The Sunday News
Pathisa Nyathi
WHEN travellers documented their experiences they did so from the background of their experiential world. This was even more so because one’s cultural background provides lenses through which one sees the world in front of them. For writers or documenters coming from the West, their experiences were premised on the phenomenology of their world, a physical or material world. Their world was a subset of the broader world of the African.
What we wish to point out may not be that obvious to some people. We shall try to unpack what we are positing so that what we are trying to do with Reverend Doctor Robert Moffat journals is contextualised for clarity or lucidity. We do not seek to regurgitate what the Scottish missionary of the London Missionary Society (LMS) documented. Our task and challenge is to go beyond his material rendition of what he observed and commented upon. The argument here is that what he saw was not a full picture of the world he was being exposed to. His restricted and impaired vision of the world limited his full appreciation of the African world.
For one coming from a limited material/physical world it is a big challenge to fully comprehend and understand the more intricate, more expansive and more diverse world which embraces both material and spiritual dimensions. The material world of the African world is by far narrower than his spiritual one. The painful reality though is that those pontificating within the context of a narrower and limited world call the tune when it comes to scholarship and academy. Little do they appreciate their shortcomings as they have to grapple with a world beyond their own world.
What obtains in reality is that what relates to the African spiritual domain is arrogantly dismissed as superstition. The position is that there is nothing they do not understand in this world, more particularly when Africans know it. Racial superiority rather than possession of critical knowledge is what matters. They will not believe it that the African may and will know what they do not know. Control and definition of scholarship allows them to perpetuate their academic dominance. The inherent arrogance informed by racial superiority in the LMS missionary is too obvious to gloss over.
The critical question that some of us are posing is, “Just how possible is it for one to write meaningfully and intelligibly about an African world from a limited material world experience?” What is dismissed as superstition is part of what they do not comprehend and believe as it might give an edge to those who are regarded as inferior. This, in our view, is what gives scope for the need to amplify the writings of Reverend Moffat. There are fundamental narratives that belong within the realm of the intangible. There is therefore need to unpack issues beyond the mundane and mechanical rendition of cultural practices.
This is to give more emphasis to the field below the tip of the iceberg. There are many writers today who fall in the same category as Reverend Moffat. Their documentation is certainly not to be ignored. It however, limits itself to the material or tangible domain consistent with their view of the world.
How feasible is it to render African history to the total exclusion of the African’s Cosmology, world-view and philosophy? Virtually all of his thinking was premised on perceived “superstations”, as adjudged by those coming from a limited world of materiality.
Time certainly lies ahead when it shall be appreciated that African historical experiences may not be fully comprehended and interpreted outside of grappling with intangible phenomena. It is then that people will appreciate the triple phenomena of cosmic reality (or perceptions) and cosmologies that underpinned African thinking and behaviour. Then and only then, shall we begin to see beyond the racially induced perceptions of African thinking and doing as comprising no more than mere superstition.
Let us return to Reverend Moffat. He observed, and correctly so, that King Mzilikazi Khumalo met his chief men in the cattle fold. To him that record constituted a full story as this was indeed what he observed Ndebele men and their king to be doing. Without traversing the intangible world of the African one would wonder why the king and his men endured the unpleasant conditions within a cattle byre (fold). This lack of understanding or knowledge of African Cosmology lies behind such unfortunate dismals.
The cattle fold, during the times of King Mzilikazi Khumalo, was located at the centre of a circular cluster of homesteads (Central Cattle Pattern, CCP). Cattle were a precious possession, not only in material terms but more so on spiritual terms. Some cattle, particularly black bulls, assumed spiritual significance. Black is a colour of peace which bears spiritual significance. A black bull represents the critical interface and overlapping of the two African world dimensions, the spiritual and the physical.
It is an interface to be found at different levels. Man himself is the microcosm of the same dual reality. He is material and spiritual, actually more spiritual than material. At the macro level, this again happens to be the case. The material world interfaces and overlaps with the spiritual world, a world not understood in spatial dimensions. Such conceptualisations by Africans have some bearing on the Earth-Heaven dichotomy. This is important for the understanding of the spiritual significance of the cattle fold which was, to the Ndebele man, what the temple was to a Jew.
Spirituality pervaded all of the Ndebele people’s spheres of life and all they thought and did, including their behaviour. Spirituality facilitated success. Prayer or propitiation lay at the centre of spiritual invocation or facilitation. Important issues that the king discussed with his men had a bearing on the welfare of the entire citizenry and the continued life of the State. What better way of praying could there have been than meeting and discussing national issues within a spirit-infused site, the cattle fold? To understand this demands more than merely stating that the cattle fold was a spiritual site.
Physical and cultural landscapes and objects may be infused with spirituality and thus acquire a societally recognised sacredness. It is a sacredness that may be negated or defiled within the context of actions of man or other agencies. In terms of such sacredness and defilement, ‘‘man giveth and man taketh away’’. Within the context of a cattle fold its sacredness was premised on the maintenance of certain conditions or the prevention or absence of desecrating conditions as perceived by the family or the community at large.
What Reverend Moffat observed was testimony to a link between patriarchy and the control of spirituality. Reverend Moffat correctly observed that it was men only that commiserated within the cattle fold. The spiritually significant site within a homestead was the male domain. Men courted spiritual legitimation for their positions of social and economic privilege. It was politics of seclusion and disempowerment which had to be accompanied by legitimating something that would otherwise have seen men do with a sense of guilt.
We have argued before that man does not kill man. His conscience will simply not allow him to do so. What then happens is that man must successfully dehumanise the man he wishes to kill. This absolves his conscience from a sense of guilt. “Uyinja wena, ngizakubulala!” You are a dog, I will kill you. This is what happens everywhere in this world.
It is against the same background that slavery of the black race was perpetrated. Westerners were not enslaving fellow men. Rather, they were enslaving a subhuman people, a people not like them after successfully dehumanising them. The same is true of colonisation. Only those that were successfully dehumanised were mowed down in colonial wars.
