The Sunday News
Cultural heritage with Pathisa Nyathi
AFTER the colossal stones at Stonehenge the next most conspicuous cultural feature is arguably the arrangement of stones in space. The same is true of the cultural features that were made out of wood and not stone. At Stonehenge there are Darrington Walls which also feature circularity. So did the Woodhenge, also comprising of wood. Stone and wood have been compared and contrasted before. Items such as wood, grass, unfired clay are readily perishable and hence are associated with transience ephemerality. Stone, on account of its solidity (resistance to weathering), is the rock of ages and is associated with permanence, eternity, perpetuity, endlessness and immortality.
On the cultural plane it is associated with death which marks the release from the material body of the spirit/soul which has eternal and perpetual life. This translates to some link between spirit and eternal life and therefore spirituality is thus associated with both stone and death. The question then is, given the differences between rock and wood, why on the same cultural landscape would there be representations of transience and immortality?
Looking at modern construction work we observe that the workers who are engaged in building eternal structures are housed in ephemeral structures.
The structures, including their residences, are temporary and they will be abandoned or dismantled after completion of the more permanent structures. This was found to be the case when Egyptian pyramids were being built. That arrangement still applies to this day where construction work takes place and many people are involved in the various aspects of construction work and have to live on site. Temporary structures are used to come up with permanent structures.
However, we need to observe that a particular community applies some common architectural principles and ideas when it comes to construction regardless of it being a temporary or permanent structure. A good example back then would have been the universal application of circularity whether with regard to wood or stone as building material.
In my Book, “Journey to Great Zimbabwe,” I drew readers’ attention to the fact that arrangement in space is arguably a more important consideration that the nature of materials being used.
The example given was the use of stones at Great Zimbabwe but arranged in circles and wood constituting the double palisade of King Lobengula’s Royal Enclosure at Old Bulawayo.
There are other communities that, for the same purpose, have used either reeds or grass while others have used clay.
These are merely differences in the types of materials that have been used. A more fundamental consideration is how those varying materials have been arranged in space-the application of a circular arrangement. “As above, so below.”
This arrangement of materials in space was at one time universal. Even as recent as the times of the Roman Empire buildings were constructed along circular designs.
The Colosseum in Rome is a good example. The leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy is the same. Africa is associated with the circle perhaps more than any other cultural group in the world. From sculpture, architecture, art, design of artifacts, etc., the circle has predominated. On this front, the creators and builders of Stonehenge shared a common architectural design with Africans who until recently have been loyal to the circular design.
What has been the inspiration behind adoption of the circular design and its variants which include the following: crescent, horseshoe, lozenge, hemisphere, arc, bow, semicircular, curved? How are we to perceive a circle if we are to appreciate the message(s) it embodies?
Before attempting to answer that question it does seem Africa has the answer. “As above, so below.” Africa looked up and saw the some cosmic bodies, bright against the darkness of night. They were all circular in design without exception. Further, the bodies were eternal and were moving along elliptical orbits. Circular stone structures such as Nabta Playa were conceptualised, designed and built to monitor the movement of celestial bodies with a bearing on life on earth.
There were monitored constellations with cycles/rhythms lasting thousands of years. When the constellations were observed to have completed a cycle, they were awaited with glee and excitement and met with jubilant ceremonies and rituals where offerings and sacrifices were made. Radio-carbon dating has shown when some of these fires were lit at the Nabta Playa in southern Egypt.
What has to be appreciated is the fact that the circular design is the universal building bloc. Even at the electronic and sub-electronic levels the particles are circular and are in constant motion along elliptical orbits or energy levels.
Perceptions of the circle are important to consider. The first consideration is one of movement. This is how I perceive a circle. There is imperceptible and imaginary movement. That movement is not irregular. Instead, the movement is regular, which is to say it is rhythmic or periodic just like the predictable movements of celestial bodies and stellar constellations.
The movement is not linear, instead the movement is characterised by constant and consistent change. Imagine the movement we are referring to here. If a tangent is drawn at a given point in the, one can have an infinite or limitless number of tangents which testify to constant change in direction.
This constant change turns out to be an important portrayal of a circular design-constant change and therefore constant renewal, rebirth, revival, reincarnation, regeneration and rejuvenation. Celestial bodies such as the sun and the moon which ae circular embrace these qualities which Africans sought to embrace on their biological and cultural fronts: endlessness, eternity, immortality and continuity as found among the cosmic bodies.
The desire to attain eternity should never be underestimated. A lot of effort and energy was put towards attainment of that goal. Indeed, everything the African made assumed a design that expressed and symbolised eternity-from sculpture to architecture and production of all his artifacts.
Nature itself is a global exhibition of circularity, including the human body as long as we appreciate that a cylinder comprises an infinite number of circles or discs.
In some way, we have already unpacked the circle but we need to get deeper into the process of explanation and analysis so that we are poised to offer sustainable interpretation of the circle as viewed by Africans. From that we may surmise that Africans were not alone in holding such ideas. How wrong would we be to arrive at the conclusion that the ancients shared a common worldview and hence similarities at the level of cultural practices, the use of a circle being one such.
