METAPHORS WEAVING WISDOM ABOUT WOMEN IN MOZAMBICAN BANTU CULTURES

Abstract

Peoples, to sustain and maintain their cosmoperceptions and cultures create guides for reading and understanding the world and the texts that compose it. These guides are the protocols for reading and understanding texts. One of the teachings of these protocols is the understanding of difference, with hierarchical categorization and different values for each stratum of difference. Therefore, it is fundamental that these protocols for reading and understanding, which naturalize differential hierarchies, be denaturalized and destabilized. Drawing from the Bantu cosmoperception of Mozambique, this article problematizes the naturalization of perceptions about women in Mozambican Bantu cultures through proverbs circulating in the Emakhuwa, Tewe, Sena, and Changana Bantu languages in the Northern, Central, and Southern regions of Mozambique. Through the metaphorical concepts that constitute them, the proverbs are discussed, elucidating the senses and functions, and explicitly stating which protocols for reading and understanding texts they are constructing about women. Specifically focusing on metaphorical concepts, in the terms of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980; 2002), which interweave wisdom about women in the Bantu community, seeking to problematize the beliefs, place in the world, social roles, and political relations constructed in these societies.