Shipikisha as Method: Exploring Endurance, Survival and Meaning Making in Zambian Women’s Experiences
Mubanga Kalimamukwento (she/her) is a PhD student in Feminist Studies in the College of Liberal Arts. She is also a fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Mubanga earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Law from Cavendish University, Zambia, in 2011, was called to the Zambian Bar in 2013, and earned a Master’s Degree in Law from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in 2020. She also earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Hamline University, where she specialized in Fiction. Mubanga was a RIDGS Summer Graduate Research Partnering Program (GRPP) Fellow during the summer of 2025.
She is the author of four books: The Mourning Bird (2019), Obligations to the Wounded (2024), The Shipikisha Club (2026), and Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies (2025). She is also the author of a chapbook of poems, unmarked graves (2023).
Mubanga’s work leans on her legal and creative background to understand the relationship between Christianity, access to justice, culture, and the prevalence of AIDS among married women in Zambia between 1984 and 2004. Using oral history and ethnography, her work focuses on the concept and praxis of Shipikisha, a Bemba word, proverb and cultural practice entailing the expectation to endure all things in marriage for the sake of kin-keeping, even at the expense of self.
Currently in her second year, the theoretical foundations established her first year provided new avenues for examining the articulation of Shipikisha, notably as a socialization practice within girlhood studies in Ukazi: An Autoethnography of Zambian Girlhood and Womanhood, which was recently named the 2025 winner of the Cheryl A. Wall Graduate Student Prize by the Black Women’s Studies Association.
She locates her current work within multiple interdisciplinary sites: feminist and gender studies; African and postcolonial studies; cultural studies; HIV studies; legal and ethical studies; literary and creative studies; memory and oral history studies. She also situates her work in conversation with Postcolonial Imbusa: Bemba Women’s Agency and Indigenous Cultural Systems (Gender and Sexuality in Africa and the Diaspora) (Mulenga Kaunda, 2023). Specifically, she attempts to understand Shipikisha as essential to informing the private and public life of a Zambian married woman and moving beyond narratives of victimhood to consider how the silence it demands could be deployed as a tool for women’s agency and subjectivity.
Although quantitative data about the prevalence of HIV among married women in Zambia is widely available, qualitative studies centering personal narrative to explain Shipikisha as a cultural concept are more scarce. There is a specific dearth in explaining its nuances within the multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic landscape of Zambia. In particular, current work, while naming Shipikisha as the gendered expectation to endure at all costs, limits the exploration to cursory examples. Oral histories of survival among married women who are long-term survivors are not part of the formal academic archive because they exist in informal spaces. This poses methodological challenges. The connection, then, between the prevalence of HIV among Zambian married women who are long-term survivors is unclear. However, Mubanga treats Shipikisha as a critical site of meaning-making, similar to Imbusa (Mulenga Kaunda, 2023). She spent her summer fellowship exploring these possibilities by situating Shipikisha within existing work. She also utilized that work to support her argument that it transcends the lexical root to become a strong praxis.
“As a Zambian woman who has undergone the premarital training that Shipikisha encapsulates, and also as the daughter of a Zambian married woman for whom the convergence between Shipikisha and HIV diagnosis was fatal, I approached this project as ethnographic in nature, aiming to probe memory, feminist intersectionality, and archive. I had hoped to interview the Zambian married women who are long-term survivors of HIV and public, self-described HIV awareness advocates in Zambia and use that data to incorporate into my doctoral dissertation a thematic analysis of individual experiences, a discourse analysis of the responses to the interview questions, a narrative analysis of existing research—including my own—on Shipikisha, and a critical intersectional analysis highlighting how the research contributes to filling the dearth of studies in Zambia on African feminisms, HIV studies, and gender-based violence.”
Mubanga Kalimamukwento
In consultation with her summer advisor, Mubanga decided to postpone the interviews she intended to incorporate into her doctoral dissertation while she gained more academic scaffolding through her program. Nevertheless, since many of the participants were public-facing, narratives addressing their personal articulation of Shipikisha are available in the public archive. This enabled her to investigate the concept within individual experiences and the broader sociocultural context of Zambian society. Additionally, since she would also be using mnemonic devices, she relied on ongoing work, including the fictionalized The Shipikisha Club, and children of small places, an ongoing hybrid work of creative nonfiction and poetry to aid her research.
During her summer fellowship, Mubanga worked on Shipikisha: Silence, Secrets & Survival in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. The project dissected Nyoni’s feature film On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024) through an intersectional feminist framework, experiential knowledge, and personal accounts of Shipikisha contextualizing the film within the cultural framework of Zambia to understand how women’s realities are made visible and/or invisible and how Shipikisha is rearticulated.
