The Sunday News
Continued from last week
Common practice in days gone by was to inspect the grave early in the morning to see if there had been some tempering with it at night by witches. There were two possibilities with regard to witchy machinations: either witches would dig up the grave to access the corpse and partake of the flesh or they would take some soil from the grave. For the purposes of this article, what is important is the soil that was taken from the grave. The grave soil epitomises the person lying in the grave. It is his embodiment.
Taking away the soil is synonymous to taking the spirit of the deceased away for possible manipulation, including harming the living relatives of the dead person. The extracted soil need not have been in contact with the corpse. Spirit permeates the entire grave and its soil. Imagine the situation where several people were thrust into a mass grave. Corpses in a mine shaft are perceived in similar light.
There are cases when victims were said to be thrown down disused mine shafts or were thrown into shallow graves. What has happened here in African terms?
A shallow grave, including its soil, is spiritually infused with the spiritual beings of ALL who lie in the mass grave. The grave now belongs to them ALL. The grave and its soil have, in a spiritual sense, been communalised. The same applies to their bones. The bone is infused with the spirits of all other bones. This is common spiritualisation.
The soil in the vicinity represents them all. Thus, taking either a bone or clump of soil from the mass grave is tantamount to taking the spirits of ALL the people in the mass grave.
Thus, exhuming one of them, assuming it is possible to do so, means ALL of them have been removed and taken for burial in one homestead. All that we have said is humbug, in western terms.
The question then is what is to be done in the circumstances? Both a mine shaft with human bodies and a mass grave ought to be treated as presenting similar challenges. We resort to spiritual excavation in which bones are left intact.
We identify existing individual identity. It exists at the level of individual spirits of the people lying in the mine shaft or the mass grave. What is then fundamentally important is to know exactly in which mine shaft or grave a particular person lies.
His relatives get there and individually address him by name. In the process, they tell him what happened, who did what, etecetera. Finally, they should request him to rest peacefully, telling him they have forgiven the perpetrator.
The assumption here is that the first thing has happened first. That first thing being assumed is acknowledgement and apology. Then the rest may follow. For example, it is futility of the highest order to engage in the issuance of birth certificates and other official documents ahead of the first thing that ought to take place . . . APOLOGY by one who represents, in an official capacity the State that perpetrated the massacres. Note that at no point should the spirit of the deceased be asked to come along with those addressing it. To do so is to engage in a sin of commission.
This is critically important to understand. It may sound nonsensical to some people who either denigrate African spirituality or who are plainly not sufficiently schooled in African Thought. A mass grave translates to an entangled and inseparable spiritual entity. In African terms therefore, it is not possible to isolate one individual among many, in a spiritual sense.
Finally, it would be interesting to find out if really there are any Ndebele families who have ever experienced or heard about cases of exhumation within their families. If some people did it at Chivondo in Mt Darwin, it does not follow that it is applicable in Matabeleland in terms of customs and traditions.
Whatever is done ought to be culturally specific, particular and unique. Ndebele thought ought to inform and guide the entire process. Anything else risks failure at one or both levels referred to above. Matabeleland has no thought, world-view, cosmology or beliefs to provide philosophical guidance and support pillars for exhumation. Where philosophy fails to lead, justify and legitimate, a practice shies away.
