to
meet
[have
sex
with]
the wife.
(Makes limp-wrist
gesture of flaccidity.)
They say that the
man will
not feel like
making
intercourse
with
the
wife,
he won't
be able
to.
(Laughs.) As it was
during the wartime, people
were really afraid, they didn't
know which
was
which.
They thought it was a
way
of
decreasing
the
tribe
of
Africans,
they thought
all
of
that
was
going to come to men
if
women took
pills,
men would be weak so
they
could not
do
intercourse, they could not make
any
more
babies.69
However, nationalist attitudes
towards
family planning were more
complex
than
simple
outright rejection. Opposition
to
family
planning
was
a
potent political
tool to use when
garnering support
among
rural and
urban
African
men,
because
it
evoked
the
spectre
of
white
men
emasculating
African
ones
through
their
appropriation
of
a
crucial national
resource: the wombs of the Africans'
women. The
family
planning
issue
was used to
'gender' the nationalist
cause and the rhetoric that
supported it,
to
appeal
to African men
as
men.
Yet when
it came to actual
practices
surrounding family
planning by
those
in
the
liberation armies or their
sympathisers, individual desires for the
possibilities
inherent
in
the
new means of
fertility
control
and
individual exercise of
agency
and choice made the
picture much more
complex.
According
to
former
family planning
workers
(FPWs)
and others who lived
through
the
66 Interview with Mrs Rosah
Hamadziripi.
67 Interview with Mr Moffat
Chitiyo,
also a
fieldworker.
68
According
to
my
interviewees, infertility, impotence
and menstrual
disruption
are also common
signs
that
a
person
has been
cursed or bewitched
by
an
enemy
or a
jealous acquaintance.
69 Interview with
Mrs
Gladys Chitsungo. Throughout
the
interview,
Mrs
Chitsungo
used
'taking
pills'
interchangeably
with
'family planning':
like other
interviewees,
she
appeared
to
believe
that the
Depo injection
was
another
way
of
administering
the same substance as was administered
orally
in
the
pills.
I believe that her
comments
apply
to all forms of hormonal
contraception.
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364 Journal of Southern African
Studies
war years, some of the freedom fighters truly
had
deep-seated objections to the pills and
injections because of their fear that the
African
population would
be
decimated or because
of ethical objections to
artificial
control of conception, similar to those held by some
Catholics. However,
for
many others, inveighing against
the new methods of
contraception
was a tactical choice, a means of gaining favour with the masses on whom they depended
for support, particularly
the men. FPWs asserted
that the
comrades70
seized
on
family
planning as an issue which provoked strong reaction from the
men
among the citizenry,
and
which
they
could use to shore
up
their
support.
Thus some of
the
comrades
recognised
and
exploited
the
symbolic
value of the contestation between whites
and
Africans over women's
fertility,
because of
the
deep
resonance
this
issue
had with the
nationalist
aspirations
of
the
people.
Just like the
digging
of contour
ridges
and
dipping
of cattle
[other practices promoted by
the
white authorities which were
opposed by
the
guerrillas],
such
talk
about
family planning
was
there and
regarded
as
a
western
way
of
reducing
the
number of blacks
so
that we
have
fewer
children and
they
come and take over the land and
eventually
the
land
is
taken
... .
So
all
these
things,
these
developmental
issues
that
would do down
the
enemy
would
be
advanced.
During
the war you
use
any
available
propaganda.
It's
a
question
of what ideas
people
will
buy
and
you
advance them.7'
FPWs reported that the younger and more
militant
comrades were the ones who most
strongly opposed contraceptives
on
ideological grounds,
as
a
western
perversion. Older
and
more seasoned comrades, especially
those who
had
been trained outside the
country
in
socialist
bloc countries
which had their own
contraceptive programmes
such
as
Cuba,
would sometimes
acknowledge
in
private
that that
they
believed
contraceptives
could
be
separated
from the
political
context
of colonialism
in which
they
were
proffered
and that
contraceptives could,
and
would,
be
politically
redefined
in
an
independent
Zimbabwe as
part
of self-determination and
development.
The politicians, they were going around mobilising people so that people knew about it
[reasons why contraceptives were bad], they were aware ... . They were telling us that it's the
way
of
decreasing
the
Africans.
If
you
could find
an old
man
who is a
politician, he
would tell
you
that this is because we are still
fighting,
we
haven't
got
our
independence yet,
but after we
win
we
will want
these things.
If
you talk to them privately, they can say that. Those were the
old
politicians.
The
young
men were all excited ...
[but] they [the
older
politicians]
would tell
you
be
strong [i.e.
don't
give up
on
family planning]
because tomorrow we
will
also want to
have this
family planning.72
The
comrades just said "Carry on [with your job]. There is no government that doesn't like
family planning,
when we are the
government
we
will
want it".73
[The comrades]
did understand
[about
the value
of family planning] but of course politically
...
they
were
saying
no.
They
would
say
it
publicly, they
could
say family planning
is
another
way
to
destroy
us ...
just
the same as what
they
would
do with
that
FN
[rifle]
of
the
Smith
people [i.e.
the
regime's soldiers], they
would
say
that
it has
got
no bullets.
They
would
say
that, they
would
say
this
AK
[rifle,
used
by
the
comrades]
is the
only gun
which
has got bullets
70
I
use the
term
'comrades' here
as it
was used
by
the
people
whom I interviewed
-
to
refer to
the
people
who
covertly
entered their
neighbourhoods
on
military
and
political
missions for the two
major
armed
forces
in the
liberation
struggle,
the Zimbabwe African
National
Liberation
Army (ZANLA)
and the Zimbabwe
People's
Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA). My
interviewees made no distinction between the two
armies
in
terms
of
their
reactions
to
Depo-Provera.
In addition to the
comrades,
the cast
of political characters encountered by
interviewees included
'mujiba'
or
'youth'
-
young
men and
women of the area who assisted the comrades with
their
operations
and acted as intermediaries between the
comrades
and
the
people
-
and
'politicians',
a catch-all
term to refer to all those
who
were
politically opinionated
and
active
on
the
side
of the
nationalists,
even
if
they
were not
formally
members of the national liberation
organisations.
71
Interview with
Mrs
Winnet
Togarepi.
72 Interview with Mrs
Gladys Chitsungo.
73
Interview with Mrs
Eustinah Muchoko.
