The Sunday News
SHE walked with a calculated gait, paying careful attention to the plastic parcel she was clutching in her hands. Finally, she stopped next to some rock outcrop close to which she deposited the parcel.
Rather meticulously, she worked on the grass until it was clear she was making some kind of makeshift grass thatch roof. Below the roof, she dug some shallow pit in the ground.
I was almost convinced she was constructing some roughshod hut.
I wondered just what she was going to do with the hut structure. I was in the company of a man whose house was haunted by invisible spirit beings. He was having problems sleeping in his house in Bulawayo.
He had, in the end, approached a female traditional healer to deal with his challenging and vexatious situation.
The woman of mature age then turned to her precious parcel, which she proceeded to open rather carefully. Out she brought some freshly made figurines, two resembling human beings and the third akin to a cow. Also in the plastic parcel were three rusty copper coins.
What then followed was the performance of a ritual that was accompanied by a carefully worded incantation. I knew by now the role of chants in spiritual rituals. Slowly, I was beginning to appreciate what the old woman was about to do.
The beleaguered man was advised to recite chants after the woman. Essentially, it all amounted to a declaration of innocence.
He was not to blame for the uninvited invisible guests that were now part of his household, tormenting all and sundry. I could detect a firm and resolute voice in the man.
The chants came after he had been advised to spit on the clay figurines.
Hmm, I remembered the vexatious question that my two colleagues, the Reverend Paul Bayethe Damasane and the late Senator Watson Khupe (may his soul rest in eternal peace) and I always posed regarding the role of saliva during traditional cultural practices.
For a while, I thought about the Sumerian creation myth that is very akin to that of Africans. It contrasts somewhat markedly from that presented in the Bible. The word and concept that came to my mind was ukubumba, to mould.
Bible
This term is used to refer to the process of making ceramic clay pots. At the same time, it refers to procreation a process that results in the birth of babies.
Right in front of my eyes, I was witnessing the use of clay figurines for the first time in a spiritual set up. As children, we used to make similar figurines depicting humans, cattle and various other domestic animals that we were familiar with.
For us it was children’s play and part of fun, but not so in this ritual that was unfolding.
I read about figurines much later in life when I was writing about the initiation of boys and girls among the VhaVenda.
I had, at the time, read about the works of Edward Matenga who specialised in the clay figurines particularly with reference to their form and purposes.
I had not imagined that one day I would bear witness to their application in a ritual setting, live!
The spiritually tortured man was asked, after eloquently pronouncing the chants, to place the cache of figurines next to the shallow pit. My mind was all the time racing ahead to imagine what was to follow next.
The man had been asked to remove his shoes and shirt on a cold and windy day in the bushy outskirts of Bulawayo.
I was convinced I was witnessing a ritual where a home was being established for some bothersome invisible tormentors. The saliva personalised the man in trouble.
The created figurines represented and symbolised the invisible troublemakers. Now a home was being presented to them.
The new home had to be attractive to the creatures.
The cow figurine and the rusty copper coins were calculated to symbolise wealth. Even the invisible creatures love wealth just as their material counterparts do.
It was envisaged that with such enticement they would abandon the victim’s home and elect to come and live in the plush home away from a home to which they had not been invited.
The end bit of the chant was that when the creatures got fed up with living in this home, they were free to abandon it but go to live with those that had in the first place directed them to go and haunt the man who was now sweating to rid his home of these uninvited guests.
The woman doctor, using some flywhisk, sprayed some medicated water on the head, face and body of the man who remained with a pair of trousers only.
I imagined he was approximating the witches and wizards in this witchy ritual. I have read and been told about the fly-by-night scientists who ply their business in the nude.
I presumed to fight them, the man had to somewhat resemble them and take it to them, African science style.
The man was then asked to expose his bare feet, one at a time, above the shallow pit on the ground.
I imagined that was the enaction of covering his tracks.
The invisible tormentors were not to follow him back home. Their home was here in the bush! I witnessed again some action on the part of the man which I understood to complement the covering of tracks.
He was instructed not to look back again until he got to his home.
At a distance from the new home of the invisible, he put on his clothes hopefully now having been rid of the spiritual menace.
All the time I was thinking about Ancient African Science (AAS) and how it operated in a different way from Western science, as we know it.
I imagined how a man unschooled in these spiritual manipulations would, in desperation, approach a Western medical doctor without much joy.
During excavations at Old Bulawayo from March to August in 1998, clay fragments were unearthed from the fill of a palisade in the southern section of the Royal Enclosure.
In the following year, another section of the royal palisade was excavated and the 9-metre-long stretch of the palisade was excavated. The gully was 0,5m wide and 0,15m deep.
The gully was cut into some bedrock, which was scorched red. The possible burning of the bedrock was the fire that was lit when the town was relocated in 1881 to a new site where State House stands today.
The new town went by the same name, KoBulawayo. The figurines had been unearthed and most of them were of a part-by-part jointing with clay paste.
As a result, many had been disjointed along fault lines. It was clear the clay figurines resembled humans, albeit without much by way of detail. For example, the feet were missing.
The clay figurines were availed to Edward Matenga for possible interpretation. In the next article, we shall furnish what Matenga thought were the purposes of the clay figurines at Old Bulawayo.
After that, I will also attempt to render my own interpretation that apparently does coincide at some points with Matenga’s interpretations. I will however, give a broader background before I venture to traverse the treacherous terrain of interpretation.
