Umvutsha: Was it an industrial ritual settlement or just a satellite village for the King?

15 Nov, 2015 - 00:11 0 Views

The Sunday News

Pathisa Nyathi
STANDING where the goat kraal used to be at Umvutshwa I get a deep sense of loss and inadequacy. I feel there is something missing, something I ought to know but unfortunately I do not know. I realise the helplessness of the situation as no one can assist me. I ponder over the subject of archiving and retrieval of archived information and knowledge. I realise that when I think about archiving I am miserably trapped in the Western concept of archiving.

Material records — written, pictures, artefacts, photographs, recorded voices, sound and picture recordings. None of these has captured the meaning of Umvutshwa. Those who came here such as H Vaughan Williams, Boogie and Cecil Rhodes’ concession seekers, not even the treacherous missionary at Hope Fountain the Reverend Helm did not think it was important to record the meaning of that name.

I acknowledge that perhaps it was not their obligation or responsibility to archive stuff that was not their own. The question that rings in my confused mind is how did the Ndebele and other Africans archive knowledge and information? What is clear is that they did archive, but how? I have for quite some time now been seized with this question. The Western world is guided and inspired by material considerations. Indeed, the examples of archiving given above are all material in nature. Retrieval of that kind of physical material demands the use of material gadgets to access recorded sounds, for example. It’s all material, from archiving to retrieval.

The Ndebele were a spiritual people for whom the spiritual realm was greater and more important than the material realm.

One expects therefore, that they would have resorted to a combination of material and spiritual archiving. African heritage was passed down to future generations through the spoken word. But was this all? How far back can oral records go? Was there another way of archiving that a spiritual people made use of?

Sadly, this is the least understood and appreciated method — the spiritual channels of archiving and retrieval. Upon death the spirit continued to live within the spiritual realm. The departed spirit possessed a lot of information from lived experiences when it dwelt in a human body. Further, spirit, so the Africans believed, had access to knowledge and information that the living could not access.

What we may now term spiritual mediumship should be understood from an Afrocentric viewpoint. Spiritually archived information and knowledge was made available through the agency of the spirit medium. That was spiritual retrieval of material that was archived spiritually. The principle is the same as in the Western world. You archive in one form, you retrieve in the same form. This is to say information materially archived must be retrieved by material means, and similarly, information archived spiritually is retrieved through spiritual means. Sadly, the latter is demonised and denigrated meaning the current and future generations of Africans will never ever access the full complement of what they ought to possess as their cultural heritage.

Spiritual medium-ship is not confined or restricted to one generation. Information and knowledge must flow to the next generation. This is where the concept I have termed generational spiritual regeneration comes in. Let’s make this easy by referring to Mbuya Nehanda the living person who was Chaminuka’s sister. She lived thousands of years ago and never got to Zimbabwe. Down the generations her spirit took possession of mediums in each generation till the last one, Charwe who was executed by the white colonists in 1898. This is how Africans archived and retrieved information — through spirituality. It may all sound like mumbo jumbo but who ever said things African are easy to understand?

Now back to the name that has been lost. Names in Ndebele society were a form of archiving information and knowledge.

Names capture contemporary events and preserve them. The name and its meaning were passed down orally to the next generation. However, over time the two were divorced — the name survived minus its meaning. Who can stand up today and say, with full confidence, what the names Lobengula and Mzilikazi mean? The names have survived and will continue to do so but the meanings or circumstances surrounding them have been lost. If spiritual retrieval was still an active methodology would this have happened? The death of spiritual archiving means the Africans are poorer with regard to accessing their cultural heritage.

All this we mention because of the loss of the meaning of Umvutshwa, a satellite settlement for King Lobengula. We do know that the name is derived from the verb — vuba which means to mix as in the case of mixing curdled milk, (amasi) and ground cooked sorghum grain, (umcaba). There are many other substances that can be mixed. Surely, whatever was being mixed was not something ordinary, something taking place in all villages. The verb — vuba may also mean to beat thoroughly using clenched fists.

The latter is most unlikely. Let us hazard a guess. At Umvutshwa we found evidence of iron smelting. Paul Hubbard picked up some iron slag. In the iron smelting process there was mixing of two substances, iron ore (Iron Oxide) and charcoal (Carbon).

Both items would have been crushed to expose maximum surfaces for the chemical reaction to be facilitated at optimum levels. The mixing of the two probably gave rise to the name. If this be so, Umvutshwa would have been a specialised settlement, in fact, a ritual settlement. The iron smelting process was akin to the process of procreation. The sexual act was symbolised through the process of having the male and female components.

The furnace resembled a woman’s womb equipped with a birth canal through which molten iron, the baby, was delivered. In some societies the furnace, being a woman, had scarifications, on the belly and breasts, thus further reinforcing the fact that the furnace was female.

The bellows symbolised the male organs —two bellows symbolising the two testes. A clay pipe leading air into the furnace symbolised the penis. The working of the bellows was akin to the sexual act. If this is so, would it be ethically and morally correct to undertake iron smelting in full view of the public? In villages iron smelting was removed from the village to some secluded space where there was privacy. The iron slag that Hubbard picked up was at the settlement, suggesting that the process of iron smelting took place within the settlement or just outside of it. Whatever the case might have been requisite privacy was not provided. In that case, the entire village was a private settlement, one that was not generally accessible to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

Is there anything else that suggests that the village was a specialised settlement with limited access? A diagram of the village indicates few huts. If the drawing is accurate the implication is that there were few people living there. Further, there is a record of a section of the settlement where female rain makers lived. The women in question were the amawosana that were linked to the Njelele rain shrine. These would have been women beyond menopause who are regarded as ritually clean. Such women have, in a spiritual sense, become men. They and the iron smelters provided specialist services and both needed to observe ritual purity.

This would further reinforce the assertion that Umvutshwa was probably a ritually secluded settlement where ritual activities conducted by a few people took place. Would this then suggest that King Lobengula signed the 1888 Rudd Concession at a private settlement? Why would he have done so? There are certainly more questions than answers.

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