Cultural victimization of young mothers through the Gokhonya rituals of the Vhavenda culture in the Limpopo Province of South Africa

Abstract

Most young women in Vhavenda communities have, in the last decades, faced tremendous pressure to undergo specific physio-healing practices to remove Gokhonya or Goni from their vaginas to prevent the death of newborn children and infertility in women. The assumption from the Vhavenda cosmology is that, a red spot behind the head of a newborn signals Gokhonya's presence. Failure to remove Gokhonya, risks a premature death of the child. In this study, the socio-psychological impact of this practice on young women in the Vhavenda communities is explored using 10 purposively selected young women in the village in the Limpopo Province of South Africa and drawing from Erickson's Psychosocial theory. The study analyses how the rituals are administered in the Vhavenda communities, the traditional beliefs behind the rituals and the psychosocial impact of such rituals on their conceptualisation of "motherhood." The results from the study found that women have strong beliefs in the practices, and they continue to do it as they believe that without the removal of Gokhonya they risk losing their children and their fertility. The study found that this Gokhonya is believed to be a small whitish growth, thou different in colour depending on responses that grow either in the vagina or the anus. Old women or traditional healers uses their hands cut out the vagina skin with a razor for blood to come out and insert other healing materials like coffee and sugar to remove out the Gokhonya. The contradiction is that this is not common in other cultures, and in western medicine, it is something that warrants no attention. The question then remains whether Gokhonya is a myth or a reality.