The Sunday News
Pathisa Nyathi
AS we conclude the section on figurines we need to focus the spotlight more sharply on the use to which the figurines were put. That they were used during puberty rituals is never in doubt. Our calculated detour to take a look at the figurines among the Venda people helped clarify some issues. At Great Zimbabwe the figurines were not in use in recent times while among the Venda the story was different. Puberty rites were practised right into more recent times and memories of the use of figurines are still fresh, as is accompanying interpretation.
Historians may have to indicate to us the connection between the Venda and the people who were at Great Zimbabwe who, on the evidence of fertility-related figurines, did undergo puberty rites during which figurines were made use of in teaching.
Possibilities may be that historically the Venda and the people at Great Zimbabwe shared a common political and cultural history or alternatively both groups shared a common stock of the human element within their ranks. In the latter case, it is the shared element that may have been the practitioners of puberty rites and associated use of figurines. There is also a possibility that the shared human element was culturally stronger among the Venda, hence the enduring puberty-related tradition.
We would not be surprised that the element in question was gifted in metallurgy. There is evidence of technically advanced mining knowledge and skills. It is also observed that the said human element within the Venda community was quite advanced in matters spiritual and the use of herbal cures. However, for us the emphasis is on those issues that are related to artistic expressions and related cultural practices and, in particular, the underlying cosmologies. The question we seek to have clarified relates to the use of figurines.
Things abstract are not easy to grasp and extract meaning out of them. To obviate the challenge, those au fait with pedagogy find recourse in the use of teaching aids, read figurines, where things abstract get concretised and underlying meanings facilitated within the minds of learners. Africans were quite alert to teaching methods and applied them within the context of formal schools that were established to facilitate transition from childhood to adulthood. Whereas formal schools were rare in everyday life, in order to deal with transition to the next stage in the unending cycle of life puberty schools were adopted and formalised. It was within the context of these schools that teaching aids were used to ensure effective teaching and learning.
Teaching aids facilitate learning through resembling life size body parts that relate to sexuality. The use of such aids effectively deals with ethical and moral issues. In the absence of such teaching aids teachers would have to use initiates’ anatomical parts and, in the process, deal with otherwise vexatious moral and ethical issues. Matenga (Dewey 1997) cites a case where a teaching aid, depending on how it is held, assumes the appearance of buttocks and yet when held in a different position, quickly assumes the shape of testes. This is the hallmark of good art which is amenable to various and varying interpretations. Different people, depending on their cultural and cosmological orientations, see different things. Clearly, this leads us to the Zimbabwe Bird where some people see a bird, while others see beyond the bird as we shall see in forthcoming instalments.
Where there is an emerging theme, there has to be some congruence between that theme and the major elements resident within a cultural edifice such as Great Zimbabwe. Where sexuality is pervasive, we accordingly expect everything to fall in line. That is precisely our argument regarding Great Zimbabwe. Architecture points in the direction of sexuality or fertility, so does sculpture. The figurines equally point in the direction of sexuality as the guarantor of the much desired concepts of continuity, eternity and endlessness. We shall demonstrate how art traverses and ably copes with culturally obscene terrain.
Outside the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo there is a good piece of stone sculpture done by Mukomberanwa. The sculpture skilfully and successfully deals with sexuality in a morally acceptable manner. What is rendered as a mouth is accurately crafted as a euphemistic mouth with lips and all. But the position of the said mouth is anatomically inaccurate, being conveniently and artistically located just above the known position of female genitals. Where there ought to be some mouth on the head, there is instead, some pointed structure which clearly fails to pass for a mouth, for how can there be two mouths?
This is art par excellence and perfectly in line with African artistic ideas of dealing with obscenity, and pornography which are ethically obnoxious through manipulation, artistic engineering, innovation and creativity and circumvention the emerging image is seemingly sanitised and never associated with vulgarity.
Mukomberanwa is a contemporary African sculptor and artist. He however, resorts to the same artistic tools and devices that were applied at Great Zimbabwe more than two thousand years ago. As I stood admiring the fine piece of art and inviting
Clifford Zulu to partake of African art from the top shelf, I found myself having to explain why the sculpture has large breasts.
The “mouth,” which leads to the womb, complements the latter in nourishing and sustaining babies. In the womb a baby or foetus feeds through the placenta. Once the baby is born, breasts take over and nourish the baby through the milk they provide. Sometimes art is manifested instinctively as in the case of a toddler who, when given a pencil, will draw shapes that approximate circles. Depending on the cultural milieu into which the baby is born, he will grow to obey and mimic nature or be taught to rebel against nature and draw rectangular shapes with right angles that do not exist in nature.
We shall certainly revisit Mukomberanwa’s masterpiece as a prelude to dealing with the Zimbabwe Bird, one that we shall argue is a bird that never was; not a chapungu nor hungwe but visually and artistically crafted to closely resemble both and in the process provide cover to nudity. Artistic deception creates a new reality which we are quite comfortable with. Our interpretation is in line with our thinking and expectation. Just imagine if we all saw beyond the façade of the bird that has come to represent the national emblem.
During the same encounters with Clifford Zulu under the hypnotic ambience of the Mukomberanwa sculpture, I drew his attention to who or what welcomes visitors and tourists to the Robert Mugabe International Airport: a bigger than life lithic phallic object or the gigantic male sex organ.
Welcome to our beautiful Zimbabwe!
