International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Review

In 1990, the suicide of a female student at the University of Dar es Salaam brought media attention to an institution that had persisted on campus for two decades. “Mzee Punch,” as it was called, was a secret organization of male students greeted the new influx of female students in the early 1970s with targeted hazing. The organization’s members exposed the secrets and foibles of women on campus by crafting massive cartoons on walls of the major buildings on campus. Mzee Punch surveilled the behavior of female students, undermined their ambitions for academic success, and at the end leveraged anxiety of exposure for sexual favors. The present work, relying upon interviews of both members of the secret society and its victims, reconstructs the history of the institution, exploring its relevance to an understanding gender attitudes in elite society postcolonial Tanzania. In 1990, Revina Mukasa, a young woman attending the University of Dar es Salaam, took her own life. Her suicide brought to public attention an institution that had existed at the University of Dar es Salaam for two decades. Since the University began admitting female students, they had endured a hazing tradition that pried into their private lives, exposed their secrets to the world, and humiliated them for entertainment and social leverage. The institution called itself “Mzee Punch,” (“mzee” meaning “old man”) and was sustained by a secret society of male students. Mzee Punch operated by publishing the foibles of the female student body through large cartoons inscribed on the walls of campus buildings at night. The campus community would head to the “Literature Walls” at UDSM every morning, eager to laugh at the illustrated scandals, while the targets, those women who found themselves “punched,” were violated, isolated, and traumatized. This essay is an effort at historicizing this tradition with the aim of understanding its motivations, its humor, and its lasting impact. It relies rather heavily on interviews conducted in the decades following the end of the institution in the 1990s with former students, members of the Mzee Punch society, and victims how endured the hazing treatment. Comprehending the history of the Mzee Punch hazing rite reveals much about the early nature of UDSM society, the relationship between higher education and Tanzanian society broadly, and the intersection between intellectual elitism and gender discourse in early independent East Africa.