The Sunday News
AFRICAN cosmology posits that life undergoes several stages before the final stage on the material realm — that of death. Each stage is attended with rituals sometimes referred to in anthropological circles as rites de passage, or rites of passage. Each stage has its own responsibilities and community expectations. The community recognises these responsibilities and tolerates certain associated behaviours that will no longer be tolerated once the individuals have undergone initiation.
An individual who has reached the appropriate age has to undergo a rite of passage to advance to the next stage in the ever continuing drama of life. There are processes that are undergone to prepare the individual for the next stage. Usually, there is seclusion which symbolises making a break with the previous stage. For example, in the case of boys undergoing rituals to become men move away from their parental homes into the bush. The journey they undertake is one of departure or forsaking the earlier stage and going into seclusion to be prepared for the next stage which, upon completion of the initiation, will be marked by re-integration into the community, albeit at a higher level.
The cycle of life transcends the two realms, the physical or material into the spiritual. The former has several rituals that attend to each stage: childhood, adulthood, and marriage. Transition into the latter realm is the most elaborate as it has to prepare the soul of the dear departed for eternal life. Life on earth is regarded as transient and this is borne out by the type of architecture, particularly with regard to the choice of building materials.
“Death is not the end of life. Life is cyclic throughout the different forms. Life SPIRALS unto itself, and this is the base of the Shona Ndoro symbol/Zulu Snake of Eternity (Ambuya Muhera 2015:51)”. The African ancients believed there was a link between the heavens and earth. The former was replicated on the former in various forms such as the alignment of monuments such as Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids and other megalithic structures elsewhere on the planet.
In some communities membership of the next stage was marked by body tattooing. Tattoos on the face marked membership of the stage of childhood and tattoos on the stomach marked progression to the adult stage. Some ordeals were performed to test the suitability and qualification of the initiates. For example, in some West African tribes the initiates were expected to withstand painful whipping of each other. In yet other communities the initiate was expected to jump over a bull while in yet other communities a man was expected to lift a heavy stone boulder to prove he was ready to marry.
The initiate got moral support from some community members who cheered him or her on. Stoic endurance of pain was meant to ensure the initiate would not abandon the group that they had become a member of. It was proof they were going to withstand the challenges of adulthood. Usually a celebratory ceremony was conducted at the end of the initiation process to mark successful passage. In some cases hair was shorn, old clothes burnt or given to younger relatives or just abandoned to symbolically mark departure, transition and migration from an earlier stage. The new acquired stage has its own responsibilities and the graduate may not relapse into an earlier stage. The dead are not resurrected into an earlier bone flesh blood and hair form. Only the soul exits the body and moves to another realm where it lives on in eternity or infinity.
Megalithic structures were associated with the dead. The architectural structures were so designed to assist the movement of the soul into the stellar realm. There were targeted stars that the soul would aim to reach. Chambers and tunnels in the pyramids have been observed to have been aligned with the Osirius constellation which was the destination of the departed souls of the Egyptian pharaohs. The wisdom of the ancients saw a close link between architecture, spirituality, astronomy and mathematics.
For the purposes of this article we are confining ourselves to the rituals on the material realm, in particular the attainment of adulthood where the use of ash was involved. Both the boys and girls underwent rites of passage for full membership of adulthood. We, however, shall confine ourselves to the rituals associated with the boys among the Nguni communities.
When the appropriate stage was reached the eligible boys in the community were led into the bush where they established temporary shelters. Here they were in the company of qualified male elders who took them through the paces — teaching them the history and oral traditions of the community. The curriculum involved in particular preparation for married life. Movement away from the home was equivalent to movement away from the community and the stage that the initiates were associated or linked with.
Here ash or ochre (either white or red) was used to paint the faces of the initiates. The painting of faces in southern Africa was equivalent to the use of masks in Central and West Africa. Their underlying meaning is the same. Masks and painted faces (as distinct from decoration of faces by women as part of self adornment) carried the same meaning. The two are used by people whose cosmology posits that there are two realms of reality — the material and spiritual.
Humans, in certain instances, have to transverse the two realms of reality. While physically they remain on the material realm their bodies could be taken over by beings or personalities from the spiritual world. The person, by wearing the mask or paint is declaring that, “Sorry, but my face has been taken over.” This could happen when the individual is a medium who is being spiritually possessed. Their identity has changed; even the voice is that of the spirit. Witches are known to daub their faces during their nocturnal escapades. They are not their physical selves. They have traversed into the other realm of reality where the spirits in them have taken control of their physical faculties.
Likewise the initiates are wearing the paint to announce that they belong to the two realms of reality. In this case it is the stages of childhood and adulthood. This is similar to theatrical production where the curtain is used to mark the end of one scene and the beginning of the next. The ash is used in this instance as a visual expression of a transitional stage. The initiates are undergoing transformation from childhood to adulthood. Painting of the face with paint is a language that is understood within the context of the community. Even before writing was developed people were communicating through means other than the verbal.
The face is special in that it carries visible human identity more than any other part of the human body. Imagine if people’s buttocks were severed and placed together in a massive display. Identifying which buttocks belonged to who would be a mammoth task. It is not so with the face which is relatively easy to identify. Such a clear notice board was ideal to post images on — hence the painting of the faces to make an announcement about the transformation that the initiates were about to experience.
The processes of initiation themselves are not of concern in this article. We thus move on to the completion of the initiation process where we see once again the use of ash. The temporary shelters, whose temporality was symbolic of the transient nature of the transformative process, are burnt. The burning is symbolic of the destruction of the previous stage — that of childhood. The leaping flames are consuming the stage of childhood.
Given that the childhood stage has been successfully killed means there is a symbolic corpse to be disposed of. The communities in question will resort to their burial and funerary practices to deal with this symbolic corpse. That is what the next article will deal with — internment of a symbolic corpse in the form of a product of a rite of passage.
