The Sunday News
BOTH cultural practices and language will reveal the fundamental thought and philosophical realities of a community. Language is the repository of a people’s culture and transmitter of same. We thus have to turn to language to reveal a people’s worldview and cosmology. Language will transcend the seeming but really seamless barriers between the tangible and the intangible, between the material and the spiritual.
In the last article we made reference to the migration of a hearth from the centre to the periphery with regard to the architectural traditions of some south-western African ethnic groups. Cultural change is traceable to some source, either endogenous or exogenous. While there are new ideas that are traceable to internal changes as a result of work by innovative thinkers there are some that have sources from without sources.
Cultural exchanges and conquest may result in the introduction of new ideas, beliefs and ideologies that may be detected as changes in cultural practices such as in the migration of a hearth from a central to a peripheral (near the wall) position. What is known as general practice is some centrality of a hearth in African architectural traditions prior to contact with foreign people with foreign ideas and cultural practices.
We do know that the Portuguese arrived in Angola around the fifteenth century. That happened after they were pushed out of the Congo by an enterprising woman who strategically adopted Christianity to further her objective of ejecting the Portuguese and regaining independence for her people. Both Portugal and Spain had received Papal sanctions to launch imperial agendas with a view to subjugating the infidels. That led to the two nations setting foothold in West Africa, in particular in the Gold Coast (Ghana). At the time both Britain and France had not entered the fray which signaled a new phase in the enslavement of Africans.
It is this long imperial, commercial, religious and cultural contact that may be responsible for some cultural modifications among the ethnic groups in the south-western part of Africa. That was at a time when the rest of Africa, in particular the central and southern interior, were free from cultural influences from a permanently settled European group whose traditions then had the hearth peripherally located. There was time during the prehistoric times when people in Britain had the hearths centrally located.
People communicate in more ways than one. While their major modes of communication may be the verbal and written forms, there are other forms of communication that are non-verbal. The former modes can be pinned down to sound. Both the spoken and written words rely on sound which is culturally intelligible and can thus be deciphered or decoded to render meaning. We are here interested in non-verbal communication which is not entirely depended on sound, directly or indirectly, within the context of a hearth.
Our analysis of the non-verbal communication has to touch and rely on the elements found within the hearth and these are the hearth stones, firewood, the circular depression and the resultant ash. In the last article we pointed out to the link between the hearth and sexuality and their common elements and philosophical expressions. We are here reminded of the South African singer Ringo Madlingozi and his erotic song about ‘‘kuyaband’ aph’ ekhaya’’. The cold that he is making reference to has nothing to do with the absence of a literal fire. Rather, as he points out in the lyrics, he is referring to some lover as the source of warmth — hence he says, ‘‘sondela sithandwa’’.
Among the traditional Ndebele people when a man’s wife was old and no longer keen on sexual activity she went to her own people to bring back a brother’s daughter to warm or raise the hearthstones — ‘‘ukuzavuselela amaseko’’. Literally, the niece is coming to rekindle the otherwise cooling down fires. This is a case where the wife has had children but is simply physically no longer able to engage meaningfully in conjugal intimacy. Despite the physical presence of the wife, it is as good as if she were not there — ‘‘kuyaband’ aph’ ekhaya’’ hence the social arrangement to rekindle the fires.
This should be contrasted with the arrangement where a wife would not conceive. Once again, this time the young wife went back to her people to bring a brother’s daughter to raise seed for her. The niece, referred to as inhlanzi, was coming for a very specific purpose — to act as surrogate wife. It is through language that we get to know about these cultural practices of the Ndebele. The reference in this particular case was to the hearthstones.
Let us now turn to the firewood and see how metaphor works. The firewood metaphor derives from its shape and the resulting warmth when it burns. Before going further let me take you back to some experience we went through some years ago. An old lady, one MaNyathi who was a resource person at Amagugu International Heritage Centre led me and a male colleague to some place where she was going to excavate some clay for making pots.
When we approached the site she asked us to pick up sticks on the ground and throw them down where she was going to extract the clay. For me this was African symbolism at play. The earth, really Mother Earth, who she was going to cause injury to, had to be appeased. Mother Earth in African symbolic terms is female. To pacify and console her there is need for recourse to sexual pleasure. That takes the form of a male sexual organ which in this instance is symbolically represented by a piece of wooden stick.
When MaNyathi asked us to throw down the sticks, these were representing phallic objects which were meant to assuage, in some sexual sense, the wife who needed some pleasure after the pain caused her by removing a part of her —the clay that was to make pots. Pot-making, it is important to realise, is perceived as equivalent to the procreative process in human beings. We thus were symbolically assuaging the pain Mother Earth was exposed to.
Through the act we earned ourselves the right to be present while Mother Earth was being physically ravaged by the potter. Otherwise we as men would be excluded from the entire process. Indeed, MaNyathi excluded the other men from getting anywhere near the entire process — from clay excavation to firing the dried pots.
The symbolic meaning and significance of sticks, firewood or no firewood, is landed to them by virtue of their cylindrical design, a design they share in common with the male sexual organ. When the sticks, call them firewood this time, are burning within the hearth, remember its grail design, the meaning becomes very obvious. Language, especially if ethical uprightness is an important consideration, is brought to play, traverses the metaphorical realm as represented by the burning wood and the whole symbolic complex surrounding the hearth.
Fire burns when the firewood is stoked —moved into the hearth; otherwise if this is not done the fire will ultimately be extinguished. When that happens, in symbolic terms, the conjugal fires are being extinguished. The hlonipha language, in order to avoid vulgarity and yet bring forth sexual matters and issues that would otherwise remain under the tongue, affords discussion where it would otherwise not take place.
We are the stage where women may use this ethical metaphor to communicate to adult members of the family matters that would otherwise be taboo. Non-verbal communication traverses interpersonal cultural terrain that is fraught with prohibitions and taboos. That will be the subject of next week’s article.
