Education in Africa 
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| Title: | Learning the Facts of Life: Past and Present Experiences in a Rural Tanzanian Community |
| Author: | Allen, Denise Roth |
| Year: | 2000 |
| Periodical: | Africa Today |
| Volume: | 47 |
| Issue: | 3-4 |
| Period: | Fall |
| Pages: | 1-27 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Tanzania |
| Subjects: | sex education initiation Women's Issues Education and Oral Traditions Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Health and Nutrition Cultural Roles Health, Nutrition, and Medicine Education and Training Women and Their Children |
| External link: | http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/africa_today/v047/47.3allen.pdf |
| Abstract: | This article explores past and present forms of 'traditional' sex education in a small, rural community in the Shinyanga Region of west central Tanzania. Although structured puberty initiation rituals ('unyago') may have been an important source of information about sexuality and reproduction for Tanzanian adolescents in the past, such rituals were not common to all Tanzanian settings. The Shinyanga Region is a case in point. Drawing upon past studies of the Sukuma and Nyamwezi as well as her own ethnographic fieldwork in the Shinyanga Region from 1992 to 1994, the author addresses the following interrelated questions: How did young women who lived in this geographic setting learn about sexuality and reproduction in the past? Did instruction about such matters involve practices that were uniform and structured events, or was information passed on in a less uniform, nonstructured way? Would a revival of these 'traditional' practices, whatever their form, benefit women, and how do they differ from the way that young women acquire such information today? The author shows that informal networks of knowledge about sexuality and reproduction are the most important source of information for these rural women. She suggests that these informal networks should be tapped when new efforts for health education campaigns are being designed. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. |