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Banning
Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe 365
...
they just say it
because of the situation. Not that they actually
hate family planning, they
were just making
propaganda.74
FPWs also reported
contradictions between the comrades'
political education and their
personal
lives. While
family planning was useful as a symbol of
white domination
and
a
rhetorical rallying point
against white control of African bodies,
for some comrades it was
also
a
resource they drew
on
in
their own private lives, and
they presumably did not fear
that
they were
compromising their
own
political integrity by
using family planning. Many
comrades found a use
for contraception in their private lives,
both the 'top people' who
formed the
elite
of
the
guerrilla movement and the civilian
support
networks,
and the more
pragmatic of the
adolescent men who made up most of the
liberation forces'
rank
and file.
As one
FPW
who was a
fellow
traveller
(and went on to
a
minor
municipal political career
with
ZANU after the
war) recounted:
I
was a politician
myself. During my school days
I
was one of the
youth for Dr Nkomo
in
Highfield .... So most of
the politicians
were
my friends and
I
could understand them. One
funny thing
was that
during
the Rhodesian
time some of the
things
they
wanted
they
didn't
want other people to
accept.
The reason
being
that
when you
meet them
they could resist
in
the
presence of many but
if
you
meet them
privately they say,
"Yes,
I
do
this
[use family
planning]
but I
don't
want
the others to know". You
get
to
some
prominent people, very top
,75
people,
and
they say,
"I am
using
but I don't want others to
know,
this is
my
secret".
It is difficult to gauge
the extent to which the comrades
themselves used the new family
planning methods. Only
two FPWs reported that they had
regular contact with (female)
comrades
seeking pills
or
Depo injections, although two others claimed that
they
saw the
comrades'
medical officers
carrying pills. Many FPWs reported that
they supplied
condoms
to
the comrades. Being a
male-controlled method, however, condoms did not
canfy the
same
political loading
as the female-controlled
pill
and the
Depo injection
with their connotations
of
gender
subversion. Yet when FPWs
met the comrades by
chance in
the course of
their
work,
the
guerrillas were
more likely to request money or minor medical
supplies
or
to
destroy
the stocks of
pills
and
injections
that
they found
than
to make
any requests
for
contraceptive assistance.
The
one
former
comrade
to whom
I
spoke asserted
that
all
of her
colleagues
were
opposed
to the
new contraceptives.
However, many of
the
people
in rural
neighbourhoods of Wedza
and
Buhera
districts
remember that the comrades
covertly used contraceptives to
facilitate their sexual encoun-
ters
with
local girls.
Like
'private acceptance' by married
women,
these
activities were
viewed
with
great
disapproval,
as elders believed that the comrades
had
used these
pills,
which
they kept secret
from
elders,
to
seduce
girls away
from their
parents
and steal their
virginity.
Elders' dislike of the
comrades' violation
of norms
in
the matter
of
giving
contraceptives
to
girls
was linked
to
their
objections
to other
ways
in
which the
comrades
transgressed
the norms of control over
fertility.
The most
frequent
complaint against
the
comrades was that
they
impregnated
local
girls
and
left them
with
illegitimate
babies who
had no fathers. This 'theft'
of
girls' reproductive capacities (and
virginity,
in
some
cases)
was
especially significant as
in
Shona
society
a child
belongs
to the
lineage
of the
father,
and the
patrilineal spirits are
important
in
healing
childhood diseases and
bringing
luck
in
later life.
Without any known
patrilineal relatives,
a
child would
not
be
able
to
participate
in
proper rituals for his or her
success
in
life,
and is doomed to be a
'person
with
no
name'.
In
addition,
the
single mothers the comrades left behind
experienced
difficulty
in
finding
anyone
to
marry them,
as
men did
not want
to
expose
their own
lineage
to the
potential
witchcraft
dangers represented
by
the
presence
of
another
child.76
74
Interview with Mr
Jonas Chakanyuka.
75 Interview with Mr
Thompson Tinoenda.
76 The women interviewed
by
I.
Staunton reported
similar concerns.
See I.
Staunton,
Mothers
of
the
Revolution
(Harare,
199
1).
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366 Journal of
Southern
African Studies
Responses to a query about whether the comrades talked about
family planning77
included the following statements
which illustrate the belief that
they
were
using contracep-
tives for their
girlfriends:
Not the first groups, and
not
often. The
last
groups
of
comrades
were
given some
pills, and they
gave
them to
their
girlfriends privately
when we elders had
gone
home from
the
meetings.78
We had no family planning lectures, but we heard our sons and daughters saying
that the
last
group of comrades from Mozambique gave their lovers injections and pills. To us
elders, they
encouraged
us to have children.79
They said nothing about family planning, but to
their
assistants
and the
girls they
gave pills
privately.
They
did this
privately,
we
only
heard it
from
the
girls.80
Testimony
from
the
comrades themselves collected
by
other scholars
researching
the war
years suggests
that the use of
pills
did
occur,
but was contested both
in
the base
camps
in
Zambia and Tanzania and while on manoeuvres
within Zimbabwe. In
the course of their
revolutionary work, living
far
from
their
parents, young
female
guerrillas
had
to
negotiate
the
issue
of
family planning covertly.
In the
liberation
movement,
the contradictions
between
the
socialist
rhetoric
of
women's
emancipation
and
pro-traditionalist
sentiments
espoused by
the cultural
nationalists
among
the freedom
fighters
were bound to
pose
conflicts
for the
running
of the
camps
and
the
missions
into
Zimbabwe,
where
young
men
and
women
would
live
in
close proximity to
each other
without chaperones.
Officially,
these were often resolved
in favour of tradition:
ZANLA had difficulty deciding how
far to intervene
in
African customs.
It
did not
go
very
far:
it
decided not
to
introduce
family planning
in
the
camps
and
...
informed
those
young couples
whose marriages the party registered
that
their parents would eventually be
informed [in
case
they should want] lobola payments and other traditional rites.81
Mrs
Julia
Zvobgo,
a senior ZANLA
official
in
the
camps,
had to
supervise
many
adolescent
and
post-adolescent
libidos
in
the
emotionally-charged
wartime situation.
New forms of
male-female fratemisation and socialisation
might inevitably grow up
in
the
camps,
but
'there
was one
rule,
and that was there should be no
prevention,
no
contraception....
We
didn't
go
in
for
family planning
....
We
felt
that
family planning
was
something
that
should
be decided
by
the
parents
[of
the female
guerrillas]'.82
A
young guerrilla
in
the
camps,
Tainie
Mundondo, reported that
'[n]aturally
men and
women fell
in
love.
If
they
wanted to
stay together, they reported
this and were
registered.
Family planning
was
not
possible'.83
The
war
situation added to the cultural and
moral
objections
to
contraception.
