Shipikisha : Negotiated Silences in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

This article situates Rungano Nyoni’s feature film On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which centres on the experiences of a middle-class Zambian family during a funeral, within the cultural practice of shipikisha. Shipikisha, most commonly enacted during indigenous marriage counselling, mandates the relentless, silent endurance of hardships that husbands impose on their wives. This counselling is delivered orally, and recording is limited or prohibited, resulting in a dearth of research on instructions to shipikisha beyond truncated accounts. Examining how Nyoni deploys cinematography, mise en scène, narrative structure and cultural contextualisation through the individual narrative arcs of Shula, Nsansa, Bupe and Chichi reveals how shipikisha shapes gendered endurance beyond the confines of marriage. Reading the film as a cultural artefact, this article expands on existing reviews of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl that accurately identify hegemonic silence by contextualising that silence within the gendered logic of shipikisha. By framing shipikisha within nego-feminism, the practice emerges in the film not only as a site of oppression but also as a site of resistance through transgressive speech and silences.