Sharing your wife as an act of kindness

ANDREAS Tjipuiko would like you to know that you can’t sleep with his wife.

Nor, if you were perhaps interested in the 63-year-old Omuangete village leader, can you expect to sleep with him if you come to visit.

Yet when his dear cousin comes to stay, Tjipuiko will offer him the best room he has. His own room. With his wife.

His wife could extend the same gesture to one of her loved ones. And they would expect the same courtesy when they visit.

“I’m not bothered by the fact that my wife is spending a night with another man, because he is just not a random man,” Tjipuiko says.

“He is my cousin, my best friend, who I love so much that I let him sleep with my wife.”

Travelling is what the Ovahimba do. Following their herds, moving with the grazing patterns.

Couples can be separated for weeks at a time, especially if young mothers need to stay behind to care for children, while fathers tend to the cattle.

And in that life, there’s not much room for jealousy.

“We do not give our wives to anyone who comes to visit us. We give them to a cousin, usually someone you’ve known all your life. Someone we love and hold close to our hearts,” Tjipuiko says.

There’s a word for this custom of including people you deeply love in your most intimate relationships: okujepisa.

Translations are hard, but it does not mean ‘wife-swapping’, an expression that conjures up the informality of free love, the cheekiness of reality TV, and the shock value of click-bait headlines.

None of that gets it right.

For starters, okujepisa includes letting a wife share her husband with someone she holds dear.

Ukatondo Tjirambi, who also lives at Omuangete, says when her most cherished friends visit, she doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice her marital bed.

“This can be done anywhere, when my best friend comes to visit us, or when we are at events,” she says.

“I can just tell her that I would like her to spend the night with my husband.”

“I don’t feel betrayed by the woman I give to my husband,” she says. “You can tell if she really wants the man, or if she’s just doing it for the night and will not develop feelings for him.”

Whenever okujepisa enters public consciousness, the tone is rarely sympathetic.

‘Five crazy sexual traditions that are still practised in Africa’, read a 2018 headline in Business Insider Africa.

‘Is wife swapping swinging with an African tribal touch?’ asked a headline in The Sowetan.

In 2019, British reality television star Scarlett Moffatt moved her family into a Himba community – in a recreation of their County Durham home built for a show called ‘The British Tribe Next Door’.

The Mirror wrote about it under ‘Scarlett Moffatt joins ‘sex-swapping’ tribe as part of shock new experiment’.

Given that okujepisa affects no one outside of a couple’s innermost circle of confidants, all of the attention begs the question, why do people outside of the Kunene region care so much?

Health workers have worried for decades about the spread of HIV, and now fears of Covid-19 also permeate discussions around sex in the Kunene.

But HIV remains less common among the Ovahimba than in the nation at large.

Covid-19 seems to have affected the Ovahimba no more than other communities where large families share small sleeping areas.

Health concerns are real, but what keeps coming up in conversations at Omuangete is something more basic, more intuitively human: jealousy and shame.

It’s not that the Ovahimba do not share in those emotions, but that the boundaries are different. For the vast majority of people around the world, it’s hard to understand why a spouse doesn’t feel jealous of the other lover, or ashamed at finding comfort outside of the marriage.

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