Philology in African Historical Inquiry: Troubling the Meaning of Girlhood in Bantu Speech Communities

Language and history are inextricably entangled with each other, but can one be used to illuminate the other? This article focuses on the generations of philologists and Bantu speakers who have collectively, in different ways, obscured and illuminated our understandings of such categories as gender and childhood. In particular, it challenges the antiquity of girlhood as a historical designation in eastern and central African Bantu speech communities. It addresses questions regarding philology's relevance in studying ancient Bantu speakers’ practices marking gender and generation as characteristics of childhood and identity. Rather than looking to written literature, this article draws on spoken word in a part of Africa where historians have long developed models of historical analysis through philological methods that forefront African intellectual trends over externally imposed ones. The words people develop reflect their ways of thinking about who they are and which categories matter to them. In this article, ancestry and familial generations act as both a subject of and method for reclaiming the past and understanding some of the processes through which identity categories were formed within ancient Bantu speech communities. It concludes by demonstrating that childhood and, specifically, girlhood are not innate and automatic categories that can be easily defined but are historically contingent identities that are forged in particular, identifiable circumstances.