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Mozambique

Gangisa

The practice of bukhontxana, or mine marriages, seems to have emerged amongst Mozambican workers in the early twentieth century.

In 1904, the head of the C.I.D. on the Witwatersrand reported that 'unnatural offences are very prevalent on the mines among the natives', particularly the Shangaan. (…) In Southern Mozambique, young adolescents often played together 'like husband and wife', a form of gender socialisation that sometimes included the practice of external coitus, or penetration between the thighs (inter-crural sex). Boys and girls lived in special huts at the entrance to the homestead, and it was easy for them to meet at night; the only proviso to gangisa was that it should conform to local rules of exogamy and that the young couple should not stay together until morning: full and uninhibited sexual relations were tied to marriage.

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Thus sexuality bound boys and girls into gender roles that were distintly masculine and feminine and marked the passage from childhood to adulthood. Gangisa formed part of the primary sexual imagery of young men arriving on the mines. As they came from a society that placed great value on children, and discouraged sexual practices that did not lead to pregnancy, the only acceptable form of sexual release to which they could turn, within their cultural code, were variations of the intercrural sex practised during gangisa.

From: Work, Culture and Identity, migrant laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860 - 1910, Patrick Harries, UCT Cape Town.

     

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