'It
would have been
wrong
to have birth
control when so
many
people
were
dying'
.84
By 1978,
over
15,000 people, overwhelmingly
rural
Africans,
had
been
killed
in
the war and
the liberal Catholic Commission for
Justice and Peace estimated
that
one
hundred were
dying every day.85
Nonetheless,
women
guerrillas
had
their own
strong reasons
and
desires
to use
birth
control. Even Mundondo
acknowledged
that
'pregnant
women
had a
tough
time'
.86
77
This question
was
asked by my
research assistant
Mrs
Nyaradzo Shayanewako, who
also translated the comments
of
the
people
of
Wedza
and
Buhera.
78 Interview
with a man in
Buhera.
79 Interview with
a
man, Masara kraal,
Wedza.
80
Interview with
a
woman, (wife
of the man cited
above).
81 N. Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War:
Peasant Voices (Cambridge, 1992), p.
193.
82 Quoted
in
R. Weiss, The Women of
Zimbabwe (London, Kesho, 1986), p. 90.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 J. Gilmurray,
R. Riddell and
D. Sanders,
The
Struggle for Health: From Rhodesia
to Zimbabwe, Volume 7
(Salisbury, Mambo Press, 1979), p.
31.
86 Weiss, Women, p. 90.
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Banning Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe 367
Guerrillas who were pregnant were sent to
the rear in Mozambique, usually to the
'maternity camp'
at
Ossibissa, for three and a
half months as a kind of maternity leave.
After the baby
was
born, he or she was placed
in
a communal nursery and the mother was
usually reassigned
to
support work.
It was
very difficult to get back to the front after
becoming
a
mother.87 Consequently, many
women did not want to get pregnant.88 Although
she was
opposed
to
the use
of
non-traditional
contraceptives, Zvobgo acknowledges, 'of
course
I
talked to the
girls privately and told them to look
after themselves
and
how
best
to do
it.
But
there
was no policy about family
planning'.89 Zvobgo evidently did not see
anything wrong
in
avoiding birth by 'looking
after oneself', so it appears to be the use of
pills and injections (i.e. modern contraceptive
methods) that was objectionable.
A
statement by Mrs Sally Mugabe, wife of the
Patriotic Front leader Robert Mugabe,
suggests
that the
comrades' objection to family
planning
was based on the idea
that it
threatened the war
effort rather than being
an
intrinsic
objection to fertility
control. At
a
London meeting
in
1981, she said,
'[family
planning] was not a subject considered or
discussed
during
the
liberation
war
-
when the numbers of
supporters
were
being seriously
depleted,
it was
necessary
to
produce
more
cadres to take
the
place
of the fallen comrades'.
She
herself was
interested
in
family planning
as a
means of
spacing
out
children so that
they
could benefit from the available resources, but did not
support the indiscriminate use of
contraceptives and lowering the birth rate.90
Yet
despite
the
apparent
ban
on
contraception,
the
testimonies of many women
guerrillas
tell
a
different
story
about
what
happened
in
practice.
Like the rural
women, they
were
willing
to
contravene officially sanctioned
norms
and
values
in
order to enhance their
own lives:
We had access to
contraceptives
in
the
bush.
People
brought them back from overseas and
I'm
glad, really
I
wouldn't have liked to have had a
baby
in
the bush. We have adopted what we
want from western
culture into our revolution,
and we are
aware of the fact that people have
sexual
feelings
in
spite
of the
dangers
of
the
struggle
... .
Our attitude to
contraception
and
abortion
changed during
the
years
of
the
struggle.
The
girls
have
really adopted
a new
way
of
living.91
For
at
least some
women, their own
interests
prevailed
over the norms
that
opposed
contraception,
and
this
could
lead them into
gender-based
conflict:
'Some of the
male
comrades
did
not like
contraceptives
because
they thought they
were
murder,
but
really
it
was our
duty
and we
female comrades
were
ready
to
defend
it'.92
Women's
Preference for
Depo
From
the information I
have
presented
so
far,
it would
be
easy
to
see the
struggle
over
Depo-Provera
which
culminated
in
its
banning
as a
contest between different
groups
of
men-white
settlers,
who
sought
to control
African
fertility,
and Zimbabwean
nationalists,
who did not want this
power
in
white
hands.
However,
such an
image
of this
struggle
would
obviously
be
incomplete
because
it
omits
the
representation
of
the interests of the women
whose bodies
were
the terrain of this
struggle.
Finding
the voices of
the women who
87 M. Davies, Third World: Second Sex (London, Zed Books, 1987), pp. 104-105.
88 Lyons, 'Written
in
the Revolution(s)'; J. Nhongo-Simbanegavi, 'Zimbabwean Women in the Liberation Struggle:
ZANLA and its Legacy 1972-1985' (unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford University, 1997).
89 Weiss,
Womi
eni, p. 94. 'Looking after oneself' may possibly
be a
reference to traditional
methods of
contraception,
such as the
rhythm method or coitus interruptus.
90 'Women's
Struggle
for
Liberation', West Africa (1981), pp. 1531-1532.
91 'Nyasha', quoted
in
Davies, Third World, p. 105.
92 Female combatant, quoted in Kriger, Guerrilla War, p. 139.
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368 Journal
of
Southern
African
Studies
received Depo-Provera is very difficult.
Because African
women
in
the settler
period were
structurally
excluded from
channels
of
voicing
their
needs
and
wants, due
to
gendered
patterns of schooling, literacy
and
political representation,
I
have
to
try to
reconstruct their
interests
in
Depo-Provera
in two
ways: indirectly from
the
testimony of men
and of those
women
who were
professionally
involved
in
family planning
and
directly from the
memories of men
and
women
of the
days
when these new
technologies
were
being brought
into
their
communities.
Both quantitative
and
qualitative
evidence
suggests
that
Depo
was
very popular
among
African women.
It
was introduced to
Rhodesia
very early
in
its development,
in
1971,
and
in that year the then medical director of the
FPAR
spoke of 'injectible steroids
...
becoming
increasingly popular'.9 The
FPAR
annual report for
that
year stated that Depo-Provera
was
overtaking
the
pill
in
popularity
at all
clinics. Two
years later,
in
the same
study
of
fieldworkers referred to
above,
73
per
cent of FPAR
fieldworkers
rated
Depo
'very good'
in
terms of its acceptability among
the
target population
of African
women,
and
only
6
per
cent
rated it 'bad'
-
respectively,
the
highest
and lowest
ratings
of
any
among
the nine
contraceptive
methods
surveyed.94 However, Depo
was
also rated
highest
in
side
effects,
with 65
per
cent
of
fieldworkers
reporting seeing
such
effects, especially
headaches,
irregular bleeding, tiredness
and
weight gain.
