The Sunday News
ABOUT a week ago, I received some WhatsApp communication from someone I do not know. He says he has read my articles and what other people have written about me.
He is coming to Bulawayo and would love to get in touch. However, what seemed to inspire me was some quotation from one author by the name of Nick Pilgrim.
“Black Americans are suffering from cultural problems more than white supremacy.” I reflected on these words and found some sense and meaning in them. For a start, blacks did not, of their own volition, get to the United States of America. They were hunted down, hunted from their African homes, force-marched to the Indian Ocean and other ports in West Africa. From there, they were packed like sardines in ships that took them to the United States of America, South America and the Caribbean Islands.
The dislocation they faced, cut them off from their cultures. They faced discrimination based on their skin colour and woollen hair. From then on, Afro-Americans, denied the designation of Americans, had no choice but settle for less gratifying nomenclature as Afro-Americans and not Americans.
In a desperate move to ensure some sense of belonging, they started bleaching their skin and straightening their hair-all in a desperate effort to be closer to whiteness. They hoped by so doing, they would be tolerated and treated with respect, justice and honour.
If anything, their brothers on the continent began to face the same racial discrimination following colonisation. They too resorted to the similar strategies. Sadly, the strategies continue to be applied to this day. Africans seek to be like whites and, in the process; they use chemicals and items that are imported from countries outside of Africa.
Beauty has been defined to Africans, with the white colour as the yardstick for beauty. White skins and flowing hair, sometimes not even black, have been the target as Africans seek to attain beauty as defined to them. While their problems may be cultural, racism contributed to the denigration, demonisation and deprecation of black people. This is not confined to the external body appearances but is more deep-rooted. Our spirituality has been replaced with book religions. Our cuisines have also been tampered with. Language, attire, governance and the legal systems, inter alia, have equally been altered and tampered with.
Some readers of this article may be wondering what connection exists between this and our thematic articles on Ancient African Science (AAS). There is some palpable link and connection. From Jinja in Uganda, Michael Wandati wrote some story about a man, who travelled a long distance to have some nice erotic escapade with a married woman. The residents of Bawenge Town Council, in Jinja District witnessed an incident at Jojo Bar and Lodge, where a couple found themselves stuck together after having sex.
The more than 38-year-old man, a driver from Kasole in Lugazi, had looked forward to some pleasurable night experience that turned sour and some source of intense embarrassment. After travelling from Buwenga to meet his fiancé, all that awaited him was being stuck male and female dogs’ style.
Initially, their predicament was ignored until the following morning. Curious crowds began gathering to witness the rare spectacle. Inevitably, the police were alerted and rushed to the scene. For some people, at least it was not something new. In the previous year, a similar incident involving a taxi driver took place. In Zimbabwe, similar incidents have been reported. The phenomenon is known as ulunyoka and is applied ancient African science. Before expatiating on the incident and seeking to unravel the underpinning science, let us go back to the statement that I have made. “Africa had no prisons. Africa had prisons.”
This may seem contradictory. Let us explain. If we think of prisons in the physical sense, where there are robust walls as understood in the Western sense, Africa did not operate such prisons.
This is true of all ethnic groups regardless of where they are found. For example, in Bulawayo, the Bulawayo Prison was the first to be constructed. It was later generally referred to as Grey Prison. Alleged culprits were remanded there and when found guilty, some were hanged (in 1896) on the Hanging Tree along Main Street, since renamed Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo.
Western-modelled prisons are wasteful in terms of resources and have limited correctional value. Of course, there are skills that inmates acquire that are beneficial, in the case of Zimbabwean prisons. Africa had her own kinds of prisons that were, in the main, social, economic and spiritual in thrust. More importantly, their correctional effects were clear for all to see. Western prisons targeted an offender. One person was punished.
To the contrary, Africa solicited the support of the wider blood family to police members that would be tempted to commit some social crime. The Ndebele people have a saying, “Zonelwa mvu nye.” One sheep spoils it for the entire flock.
Blood relatives stand to suffer, sometimes terribly and painfully, when one of their members engages in some anti-social crime.
