The Sunday News
Pathisa Nyathi
IN the last article we started looking at amalobolo/roora with a microscopic eye. We argued that amalobolo/roora facilitate the establishment of the most important social institution, that of marriage. It is a basic social institution that should be perceived as lying at the root of continuity and perpetuity of the family, group, community and indeed society.
We said we were going to use both Ndebele and Shona cultural practices to unravel and unearth the philosophical underpinnings of amalobolo/roora. Our argument is that the mechanical aspects of amalobolo/roora may differ between the two societies and yet at the level of philosophical underpinnings the two are closely related if not identical.
The differing cultural practices surrounding the practice of amalobolo/roora are the same. It is at that level, as we argued in an earlier article, that our African-ness is expressed. It is appealing to such unifying aspects that we should hope to bring about unity among African societies – from the Xhosa of South to the Fulani of Nigeria.
The stance we took is that cultural practices and expressions, including the arts, rituals, ceremonies, festive events and even the organisation of space are expressions of cognitive or mental processes. Voluntary or conscious behaviour is in response to the mind. Before a ritual is performed, or a village laid out or society organised in a particular way, all this must initially be created in the mind and then expressed externally as cultural behaviour.
We do know for example that the BaKalanga had by the 11th Century established a socially stratified complex society in south western Zimbabwe at places such as Mapela near the confluence of the Shashane and Shashe rivers. Terraces made from free standing stone walls with curved kerbs provided platforms where houses with solid dhaka floors were built. It is important to note that these houses (cone on cylinder) were not built from stone, but clay and grass thatch-typical Kalanga house architecture. But a myth bordering on lore has been created that dzimbahwe is a Shona word meaning houses of stone!
For our purposes though, what is important is that the Zimbabwe culture was essentially an ideological transformation. Either the changes (stone walls, dhaka floors, sacred leadership, altitudinal expressions of socio-economic and political hierarchies were internally driven or results of copied ideas from external sources but adapted to be in harmony with indigenous value preferences and priorities.
Those human settlements that have survived to this day are archival documents from our past. Their careful study should reveal a lot of knowledge and information about the cultures of the people who occupied them. Similarly, language is an important archive of our past. What our ancestors did and thought is retained in our language. In other words, language is a repository of our past — our ideas and cultural practices.
If we claim that Kalanga society was socially stratified with the elite living on hilltops and their immediate subordinates in terraced platforms and the low classes (commoners) in the flats down below, that reality should exist in their language. Indeed, we found this to be so when we interviewed Khesari Nthoyiwa Sibanda (See Nyathi, 2014 Dickson Netsha Sibanda).
Sibanda, in reference to Mapungubwe said:
Bohhe bagele dombo
BoNthoyiwa bagele dombo
BoTjibumba bagele dombo
Zwilanda zwigele pasi kuBambanalo
Essentially, what Khesari was expressing was a settlement reality of the 13th Century. The royal elite (Bohhe) lived on Mapungubgwe hill top. Other members of the elite (BoTjibumba, BoNthoyiwa also lived high up, probably on the terraced platforms below the hill top) while the servants (zwilanda)and commoners occupied the lower hills and flats. Significantly, this reality is still archived in the language of the BaKalanga!
You may now be wondering where amalobolo/roora come in into all this. Our argument is that a careful excavation of the cultural practices will unravel much more than its philosophical underpinnings to reveal more knowledge and information on the societies that embraced the culture of amalobolo/roora. Cultural practices and expressions provide keys that unlock the mind, the very ideological reality at work to create and sustain cultural practices.
We shall make use of a few examples to illustrate the point. Amalobolo/roora are paid to the parents of the girl being married. This is true of patriarchal and patrilineal societies where men are the domineering heads of households and lineage is reckoned along the male line. The males are the patriarchs of society. The girl belongs to the male side and not the mother side. We are able to arrive at this conclusion by merely looking at who receives amalobolo/roora. We shall amplify this when we talk about inkomo yohlanga/mombe youmai.
In fact, unless the groom’s people pay amalobolo/roora the offspring from the marriage belongs to the mother’s people, the maternal grandfather. This is so among the Ndebele and when the children are grown up; the son-in-law may not charge amalobolo/roora on children that do not belong to him. In that case the eldest girl’s amalobolo/roora is given to the father-in-law’s family. That way the rest of the children would have been set free (ukuhlenga) and the poor son-in-law is henceforth free to receive amalobolo/roora for the rest of the girls.
Cattle constitute the single largest component of amalobolo/roora. The Shona will refer to the beats as danga (isibaya). The Ndebele, on the other hand, will refer to izinkomo zamalobolo. The bottom line is that cattle were the mode of payment. From that practice we know we are here dealing with a society that practised animal husbandry and regarded cattle as a source of wealth.
The number of beasts was never fixed in both societies. There were factors that resulted in variations. For example, the royal princesses’ father, that is the king, received more cattle for them. Socio-economic and political status were revealed by the number of cattle demanded. The son-in-law, by virtue of marrying a royal princess, was accessing crumbs from the royal table and political trappings from the royal seat.
Critically important here is the fact that we are able to work out all these societal realities and complexities from the mere scrutiny of the practice of amalobolo/roora.
This to say the practice of amalobolo/roora is a mirror of society within which it operates.
We get to the mind or worldview, philosophy and ideology of the society indirectly by studying its cultural expressions be it architecture, cultural practices such as rituals and ceremonies or indeed any other forms of artistic expression.
Indeed excavations on several if not all Zimbabwe culture archaeological sites have yielded faunal remains in particular those of a bovine (cattle) nature. Last year’s archaeological researches conducted at Mapela did yield faunal remains and vitrified cow dung. Cattle, danga/isibaya were a source of wealth. The remains were found alongside glass beads (external trade goods from the East African coast) and indigenous ceramic finds which point to Mapela being older than Mapungubgwe as it flourished from the 11th Century AD till the 13th Century AD , (Chirikure et al 2014).
The conduct of amalobolo/roora are an ideologically based echo from that distant past and help us, when carefully and objectively studied, to dissect and unpack that past, in particular the primary ideologies that helped shape and organise society. It is a past that resides in our language and cultural practices and expressions.
