The Sunday News
Rev Paul Damasane Talking Spirituality
I ended last week’s treatise on the Late Father Zimbabwe with a song that I realise was largely known yet equally controversial. The toyi toyi chant was in my analysis a thoroughly spiritual piece whose attention was not at the real testicle of the Boer but symbolised what everyman’s person and being is. When kings went out to war in the pre-colonial Africa stories and accounts one finds that they always went through the ukwetshwama experience. The symbolism enshrined in the ukwetshwama experience is awesome.
This was not just an African issue but there was also the comparison of the human trophy that was used in western communities for the toast! There was the understanding again that the opponent’s power lay in the private reproductive organs. Therefore, the capturing of these body parts and the subsequent ritual use of the same by an opponent ushered the demise of one king at the mercy of another. The ritual saw the ceremonial transfer of power from the opponent to the victorious king.
Such was the chant of the toyi toyi! The Boer’s strength and power was thus seen as being transferred to the fighter king in the persona of Joshua Nkomo. It was all about the spirituality of the war.
Having said the above let me take you into the discussion of the day. The very nature of the post war so called psychological or post war traumatic disorders is a result of the spiritual issues that a war carries the individual soul through. A human being is not created to kill another human being. A symbolic process has to ensue. One has to reduce the opponent to a non-human being so as to allow the conscience to accept that the killer did not kill another human being. This was done through the use of the chant and in most cases the use of heavy dehumanising insults. Calling another man a dog makes the killer believe that what he is killing is a dog and not a human being. The human conscience is not perturbed that much when killing a dog! So when you have sprayed them with an automatic assault rifle, amidst the shouts of “…bulala izinja lezi!” calmed the soldier’s conscience to say he did not kill people but dogs! Human blood is human blood, it speaks! Despite the sanitisation of the killing there is a deeper spiritual response that speaks out.
Ever heard of the fact that soldiers are mad? I think they are not mad but they assume a peculiar spiritual posture to make them strong enough to stand against the spiritual reflex of the human blood fighting back. It is only the sane that break down. In Africa they speak of cleansing a soldier of the isinyama sempi (the dark negative omen of the war literally) which referred to the psychological trauma of the war. You can call it psychological I will call it the spirituality of wartime experience where the blood of the dead and abused human beings begins to speak and seek retribution from the living perpetrators of death! This isinyama sempi is seen in another explanation as collateral damage in the English language, or what the layman may understand to be “caught in crossfire.” Human blood will speak and seek retribution whether one thinks it was in crossfire or intentional. That is why it is necessary to seek cleansing. This cleansing is what Western medicine refers to as psychiatry and African medicine will call it isihlambo, a cleansing process.
One Richard Gabriel, a former intelligence officer in the Pentagon’s Directorate of Foreign Intelligence and an expert on combat psychiatry, states, “War has simply become too stressful for even the strongest among us to stand for very long.” Every participant in modern war inevitably experiences some degree of psychological, moral, or spiritual breakdown. While William Manchester, a marine veteran of the Pacific theatre in World War II, comments regarding combatants in particular, “No man in battle is really sane. The mind-set of the soldier on the battlefield is a highly disturbed mind, and this is an epidemic insanity which afflicts everybody there, and those not afflicted by it die very quickly.”
It is true that men are crushed by the strain of modern war. All men are at risk of becoming psychiatric casualties and, in fact, most men will collapse given enough exposure to battle stress. There is no such thing as getting used to combat. Studies of World War II soldiers revealed that about two percent did not collapse, but these men were already mad, for most of them were aggressive psychopathic personalities before they entered battle. It is only the sane who break down.
In the moral and spiritual vacuum caused by wars, the only meaning that remains is mere survival. That is where the emptiness is to the African filled by the haunting spirits of the departed whose blood continues to speak. Besesithi ama’war vet’ awazwisisi yet it is the effect of the spirituality of the war! The mythic dimensions of war remain very much with us as universal patterns in the human psyche that we attempt to replicate in every epoch of history. Young men, and now women, too, still march off as individual combatants striving to live out the model of the mythic warrior-hero. Whether enlisted as recruits for official or paramilitary, the mujibhas, military or insurgent, guerilla they are taught, and still believe, that their wills, values, and small arms can stand as Excalibur’s against evil. But into what kind of arena do they carry their patriotism and their impulse for heroism and initiation? We are trapped in a terrible tension between the soul’s craving for realisation of the warrior hero or heroine and the real spirituality of a warfare that devastates the soul that seeks it.
It all boils down to the fact that we still do not understand that the bottom line of war is that the blood will still speak even in the modern day warfare when the weapons of our warfare have taken a more complex carnality!
It is evident that war takes one through a deep spiritual journey that is destructive and leaves scars that are not just physical but too deep for the naked human eye to see.
The scars can only be seen as painful ufuzo in the generations that remain. You call it trauma I call it a spiritual malaise that needs a spiritual antidote that is not only trans-generational in effect but also surgically separates the past and ensures a glorious possibility in a free future. Yes they still need a healing! Shalom!