The aggrieved may resort to Ancient African Science and invoke ingwendela/uzimu/ngozi that has the potential to kill members of the same blood family, in terms of their common genetic make-up.
It is not about one individual suffering consequences of his/her sins of commission. The group, by virtue of relatedness, suffers.
This has the effect of other members demanding that all of their members keep within the straight and narrow path, so that the innocent do not suffer because of what a relative has done. The group therefore is roped into policing itself, for fear of disastrous consequence not to one of them, but to alike.
There are many cases where the consequences do not translate to death. Instead, the wider blood family is embarrassed. As a result, they work hard to ensure no family members spoil it for the rest by virtue of blood connection. As I have often said, there is no police force in the world more effective that one’s own conscience.
A family plays the role of police force. A thief may be found still wandering within a crop field from where they have stolen some produce. That is some source of embarrassment to the broader blood family. When a witch/wizard is captured trying to enter some homestead, it is not the perpetrator alone who faces some social stigma. The wider blood family is equally embarrassed. The extended family is not spared. It is that family that plays some pre-emptive role-the effective police force that is roped in. The family does more effective policing of its members. The consequence to them demand exactly that.
I hope that the link has emerged. In the case of marriages, there are husbands that obtain requisite ritual formulations to fence, ukubiya and their wives. The process may also work in reverse, when a wife fences her husband. This may work in numerous ways.
The less incriminating is one where a husband may fail to insert his machine gun, until he gives up. We have reported cases in the past, where some male infidels have engaged sexual entrepreneurs and failed to pay. Their organs may “go missing,” as a result. A case of optical illusion?
The case sited above is extreme. Essentially, it is symbolic in nature. By that, we mean identification of “sexual sticking together” in natural circumstances during or after sex. The one easily identifiable case, is one involving male and female dogs.
Many people would have witnessed this not-so-pleasant phenomenon. AAS has the capacity to transfer that natural sexual condition to human beings, to be stuck during sex, dog style. A male dog in such a predicament is killed during its capture and its copulating organ severed and ritually mixed with other herbs.
This is where I have a serious problem. Many of our people rubbish all this as untrue, pagan and supernatural practices. When Africans possess this sort of science, it is said to be mythical. The “mythiness” is based on the fact that it is a practice by Africans, whose culture knows no science. No, it is “penis captivus,” stupid! This is how it is explained and interpreted in the Western world for which Africans have fallen completely. African cultural practices are mythical and divorced from science as found in Western communities. I reject such notions that are based on racial denigration of the black race. In this world, all communities explain and interpret phenomena within the contexts of their cultures, traditions, knowledge, experiences and worldview. The explanations, interpretations concerning causality may differ and accordingly, how a given material or spiritual condition. It is racial arrogance of the highest order to dismiss all communities’ perceptions, explanations and interpretations as nonsensical and give credit and reality only to one’s own perceptions and beliefs.
These are racial biases that see Africans spend a lot of money trying to be like westerners, the self-appointed standard-bearers of humanity in terms of colour and other aspects of human endeavours. The locking mechanism is one such. It would seem Africans peddle in pagan superstitions. People fail to identify and explain the underpinning science, a science whose principles are different from those found in the West.
Interestingly, in Uganda, sexual locking, is explained and interpreted the same way as understood in traditional Zimbabwe. Indeed, our Africanness is the same. The report referred to recourse that separated the two lovers. The husband took some grass and thrust it over the bodies of beleaguered lovers. They separated. However, the onlookers saw that act and took it for granted that it was just some ordinary grass. It was special grass obtained from a river with flowing water.
When a man drowns and is taken downstream by raging waters, he may be found naked, with water having undressed him.
Water would have loosened his clothes. The same is true of a motor vehicle. When it is washed downstream by water, its wheels may be found loosened and no longer attached to the car. Water has the power to loosen up what has been tightened. I observed that during the days of my youth, when in spanned donkeys pulling a scotch cart stopped in the middle of flowing water to urinate.
Symbolic manipulation will be dealt with, as it is important in doing and undoing certain conditions from nature. Spirituality has the power to transfer a natural condition and replicate it in a different natural setting. This may sound difficult for people whose attitudinal leanings towards rubbishing everything African is deeply rooted.
