ABSTRACT

There has been no research on gender roles and the triple burden of women in the Rehoboth area. Yet women in Rehoboth as many elsewhere are faced with socially ascribed roles in production, reproduction and community. This research seeks to explore and understand the gender division of labour and the gender relations within this community. As a diverse country, Namibia has different cultures, we witness that women and men are taught their gender roles through the use of specific cultural practices for instance female initiation, male initiation, genital mutilation and many others which reinforce patriarchy and power relations. However, these specific practices are not present within the Rehoboth community, which is a more religious community and thus base their gender division of labour on their religious beliefs. These religious beliefs could be seen as the bases for the Rehoboth culture as all decisions regarding the family and activities are made based on religious principles. As this is a community of mainly people from the Baster ethnic group, the findings can thus not be generalised to the whole of the country. This study, which attempts to yield literature on a community where there is an existent knowledge gap, tries to identify and explore the gender division of labour of some of the men and women. As this is an ethnographic study of the community, the study also identified the power relations between men and women regarding decision-making, relating to activities within the productive labour, reproductive labour and community service. By comparing the debates surrounding the gender division of labour to the findings, we were able to gain clear insight into a community that has been extremely understudied.