The Sunday News
Cultural Heritage, Phathisa Nyathi
THE enduring theme in the 25-plus articles that we have written to date is food, and more specifically food as a cultural expression. Food becomes part of a community’s cosmological make-up and reality. For food to be adopted, belong and become part of a community’s cuisine, it acquires new meanings beyond its nutritional value. In short, food, in its multifarious aspects, mirrors the community that has adopted it.
African knowledge and beliefs identify stages in the development of an individual when he/she is vulnerable and would require cultural interventions to ward off threats to his/her being. The said vulnerability may pose a threat to one’s life. We do know that one preoccupation of traditional Africans was to ensure sustainability or endlessness and perpetuity of life. It was against this backdrop that witches and wizards were a feared and hated lot within communities.
We did indicate in some earlier articles that the emergence of a new moon was cause for celebration and among the Bakalanga in particular, there was a long poetic rendition that welcomed the new moon: “Hoya mwedzi wagala, wagala panahhunduntule . . .” The brightness of the moon has come and is driving away darkness, which is here symbolised as the pitch black ground hornbill (hhunduntule). Darkness represents night time when there is no moon and this is the time that is ideal for witches/wizards to prowl and undertake errands to ply their nocturnal business.
The emergence of the new moon, just as dawn, heralds doom to the nefarious escapades of witches/wizards. The disappointment of witches brings happiness to the general populace. That is the essence of the Kalanga incantation that heralds the appearance of the new moon. In essentially the same vein, the Ndebele welcome the appearance of a new moon and request it to take away diseases, inevitably these are diseases caused by witches/wizards. They shout,” Kholiwe, hamba lomkhuhlane!”
We need to identify the critical stages when individuals are most vulnerable and see what was done in order to deal with those conditions. The stages of human development include the following: purification (at birth), initiation, adulthood, marriage and death. These stages, sometimes referred to as rites of passage, are attended with a lot of cultural interventions. Food inevitably entered the realm of a community’s cosmology.
The first stage, that of child birth, was attended by several cultural interventions at the medicinal or herbal and food levels.
There were taboos calculated to avoid the possibility of both mother and baby losing their lives. This was a very important stage as it laid the foundation of facilitating the perpetuity of a community. If there were conditions that negated birth, be it through the agency of witches through their malevolent interventions, the critical process would be negated, thus posing a threat to the ideas of endlessness and perpetuity (fertility).
Let us digress a bit and link the ideas that are being unpacked here and relate them to iron smelting of the Iron Recently, an informant told by his father when he was still a child, that he used to get material, actually byproducts of the smelting process (manyilo). These were collected and scattered in a crop field during sowing of seeds. In fact, the byproducts were referred to as “seed” used during the sowing of crop seeds. For one who is au feit with African Thought, it is easy to understand and appreciate what the old man was doing and why he was doing it.
New technology was domesticated so that it sat well with the cosmology, worldview and belief systems of a community. The idea of endlessness or perpetuity was infused into the new technology which some people perceived as a mere chemical process which reduced iron oxide to molten iron which the iron smiths used to fashion various artifacts associated with the Iron Age farmers and pastoralists.
When it came to operationalising the idea of endlessness and perpetuity, the African places sexual reproduction at the centre.
Ritual killings should be perceived in the same way. The iron smelting machinery was so structured as to present both the male and female principles. The bellows were the male side while the furnace symbolised the female’s womb. Out of the symbolised sexual processes came the iron and its byproducts. The byproducts are infused with acquired qualities of perpetuity resulting from the symbolised sexual act.
Those that are quick to see through the process will immediately see that this is no different from ritual killings. Those who ply the trade of ritual killings are in actual fact seeking after the ‘‘seed’’ that is resident is certain parts of the human body, the generative cells contained in the sexual organs — the ova from women and sperms for men. While within the biological realm the ‘‘seed’’ is alive, or was alive till the person was killed, in the technological or cultural realm we are dealing with symbolised ‘‘seed’’ from the symbolised sexual act.
For us to begin to appreciate these apparently hidden African worldviews we need to get into the mind of the African. Then we are in a position to appreciate the bases of his cultural practices such as obtaining “seed” from an iron smelting site to use in a crop field to achieve the same idea resident in sexual reproduction ie fertility which is expressed through acquired technology: continuity, perpetuity and endlessness.
We have expressed this idea of seeking to understand the cosmological foundations of the several cultural practices. For as long as we do not unpack this idea, we shall continue to remain external to the African world in its totality. This is exacerbated by the fact that scholarship is informed by Western culture which posits a material and physical world. Their academic disciplines such as archaeology are concerned with the study of material objects, in the main. Whatever interpretations proceed from archaeological findings are informed by perceptions of a material world. Of course there are moves to unearth the intangible cultural heritage with material object.
This happens not to be the case with the African perceptions of the environment. The African posits both material and spiritual realms. The African world is thus more complex, more diverse and more expansive as it has to deal with interactions and relationships between the two worlds or realms, which is not the case with the western world. The science that is peddled in the western world is one that is understood within the reality of materiality. The other half of the African world is not fully appreciated or grasped, nor is it approached with empathy and objectivity. Sadly, African academics have shied away from telling Afrocentric perceptions of the world, but instead seek academic belonging and authentication by professing a diminished world of westerners.
Well, we were going to deal with cultural interventions at the various stages of human development. The necessary digression we took has meant that we could not reach the target we had set. Next week we shall revert to the ideas that we had originally set to unpack within the African cosmological context.