By 1975,
the medical director of the
FPAR
was able to
report that, despite
the
painful
side
effects, acceptance
of
the
Depo-Provera injection outweighed acceptance
of
all
other
methods
the FPAR
provided, accounting
for
73.9
per
cent of all known
contraceptive
users.
This
pattern
was confirmed
by
the
Annual
Reports
of
the Health
Department
for
the
City
of
Salisbury
for the
1970s,
which
showed
a
steady
increase
in
both the
absolute numbers
and
the
relative
proportions of
women
using
the
injection compared
to other
contraceptive
methods.
A
1976
study
of
contraceptive
use
patterns
in
three
municipal areas,
in
addition
to
confirming
the
popularity
of
Depo
with
women, reported
that
discontinuation rates
among Depo
users were
very
much lower
than the
discontinuation rates
for
pill users
(dropout
rates
for
Depo
between 35
and
40
per cent, compared
to
dropout
rates for
the
pill
between
62
and
65
per cent).95 Although
this
study
was
crude and
many of
the
key
terms
unspecified (such
as the
comparability
of
'dropping
out'
from
taking
a
pill
and
'dropping
out' from
receiving
an
injection),
the
findings
do
support
the contention that
Depo
found
a
receptive
audience
among
African
women.
While this
quantitative evidence could indicate
that
women were being coerced
into
taking Depo,
as
I
have indicated
happened
on
some commercial
farms, my
interviews with
former fieldworkers
and
non-fieldworkers indicate that
Depo
was
genuinely
popular
with
many
women
and was
sought
out
even
when
no overt coercion was
applied
to
them, despite
its well-known association
with headaches and
menstrual disruption. Comments
such as
'Depo
was
compared
to
nothing!'
or 'With
Depo
the
people
came.
They
really came!'
invariably accompanied any discussion of the relative popularity of the different
methods.
Why Depo's popularity?
I
hypothesise
two minor reasons and one
major
one.
First,
Depo
was
cheaper
than
other methods.
At FPAR
clinics, Depo
cost
15
pence (in
Rhodesian
currency) per
three-month
injection
or 60
pence per year, compared
to 6
pence
per
month
for
the
pill
or 72
pence per year.96
Since
many
African
women
contracepted
without
their
93
K. E.
Sapire, 'Family Planning',
Rhodesia
Science News (April 1971), p. 107.
See also
E. Still, 'Problems of
Family Planning
in
Rhodesia', Family
Planning (January 1973), pp. 91-95.
94
A.
Geraty, Evaluation of Family
Planning Educational Programmes in Rhodesia (Salisbury,
University of
Rhodesia, 1973), p.
23.
95
W. M.
Castle,
'The Extent
of Family
Planning Among
Africans in
Mashonaland', Central African
Journal of
Medicine (August 1976), pp. 150-151.
96
Still, 'Family Planning', p.
2.
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Banning Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe 369
husbands' knowledge or approval, and thus
had to pay for contraceptive supplies from their
own limited cash
resources,
a
saving of
twelve pence
was
significant. Second, Depo did not
require constant vigilance, such as
remembering to take a pill every day.
Third and most important, Depo was
effectively 'invisible' contraception. After the shot
was
administered, no tell-tale evidence
existed
in
the form of pills or diaphragm cases to
arouse the
suspicions of husbands or other
family members. The enduring significance of
this third
reason
is
underscored by research
by Gibney who reports that immediately after
independence, discussions at women's clubs
meetings
in
rural areas repeatedly raised the
subject of women's interests in 'safe,
effective child spacing methods which would
not
be
visible
to
men'.9
Gibney also found that
many women reported that they had used birth
control
in
secret without their husband's
knowledge. She reported
this
result according to
the educational status
of
the
women
interviewed,
and
it
was evident that
it
was the least
educated women who had
most frequently to resort to
this
subterfuge. Among
women with
less than four years of education, 39 per
cent said they had contracepted against their
husband's
wishes; among
women with five
to
seven years,
40
per cent, among women
with
eight
to
ten
years,
8
per cent; among
women with
eleven to twelve years,
13
per cent; and
among women with more than thirteen years
of education,
25
per cent. Estimates by former
FPAR
fieldworkers of the percentage of
contracepting women
in
the 1970s who were
'private acceptors' (women who used
contraception without the knowledge or against the
will of their
husbands) range from
20
to 90
per cent, depending on
district.
In
my interviews with older women and
men
in
rural communities
in
Wedza and Buhera
districts,
southeast of
Harare,
it became
clear
that
the
invisibility
of
Depo had
been a
much-remarked on
feature
of
the new
drug, greeted
by young
women with interest
and
by
men and elders with
suspicion.
When
asked who
in
their communities liked or did
not
like
the new methods of
fertility control
when
they were introduced
in
the 1970s, women
spontaneously brought up
the
'private acceptor
issue':
They
were
happy, especially the women, because
they
liked
the injection [because] you
can
just
have it
private,
like I
did
...
the injection is for
me and that's all [i.e. no one else
in
the family
will
know
about it].98
Women
[liked the
new
methods] but not men.
Men like children, no matter [if they
are as
many
as]
fifteen as
long
as
he
calls them
his,
but women know the
problem
of
labour
pains
and
raising
children so
they
do
it privately.99
I
can
say women [were happy] because the men want children
but
they
were not able to look
after
them
properly.
Some
beat
their wives no matter
if
she was
pregnant,
so
they
were
happy
to
have secret
prevention.
Our tradition
[traditional
ways
of
preventing conception,
such
as
drinking
infusions of
herbs]
is
perfect,
but
some
...
[you
have
to]
drink
[a cup
of
medicine]
everyday,
and
you
can't hide
a
cup
of medicine
every day,
so
injections
are better.100
[Women]
like the
modern methods because
it was so
easy
to hide and secretive to
men.
Traditional methods, you have to consult
someone and
so
there
was a lot
of
gossip.
Men
like
children,
but
some women don't want to have so
many
children.'0'
In
1981, shortly
after the
banning
of
Depo-Provera,
further evidence
of
the
popularity
of the
97
L.
Gibney, 'Contraceptive Practices
in
Zimbabwe:
The
Influence of Educational Attainment
and Personal
Relationships' (unpublished PhD thesis, Stanford University, 1993), p. 60. Gibney's information was derived
from single-sex focus group discussions of 8-12 people in both rural and urban areas. See also A. Kaler,
"'Who
Has Told You To Do This Thing?": Contraception as Subversion in Rhodesia 1970-1980' (paper presented at
the
annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, 1997); A. Kaler, 'Fertility, Gender
and
War'.
