The Sunday News
Pathisa Nyathi
FOLLOWING the publication of my most recent book, “My Story, Joseph Khumo Nyathi: Serving in ZPRA and ZNA’s 5 Brigade,” I have commenced work on “The Big Five: An African Perspective.” Joseph, whose war name was Dickson Khupe, was my classmate at Sankonjana School in the mid-60s before he proceeded to Manama Mission after which he joined the liberation struggle and trained at Morogoro in Tanzania in 1975.
As I work on the latest book, where I seek to bring forth African ideas and perceptions on the Big Five (lion, elephant, leopard, rhinoceros and buffalo), it dawns on me that Westerners have their own emphases when it comes to knowledge about the Big Five. The knowledge centres around empirical facts: weight, height, eating habits, etc. This is in line with ideas from the material Western world. It is not so with Africans.
Their views, ideas, knowledge and perceptions take a different angle. Empirical or physical attributes are a mere entry point into a whole complex of symbolism, metaphors, images and symbolic manipulation. Being a people who posit ‘‘Duality of Being’’, for them there is another world beyond the material or physical world. There is an intangible world. The posited duality applies to everything including the Big Five. There is the physical lion that we see with our physical eyes. There is also another lion that is created by African culture, in particular African world-view, thought and philosophy.
The primary physical attributes of a lion are inextricably linked to the intangible attributes or traits of a lion. This is the duality that exists at the macro-level and in the case of the lion, it is existing at the micro-level. The lion is seen through cultural lenses. Out of culture-induced perceptions are born of various usages that have a bearing on what parts of a lion are used in numerous cultural contexts. Nguni kings and chiefs used to, and still don, claws and teeth of a lion on their necks. This is what the book will seek to unpack and it’s got to do with perceptions held regarding a lion. Why don’t kings use claws from a rabbit?
However, we are mentioning this as some kind of introduction to what our article this week is dealing with. We are still interrogating and interpreting the burial practices of the Ndebele people as witnessed by Reverend Herbert Carter of Tegwane Mission. With his Western cultural background, Reverend Carter, as expected, concerned himself with material or empirical observations of cultural practices. He noted rituals that were conducted but did not go into expressed world-views and cosmologies. The tangible dimensions of what he experienced and documented did not embrace intangible aspects. He explored half the African world. Quite often, ancient Africans are misunderstood as a result of concentrating on the physical and material aspects of their ways of life at the total exclusion of the more fundamental intangible aspects wherein lies the minds of Africans.
We thus take advantage of Reverend Carter’s documented experiences to go beyond what he saw and heard to access the African mind which is responsible for the creation and legitimation of cultural practices. Before going any further, we need to point out the link between ritual performance and dress. Whereas Ndebele people, at the time of the demise of Chief Gampu Sithole in 1916 were fast Westernising, when it came to performance of rituals, traditional attire was preferred. Some rituals are linked to ancestors who dressed differently from the current generation. This is true of many religions. Catholic and Anglican priests don gowns that are reminiscent of Greco-Roman times. In a similar way African ritual officials dressed differently from the rest of the members of the community. Rituals display some consistency and rhythm with regard to when and where they are performed, who officiates, the mode of dress for ritual officials, inter alia. In fact, the term or word ritual underpins these ideas.
We thus should not wonder why the six widows of the late Chief Gampu Sithole reverted to goat skin skirts which were common in the pre-colonial period. Goat skins were tanned in an elaborate process where men dried the skins, ukubethela izikhumba, by impaling them, using izikhonkwane, on the ground till they dried. Next, they used a lot of water to get rid of any meaty remnants still attached to the skin. The expression, “Utshwala bungangamanzi okuphala izikhumba,” was derived from this process of skin tanning where copious amounts of water were used. Hair was then scraped off and the skin turned around vigorously in both hands, ukutshuka.
Those familiar with traditional Ndebele women’s skirts will know that all of them were black in colour. Grass or sorghum stalks were burnt black. The black soot was then mixed with fat which was rubbed onto skins making them assume some black hue. All the processes being described here took place after the leg and arm extensions had been cut off using an adze, isancele. The process was called ukuncela, hence the name of the artefact. The trimmed off pieces were known as izinkondo. The metaphor deriving from the process gave a similar name to an off-cut from Intemba Regiment/Village under the leadership and command of Xukuthwayo Mlotshwa, okaNjotsho. The new Regiment that was created out of the surplus population at ENtembeni constituted the new Regiment/Village called IZinkondo which were led by Chief Sikhombo Mguni (actually a Mzizi).
One observation that Reverend Carter observed among the widows was that they plaited grass which they wore around their heads and necks. A look at the picture of Queen Lozikeyi Dlodlo, okaNgogo, will indicate that she had some band around her head. It was a band that she wore at the time of the disappearance of her husband King Lobengula kaMzilikazi. What is important is to note the position of this band. It does not go over the brow, but is further up the head. This band is known as isincwazi, or just inzilo, a mark of bereavement by wives/widows of a deceased husband. Queen Lozikeyi Dlodlo wore isincwazi to her grave in 1918 when she succumbed to influenza.
Retaining it for the rest of her life was to indicate she did not intend getting married again, and she did not, despite approaches from Mtshane Khumalo. For some bereaving widows, izincwazi were retained till after umbuyiso, the bringing home ceremony, at which it was decided whether they were to retain their statuses by not remarrying, in which case izincwazi were retained. If they chose to remarry, they removed izincwazi. They were announcing their new statuses, ready to be “inherited,” ukungenwa, or find another husband elsewhere.
However, what is more pertinent is to explain and interpret the wearing of isincwazi. A married woman stood out among younger unmarried women by virtue of her wearing icholo, a tuft of hair on the crown of her head. The next article shall deal with icholo. Isincwazi stood in relation to where icholo had been shorn off following the death of the ‘‘owner’’ of icholo, the deceased husband. Icholo thus fenced off the area where icholo once stood. Icholo was, to the Ndebele a fence to keep off potential suitors during the period of bereavement, the same way a ring in one of a married woman’s fingers fences off and marking protected territory in Western society. To Westerners, this is what a ring signifies, a mark of married men and women, but at the same time symbolically marking territory as does a lion when it urinates on trees to mark off territory. A sense of territoriality exists not only in animals but in humans too.
Technically, isincwazi and icholo did not co-exist. There was either one or the other, but never both on the same head. Where isincwazi was present, icholo was not there. Whose would it be, anyway? Icholo belonged to the husband and we shall see, in the next article, what happened to it when the husband passed on. Reverend Carter did refer to that tradition.
Homestead palisades were circular in shape. Villages and individual homesteads had circular designs; they marked and defined territory and expressed some sense of belonging and not belonging. Similar ideas were expressed in other areas such as when izincwazi were worn by widows.
