The Sunday News
ONE of the enduring items within a settlement are bones. As a result, bones can reveal something relating to the ways of life of a given people who lived on the site.
Archaeologists carry out excavations on cultural landscapes and extract bones which they identify, analyse and interpret to get ideas, beliefs, world view, philosophy and broad cultural practices of a people such as their cuisine.
From faunal remains in the form of bones, we may glean rituals that were conducted and the world view that underpinned those rituals.
Bones may thus be an important window into the broader knowledge of the residents of a cultural landscape such as Old Bulawayo.
Bones work in conjunction with other remains to give a relatively more comprehensive knowledge of the community who have since vacated their settlement.
We are, in this article, concerned with the faunal assemblage that was recovered from Old Bulawayo, a site that used to be the capital town where King Lobengula lived from 1870 to 1881 following which he relocated to the present site of State House in Bulawayo.
It being a royal site implies that there will be some diversity of bones recovered from the Royal Enclosure and those from where the commoners lived. However, emphasis on excavations was placed on the Royal Enclosure between 1997 and 2000.
We expect the bones recovered from the site to tell the story of social strata that existed among the residents when it is acknowledged that royals and non-royals both resided on the same cultural landscape.
This preliminary article serves to introduce the treatise relating to the faunal assemblage that was recovered from Old Bulawayo through archaeological excavations. In the end, we are interested in bringing to the fore the story as told by the recovered bones.
Altogether, more than 500 individual bones were recovered, analysed and interpreted. Forthcoming articles will deal more specifically with the bones that were identified and analysed.
However, when it comes to interpretation we are going to rely mostly on our knowledge and understanding of the beliefs, world view and perceptions and cultural practices of the Ndebele as we know them. Inevitably, here and there, there will be some points of convergence.
For now, we wish to lay bare issues relating broadly to bones after which we shall zero in on the significance of the faunal remains at Old Bulawayo.
The first question is to do with the explanation of how bones end up at a residential site. The Ndebele are known as accomplished pastoralists who kept large herds of cattle as sources of food, in the form of meat.
As a community, the Ndebele had their own butchery methods which were dictated by available technology and informing beliefs. As pointed out in my book, “Beyond Nutrition: Food as a Cultural Expression,” food, including meat, expressed social, political, cultural and belief aspects of a community
The major source of bones at Old Bulawayo came from what was consumed by the residents. On that score, we expect cattle bones to be the dominant category of bones excavated at Old Bulawayo.
As already pointed out, social stratification existed and it was expressed in several ways including the diet applicable to the varying classes.
The person of King represented the State and Nation. He was the access point for the State, which from time to time was renewed or regenerated through the person of King.
However, what is important here is the fact that the royal diet was distinct from that of ordinary people, his subjects.
The cuts of meat that were reserved for the monarch yielded bones that served as pointers to what he consumed which was commensurate with his political, social, cultural, military and spiritual status within the Nation and expressed locally in terms of faunal remains.
The person of King differed from others in terms of other considerations, in addition to the dietary aspects. His dress was different and identified him as such.
He stood out above the rest in many ways. As the most important individual in the land, he was attended with measures that sought maximum protection both in the physical and metaphysical or spiritual terms.
It turned out this consideration explained the introduction of bones from consumed domesticated animals such as cattle, sheep and goats.
There were therefore, bones from wild animals that were not remains following consumption of meat from these specimens.
Animals and plants found their way into the protection and fortification of a monarch. Certain parts of those animals were used in the fortification process in line with the beliefs of the Ndebele.
In most cases, as will be seen, symbolism was at work. There was nothing chemical or pharmacological at work. This is an important consideration when it comes to African science including what has mysteriously and erroneously been referred to as witchcraft, which, like healing, are premised on the same principles.
The fortifying need resulted in the traditional doctors residing within the Royal Enclosure in order to attend to the fortification and prophesying of imminent events, some ominous, so that pre-emptive measures could be taken to obviate possible national calamities.
The traditional doctors needed to be sharpening their “prophetic” capacities. In the exercise, they made use of certain parts of animals, snakes and birds such as pythons, eagles and vultures.
This, we expect to be another source of bones that were coming from specimens that were not for consumption but to enhance the “seeing” capacity for the traditional doctors who had to be alert all the time though revelations (sometimes through various forms of divination), also known as dreams and visions.
Royal fortification that they undertook became another source for the bones following the use of fortifying animals.
A King had to be equipped with defensive and offensive arsenal, not just in the physical sense of spears, shields and other military items.
One immediately thinks of the regal, fighting animals in the cat family and other defensive and fighting animals such as rhinoceros.
Defence may also be achieved symbolically through the application of symbolic manipulation as derived from observable behaviour of animals such as pangolins, porcupines and hedgehogs.
The presence of the King within Old Bulawayo resulted in a unique settlement adapted to offer defence. That translated into structural adjustments as already alluded to.
The King required conflicting demands in the form of privacy for his household but also protection by having people around him.
The compromise position in structural terms was to have a stand-alone Royal Enclosure with a near-infringing Commoners Enclosure.
This structural adaptation would have been buttressed by the distribution of faunal remains that reflected and expressed political and social stratification.
Extracting and analysing bones through excavation is one thing while objective interpretation is quite another. The latter assumes a thorough knowledge of the culture of the requisite community that created, built and used the emerging cultural landscape, a mind transferred into a physical site. Cultural practices stand on the pillars of a world view, beliefs and cosmology of a community.
These culture-sustaining pillars ought to inform interpretation of the site and its finds if it is to stand and have relevance, not to the foreign interpreters in both ethnic and racial terms, but from the perspective of the community itself, in this case the Ndebele.
Their minds have been applied in the creation of the cultural landscape. The least that should be done to spoil it all is to wear foreign mental spectacles and see the cultural landscape from the researchers’ perspectives.
It is not their perspectives that matter but those of the community that created built and used the resulting cultural landscape. There simply should be no room for cultural hegemony and self-centredness.