98 Interview with
woman,
Zvaita
kraal,
Buhera.
The
quotations
in this section
are
all
derived from interview notes
and
translations by Mrs Nyaradzo Shayanewako.
99 Interview with man, Masara kraal, Buhera.
100 Interview with woman, Songo kraal, Wedza.
101 Interview with woman, Tafadzwa kraal, Wedza.
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370 Journal of
Southern
African
Studies
drug amongst
women was
provided
in a current-affairs
television
show, Focus,
which
included discussion of contraception.
According to a report on the show
in
the Zimbabwean
news magazine Moto:
A
woman
in
the audience lamented
the
phasing out
of
Depo, claiming that many black wives
had preferred
it
to other forms. The
reason, she said, was to avoid being found out by husbands
as most black husbands did
not
approve
of their wives
practising
birth control.'02
'The
Problem
of
Husbands'
In
all of my interviews
with 48
former
fieldworkers,
interviewees talked about the
'private
acceptor
issue'. The
majority
of them
described
this
issue,
often referred to as 'the
problem
of
men' or 'the
problem
with
husbands',
as the
biggest challenge they
faced
in
spreading
the gospel
of new methods
of
family
planning.103 They
identified
three sources of male
resistance to family planning:
men
who wanted more children for
instrumental purposes,
such as
more
hands
to work in fields or as status
symbols;
men who
believed that
protection
from pregnancy would
lead their wives into sexual liaisons with other
men;104
and men who
resented
pills
and
injections being given
directly
to their wives without first
being
screened
by
men as the
guardians
of
the interaction between the
family
unit
and
the
outside world.105
Those interviewees who did not see 'men' as their
greatest problem said
that the
biggest
problem
was
'politics'.
However
I
would
argue
that
'politics'
in
the context of
family
planning
had a
great
deal to
do with men and
women,
and with
what men considered the
proper
relations between the
genders.
Women,
both former fieldworkers and
non-fieldworkers, reported that they feared
divorce
if
they
were
caught trying
to
affect
their own
fertility
without
permission
from their
husband
or his
proxies, including
his mother
and sisters.
Birth
control pills could be hidden
in
places such as
the
roof
thatch of the hut
or
in
the bin of mealie-meal, unlike the more
unwieldy indigenous contraceptives,
but
injections
were
even
more
suitable
for
'hiding'.
In
a collective
interview,
senior
members
of the
Zvamaoko Women's Club
in
Buhera
summed
up
the
experiences
of
many
women:
Some
of the
women were divorced
by
their husbands
in
the
1970s when women started to use
injections. Our African men want
children, so at that time we had to hide pills, but we go for
injections
because
they
were
so
private
and easier to use than
pills,
because
he will
try
to find
out
[find
the
pills
where
they
are
hidden]
one
day
....
Some
they
are still
hiding
their
pills
but
they
end
up [get caught
or
found
out];
their husbands
get
other wives. We are still
fighting
the
war
of
understanding [between
husband and
wife]
if
we
are
talking
in
terms of
family
planning.
106
Fieldworkers, both male and female, reported that
they regularly colluded with such women
in
their
deception through
such means as
scheduling
their
family planning visits at the same
time
as
well-baby clinics, giving
women an
acceptable
excuse to visit the mobile
clinics;
or
through providing
women
with
false
clinic
referral
slips stating
that the
women needed
to visit the
clinic
for
high
blood
pressure
or other
treatments,
so
that women could
get
permission
from their husbands to
go.
In
interviews,
fieldworkers
enthusiastically
102 'Contraceptives:
People Concerned',
Moto,
22
August 1981.
103 The second biggest
problem
mentioned was
described
as
'politics'.
104 In the words of Mrs
Tariro Tafireyi, a
former fieldworker, the
provision on Depo or other
means of family planning
was 'a
certificate
to
do whatever she wanted without
the husband's
consent'.
All
former FPAR
fieldworkers cited
in
this paper are
referred to by
pseudonyms.
105 See Kaler,
'
"Who Has Told
You"
'
for a more
detailed discussion of these
reasons.
106 Interview
notes and
translation by Mrs
Nyaradzo Shayanewako.
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Banning Depo-Provera
in Zimbabwe 371
expounded on the tactics they used to circumvent male opposition. In other
words,
husbands
and
fathers had
good
reason
to
suspect
that
the
new means
of
family planning
being
diffused through the structures of the FPAR were a threat to their authority.
The use
of
Depo was not only a conspiracy of women against men since male
fieldworkers also
supported women's secret use of the drug. One male field worker said:
Women
definitely, young women they used not
to
have problems [objections]
to family
planning. They liked family planning .... She is concerned of her health,
repeating of
pregnancies ruins her life, so she is afraid for herself. This is the reason why
she goes to the
clinic
and she tells the clinic staff,
"I
have come here but my husband
is against it, my
mother-in-law is against it, so please keep my card [prescription] here in the
clinic". So it was
very confidential
to
the nursing staff because we wanted to help the people
that needed help.
[AK: So you thought that was all right?]
Yes, it was all right.
[AK: Even though the woman might be deceiving her husband?]
Yes, it was all right.107
In
providing Depo secretly to Zimbabwean women, a whole set of
forces was arrayed
against
the
patriarchal authority
of
the
husbands. Former fieldworkers talked often about the
collaboration
of
medical personnel, including nurses and doctors,
in keeping the secrets of
their clients. As most of the
personnel trained
in
Western medicine that ordinary Zimbab-
weans would
have
had contact with were
attached
to
government-
or
local
council-funded
clinics,
mission
hospitals
or other white
institutions,
the
assistance
of medical
personnel
in
both
providing
and
keeping
the secret of
Depo-Provera
mean that the forces
of
chirungu,
the
devices
and
institutions
of
the white settlers, were allied
with
'insubordinate'
women
in
deceiving men.
Co-operation by
medical
personnel
was
particularly necessary
in
managing
the side
effects of
Depo, particularly
menstrual
disturbances,
whether cessation
of
menses
or
excessive
bleeding.
As time
went
on,
fieldworkers
reported
that men
learned
from
educational talks and lectures about this
particular
side effect
of
Depo,
and would become
suspicious
or accuse their wives of
contracepting secretly
if
they
observed
that the women
were not
menstruating
as
regularly
as
they
used
to:
We
had
Depo,
it
was
a
private
method. And some of the
woman,
as
you
know with
Depo
sometimes
you
have
your
menses and
sometimes
you won't,
some could
just say,
"I have
pretended
to have
my periods,
after three
days
I
have
finished and then we start meeting
[having sex] again, because he [the husband]
is
going
to ask
me, 'Why
are
you
not having your
menses?'
",
because you
know
they
were
talking
sometimes
in
the bars
[male
educators
visited
bars and other
places
where men
congregated
to
extol
the virtues of new methods
of
family
planning],
and
the
educators
like Mr
[X]
were
explaining
also to
them,
then the
man
if
he
sees
that the wife is not
having periods
he
might
be
suspicious
that
"I
think
my
wife
is
using
this
Depo",
because he
might
have heard from his friends
in the
bar
or
in
lectures.'08
[AK: Were the
men
talking about family planning
with each
other?] Yes,
yes, they definitely
do.
They say
when
you
find
a
woman
not
having
menses
sometimes she is
on
injection.
That's
when
they take
their wives to doctors to
find
out
why
she
is not
menstruating....
The
men
were
getting suspicious definitely.'09
Doctors and nurses at
government
and mission
hospitals
colluded
in
keeping
the use of
Depo
a secret from men. One former fieldworker
explained:
... the doctors were all motivated.
They
knew what
to
say
in
a case when
such
problems
come
up, they
would
just say
there is
nothing.
The husband
says, "Maybe
she
is
going
for
some
107 Interview
with former Mr
Moffat
Chitiyo.
108
Interview with former Mrs
Nancy
Gumbo.
109 Interview with former
Mrs
Florence Ndaneta.
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372 Journal of Southern African Studies
things [which]
I
don't know
[about]",
and the doctor would
say
there is no
evidence
of
Depo
[i.e. the doctor would lie to conceal the use of Depo]. The doctors
were all informed .... When
we hear of such [husbands who objected
to their wives' use of
Depo]
we
make it known to
doctors,
then
doctors
will
tell other doctors that
if
anybody
complains
about
this
you
must
know that this is what is going on and don't say anything to
the husband
if
they start
complaining. We were
all
co-operating.110
The
Demand for
Depo
After 1981
The importance of Depo to
Zimbabwean women's
reproductive
strategies
is
shown
by
reports of a decline
in numbers of
contraception
users after
Depo
was
banned.
A
report
of
a 1983 conference noted
that,
'It
has been found that
women
who
stopped using
it
[Depo]
... have had no
motivation
to
use other
methods',"'
and as late as 1992
the Minister of
Health reported 'persistent requests'
from
Zimbabwean women for the return of
Depo.
12
Women did not switch
their
loyalties easily
to
another form
of
contraception. Clearly
there
were
important advantages
which were
unique
to
Depo.
The
enduring
demand for it in
Zimbabwe was shown by
the
lively
trade
in
the 1980s
in
smuggling
vials
of
Depo
from
South
Africa,
where
it was not banned.
This
unregulated
cross-border trade
resulted
in
health
complications
for
many
women who took the
smuggled Depo
without medical
supervision,
since women with
pre-existing
conditions such as
high
blood
pressure
were not
warned of the
negative
effects of
using Depo,
and since
many
of the vials of
Depo
were
expired, damaged
or
injected
in
unsanitary conditions, leading
to
infection.
Employees
of the ZNFPC
report persistent requests
from women
throughout
the
early
1980s for
the
return
of
Depo,
and the
appearance
of women at some
clinics
with
smuggled
vials of
Depo asking
to be
injected (which
clinic staff were
legally
bound to
refuse to
do).
Rumours abounded of an
underground
market
in
Depo,
through
which
women could
purchase
vials
of the
drug
and
then
approach
certain
private
doctors to be
injected.
Like
abortion, Depo
became
a clandestine
privilege
of
class,
as
wealthy
women were able to
obtain and use
it
illegally,
while
poorer
women had
to
switch to a
less invisible method and
run the
risk
of
being discovered,
or to
stop contracepting
altogether.113 According
to one
fieldworker,
Mrs
Genevieve Rubotsiro:
There was
a
time
when
Depo
was
phased
out ... it was
taken as a
political issue and
it
was
decided
that it
should be abolished.
[AK: What happened
to
the
women who
had
been
using Depo?] We
had
to
remotivate them
to
go
and take oral
contraceptives.
Some
defaulted
[stopped using
any
form of
contraceptives].
Some clever
ones,
some dealers used to
go
outside the
country
to South
Africa, they buy
some
vials and
being
them
back and sell them without
any prescription. And when
you
are
given
Depo by someone
who
is not qualified, some went through difficult
health problems. So they
went to
the
health centres
reporting
that
they
were
having problems because of this
Depo.
That's where
we found
those
clients who
were
still
wanting Depo
although
it
was banned.
A
lot of those mothers were still interested
in
Depo.
So it
was found there was a
big demand so
it was introduced
again.
According
to a
colleague,
Mrs
Thelma
Choto,
when she
was
doing
her rounds as
a family
planning
distributor after the
banning
of
Depo, telling
her clients that
they could no longer
have their
injection:
...
we
could
find
them
complaining, "Why
did
you
ban our
injection?"
So we could
say, "No,
times
change,
it will
come back". Now
[post-1992,
when the ban on
Depo
was
rescinded]
we
are
saying
"It's
back!"
110 Ibid.
111 'Child Spacing Under the
Spotlight', The Herald, 27 May 1993.
112 'The Pill Women Fear May
Cause Infertility', The Herald, 10 June 1992.
113 Interviews with former
FPAR
fieldworkers.
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Banning Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe 373
Depo and Racism around the World
ZANU's decision to ban Depo was also the product of global political dynamics. Attention
to these dynamics helps to answer the question of why Depo was singled out among
contraceptive methods for banning, although the contraceptive pill and the IUD
were
arguably as dangerous to women's health.'14 During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Depo
injection and other forms of unsafe contraception were symbols of the asymmetry of global
power relationships, with the reproductive systems of women standing
in for
the poor and
oppressed of
the
world. International controversy over Depo was preceded by
American
dumping of
the
Dalkon Shield and
the
high-oestrogen pill.
In
addition, the history
of
Depo-Provera contains a specifically racial component. For much of the 1970s, Depo was
a
drug
inflicted
by white men on
brown
and black
women.
While
the
fact that Depo was not considered good enough for
American
women
was
undoubtedly
a factor in
public antipathy to the drug
in
Zimbabwe,
it was its
ongoing
use
closer to home,
in
South Africa and its occupied territories
in
Namibia, that may have
tainted it most
in
the eyes of ZANU. Both Ushewokunze and the editorialist for The Herald
referred to the apartheid regime in explaining their opposition to Depo. In the early 1980s,
both
rumours
and
confirmed reports circulated of
the South
African regime using Depo
as
part of the same sort of genocidal campaign of which the FPAR had
been
accused.
In
South Africa
in
1982 it was reported that, 'there is some talk by the director-general
of
the Department
of
Health and Welfare, of using drastic measures and compulsory
sterilization
unless
blacks accept family planning voluntarily'.
15
Among Africans, many
rumours circulated; for example, that Soweto obstetrician-gynaecologists were filling
monthly quotas of one hundred hysterectomies on African women.116 Birth control was the
only free health service provided to blacks by the white regime, and Depo was the
birth
control method of choice, given disproportionately to black women. Brown reported that for
women using contraceptives, Depo-Provera was given
to
33 per
cent of
African
women
(a
much lower rate of Depo use than in Rhodesia in the 1970s), to 38 per cent of Coloured
women but
to
only
2
per cent
of white
women.'17
Stories
of coercion
and
deception
associated
with
Depo
in
South Africa abounded.
There were reports
of
women
who
could not get jobs unless they gave
their
employers
medical certificates
showing
the date
they had
last had the
injection,
and
of
government
teams which descended
on factories
and
commercial
farms to
give injections
to
the
workers.
Nurses on these teams who told women about the
potential
side
effects of
the
drug
were
supposedly
fired on
the
spot.118 Depo
was
reportedly given
to women
in
labour wards
immediately
after
giving birth,
a
practice that
was
allegedly
so
widespread
that nurses
in
South African
government hospitals
for
Africans
had a
saying
that
'Depo
is
the fourth
stage
of labour'. l
19
Namibia,
then
controlled
by
South
Africa, experienced
the
same
pattern
of
government
reliance on
Depo accompanied by
rumours and anecdotal
evidence,
confirmed
and un-
confirmed,
about its
abuse.
As
in
South
Africa,
birth control was the
only
free
health
service
for
Namibian
Africans,
and
Depo
was the
most
common method.
Many
Namibians
believed
114 J. Lindsay, 'The Politics of Population
Control in Namibia',
in M
Turshen (ed), Women and Health in Africa
(Trenton, Africa World Press, 1991), p. 164.
115 Cited in B. Brown, 'Facing the "Black
Peril": The Politics of Population Control
in
South Africa', Journal of
Southern African Studies, 13, 3 (1987),
p.
268.
116 'A Correspondent', 'South Africa:
Crimes Against Women', Africa, 170 (October 1985), pp. 70-71.
117 Brown, 'Black Peril', p. 271.
118 'A Correspondent', 'South Africa', p.
71.
119 H. Rees, 'Women and Reproductive
Rights',
in
B. Bozzoli (ed), Putting Women on the Agenda (Johannesburg,
Ravan Press, 1991), p. 210.
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374 Journal of Southern African Studies
that post-natal Depo injections,
with
or without consent, were given routinely, and were also
administered
to women
recovering
from abortions.120 Tuberculosis
patients
and
psychiatric
patients were also allegedly refused treatment
if
they
did
not accept a Depo injection of up
to three times the recommended dosage.121 Lindsay's interviews with Namibian women
yield specific cases
of women who
report being
coerced into
taking Depo
or
having
it
administered against
their will.
By
the
1980s, Depo-Provera and population control had
become
so
strongly
identified with
white
hegemony
that 'the issue
[of Depo-Provera]
has
become
so sensitive that
anyone
who dares to interfere with
Depo-Provera
stands accused
of
agitating against
the state'
.122
These accounts
from
South
Africa,
and
Lindsay's
interpretation of
the Namibian situation
suggests
that the Rhodesian situation
was
not
unique
in
the
minority-ruled
states of southern
Africa,
and that
throughout
the
region,
African women's reproductive systems
had been identified as a
'breach-point'
for the
genocidal designs
of the white state.
These stories were widely reported
in
the Zimbabwean
press.
In
an article on 'How the
west
dumps
its
killer
drugs',
the
Deputy
Permanent
Secretary
in
the
Ministry
of
Community
Development and Women's Affairs,
Dr
Samuel
Agere,
was
reported as saying, 'women
in
the
Third World were used for
experimenting
on
drugs....
Researchers
on
Depo-Provera
in
South African were said to
have used
mainly
African women
for their
experiments'.123
A
report
in
the
Herald on the British
anti-apartheid
movement
alleged that, 'Depo-Provera
is
being
used
on black women
in
South Africa without their
knowledge
... British anti-
apartheid
movement member Cate Clark said
that
South African women now
living
in
Britain had told
her
the contraceptive drug
was
being
used on
black women without being
identified'.
124
The Rehabilitation
of
Depo-Provera
This
was the situation of
Depo-Provera
in
the 1970s and 1980s. But in
1992,
when the
fiery
anti-imperialism
of
the immediate
post-revolutionary
situation
in
Zimbabwe had had more
than
ten
years
to
cool,
a
remarkable about-face
took
place
and
Depo
was
re-legalised for
contraceptive purposes by
the
general
female
population.125 By
this
time,
the
control
of
African
women's
reproductive
abilities was no
longer
a site
of
unresolved conflict between
white and African
men,
and
so,
I
believe,
it
became
politically possible
to
'rehabilitate'
Depo-Provera.
As
discussed above,
women's attachment to
Depo
had
remained strong since
its banning,
and there was still no other
contraceptive
which combined
Depo's advantages
of
affordability, discretion,
effectiveness and convenience.
By 1991,
women's interests
in
having
access to
Depo
were
no
longer
overridden
by nationalist opposition to white control,
and the
government
thus found
it
possible
to make concessions to
women's desire for this
contraceptive.
The return of
Depo
followed
acknowledgement by
the Zimbabwe
National Family
Planning Council (ZNFPC)
that the
range of contraceptive choices offered
in
Zimbabwe
was
inadequate. Although
the ZNFPC did not mention
any
non-medical reason
why
women
might
choose one method over another
and did
not address
questions
of
gender relations
in
method
choice,
it did
argue
in
its 1991 Five-Year Plan for
the promotion
of
'invisible'
120 Linday, 'Namibia', p.
145.
121 Ibid.
122 Lindsay, 'Namibia', p. 151.
123 Sunday Mail, 26 July 1981.
124
'Unsafe Pill to be Banned', The
Herald,
22
July 1981.
125 Technically, Depo-Provera
had never
been completely outlawed
as its
use among
some
small
medically
defined
subgroups, such as
the
mentally
handicapped,
was still
legal.
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Banning Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe 375
contraceptive methods such
as the injection and the new Norplant subdermal implant,
albeit
without mentioning the
specific advantages to women of these methods' invisibility.
[F]amily planning
in
Zimbabwe is essentially a one-product programme. Oral contraceptives
are highly effective but are
not necessarily the best method for every woman. Pill users require
constant resupply, a
requirement that poses both logistic and financial constraints.... There are
many categories of women
for whom the pill is perhaps not the best method. The challenge to
the family planning
programme is to make a greater variety of methods available to the
motivated user.... Political
concerns and medical policies currently restricting the use of some
methods
will
be reviewed
and modified as appropriate.126
The new attitude to Depo
also resulted from a more general turnaround in official attitudes
to
contraception.
As
early as
1982, the pro-natalism of the war years had given way
to
concerns about the
implications for economic development of a high fertility rate and by
1984 the Child Spacing
Association was reorganised and tasked with the aggressive
promotion
of birth
control
-
the same activity that its predecessor, the FPAR, had
undertaken as
recently as
five years earlier.127 By 1989, Mugabe had become a fixture at
international conferences
dealing with African population and he received the Population
Institute's International
Population Control Award that year. Space is too limited here for
me
to go into political
developments that underlay
this
turnaround, except to say
that
they
took
place
in
a
Zimbabwe
which, although
it
may
have fallen short of the
revolutionary
visions of
the
war years,
was characterised by 'rising urbanization, decreasing
infant
mortality rates caused by
improvements
in
the health care system, increasing educational
opportunities
for
women,
and,
not
least, rising expectations
-
all
of which contributed
to
a
higher rate of contraceptive
acceptance among the entire
population'.128
Whilst suspicion of
family planning
as a
disguised instrument of
genocide has still not entirely
abated
in
Zimbabwe,129
state
support
for
contraception
and lower
population growth
rates is now
very
strong.
Conclusion
The 1981
Depo-Provera
decision is located conceptually at the intersection
of the
'politics
of
reproduction'
and
the
politics
of national liberation.
One
of the best reasons
to
study
this
particular
decision is
that it illuminates the
entanglement
of
gender
issues
and national
political
issues
lying
at this
juncture.
In
Zimbabwe,
the
decision
to ban
Depo-Provera
was
justified
on the
grounds
that it was
in
the best interests of both women and
the
state,
as
it
both
protected
women's health and threw off some of
the
remaining vestiges
of colonialism.
Depo genuinely
did
pose
risks to women's
health, especially
when
carelessly
or
unscrupu-
lously promoted:
the
concern
with
health was
not
just
an excuse
trumped up by
Ushe-
wokunze for
nationalist
muscle-flexing.
Yet for
many women, Depo
had
advantages
which
outweighed
its health
risks and its association
with coercion
and
racism,
as evinced
by
the
great popularity
that
Depo
enjoyed
within the FPAR's
programmes
and
the continued
demand
for it that
eventually
culminated
in
its rehabilitation. Women of
Zimbabwe, by
their
expressed preferences
and
by
their
actions,
contested
Ushewokunze's assertion
that
banning
126 Zimbabwe National Family Planning Council, Strategy for the Zimbabwe National Family Planning Programme
1991-1996 (Harare, ZNFPC, 1991), pp. 7, 10.
127 West, 'Nationalism, Race and Gender', p. 468.
128 Ibid., p. 69.
129 See, 'Emotions run high over funds allocation for family planning', The Herald, 29 September 1994. This article
reported a debate on the health budget allocation during which some MPs accused the Minister of Health, Dr
Timothy Stamps, of 'trying to kill and exterminate the population', and argued that 'family planning programmes
were designed by multinationals 'with an exploitative endeavour to reduce our populations'. See also
'MPs
Criticise
Modern Birth
Control Methods', The Herald,
1
June 1994.
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376 Journal
of
Southern
African
Studies
Depo was in their
best interests. The determination of
where women' s best interests lay was
fraught
with
contradiction between official and grassroots
interpretations
of
what women
needed for their own
good.
The
Depo-Provera controversy also demonstrates the
complexity
and
ambiguity of the
relationship between
the state and women, especially when control
over reproduction is at
stake.
I
argue that
the
desire
to
assert patriarchal norms
and
evict
the
colonial
usurpers
from
African women's
bodies coexisted
with
the instrumental reasons for
banning Depo on
health grounds.
A
related
argument,
that
the
Depo
decision was about
wresting control of
African women's bodies from whites rather than
passing
that control to African
women, is
supported by the absence of
any
mention of
relations between men
and
women from
official
discourse
on
Depo.
Ushewokunze
and
the
government
of
Zimbabwe
did
not admit
into
public debate any
acknowledgement
of
why
women
were
so
ready
to
accept
a drug which
could be hidden from husbands and
family
members. Discussion
of
gender
relations
and
the
role that these play
in
shaping
the
acceptability
of
Depo-Provera
for
both men and
women
was completely absent from rhetoric
about
the
drug,
either
in
the 1980s
when
it was
being
banned, or
in
the 1990s when it
was
resuscitated.
In
the midst of
the
war
of
words
in
the national
press,
a
white
doctor accused
African
opponents
of
Depo-Provera
of
'bring[ing]
in
many
irrelevant
issues,
such as
revolution,
reconciliation,
oppression,
which have
absolutely
no medical
bearing
on the
subject'.
130
Yet
in
the particular context of the recent arrival of a
post-liberation
era, these issues were not
irrelevant.
With
all its
contradictions
and
complexities,
the decision to
ban
Depo-Provera
in
1981 was a
product
of the
conjunction
of several sets of
political
forces
-
gendered
struggles
for control of
fertility
within the
marital
dyad,
the
national
history
of
opposition
between the white
family planners
and
African
liberationists,
and
the
global history
of
Depo's
shameful
place
in
international
power
relations
-
with a
moment
in
Zimbabwean
history
when the
government
was
able
to
take some
steps
to
purify
the
national body.
'Politics' on
many
levels came
together
in
the
Depo
decision,
as
nationalist fervours and
gender
conflicts intertwined with a
drug
of dubious
safety.
This
particular conjunction
brings
into focus
important
issues
about
gender, fertility
in
a
newly
liberated
country,
and
thus the elimination of
Depo-Provera
from
Zimbabwe assumes a
significance
that
goes
beyond
the
banning
of
one
injectible synthetic
hormone.
AMY KALER
Population
Studies
Center, University of Pennsylvania,
3718
Locust
Walk, Philadelphia,
PA
19104-6298, USA
130 Dr E. J. Candy, 'Politics
No
Reason
for Drug Ban', The Herald, 25
August 1981.
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