FREDDY Silva travelled to Africa to get an African perspective of a phenomenon that was experienced and perplexed European minds. He was not the first to undertake such trips to African communities to learn something or two. Pythagoras from Greece had been another such man searching for African knowledge.
In his particular case, he was keen to get African views relating to the phenomena known as crop circles. These occurred in several parts of the world and perplexed the minds of many a thinker or philosopher. As usual, the Africans were regarded as pagans with little knowledge. In the absence of plausible interpretations, the pagans were the last resort to visit and get their side of the story.
As the name suggests, from time to time perfectly circular depressions appeared in crop fields. These were seen mostly in wheat and barley crop fields in the case of Europe. In Africa, they appeared in sorghum and millet crop fields (both pearl and finger millets). Once maize had been introduced to the African continent in the 17th Century by the Portuguese seafarers, the phenomenon did not however, occur in maize crop fields.
There has been some speculation that maize was not indigenous to Africa as compared to the small grain crops mentioned above. Archaeological excavations at a site in Nabta Playa on the border between Egypt and the Sudan revealed the presence of the small grains that were indigenous to Africa for over five thousand years.
Apparently, the emerging perfect circular designs did not have crops cut off or cleared. Instead, the crops were flattened and did, after some time, rise up once again. In other words, there were no crop destructions, other than the temporary circular design patches that appeared on crop fields. Negative geotropism of the growing crops ensured they resurrected once again, but after the African people had deciphered and inculcated the artistic message(s) that they believed were being expressed to them by the Star God.
There is possibly another explanation for the phenomenon revealing itself in sorghum and millet crop fields in Africa. Both sorghum and millet crops have thinner and more pliable stalks, which will bend to the force of powerful wind blowing over them.
The stalks will bend without breaking, a feat that the thicker and more fragile maize stalks will not execute.
In Europe, it was believed some circular disc-shaped force descended upon the centre of a crop field. In compliance to the circle-inducing force, the crops were forced to go down and create designs, in almost all cases geometric, in congruence to the blowing wind induced by the circular disc-shaped flattening force.
It is very possible that this kind of Euro-centric explanation and interpretation belongs to the recent past. It is most unlikely that in the ancient past they would have advanced such views, probably unique with respect to the views of people in other parts of the world.
My own view from many decades of observations is that the ancients, regardless of their race, ethnicity and skin colour, advanced a similar worldview or cosmology.
I was to learn, when I looked closely at the Stonehenge, an iconic English cultural landscape, since declared as a World Heritage Site (WHS) that the ancients shared common ideas relating to and linking the same phenomena and ideas such as circularity, spirituality, transience and eternity, stones, tombs and cemeteries, and ideas about celestial bodies, their movement and how their movements and position in the firmament impacted on both nature and culture on Earth.
This was true of the Incas, the Aztecs, the Mayans and indeed the Africans with their circular megaliths as found at Nabta Playa, Naboritunga near Lake Turkana in Kenya, Adam’s Altar near Nelspruit in Mpumalanga, South Africa and Terre Batch in Gambia.
It is the link and association between monuments such as temples, pyramids and royal palaces that, through petroglyphs, architecture, sculpture and other visual arts renditions, provided the hidden knowledge, information and interpretations. A special kind of people were the privileged class that possessed the knowledge with which to interpret the secret knowledge of the ancients.
The kings and chiefs (and their royal palaces), the priests/spiritual individuals (and their temples) and both categories (and their tombs, cromlechs and pyramids) that were privileged to possess insights into the hidden meanings.
For Africa in particular, it was spirituality that lay at the centre of communication between the builders of monuments and the creators of various designs, that is, the ancients and current generations.
Spirituality was a veritable medium for the intergenerational transmission of ancient knowledge, information and skills to future generations. As we shall see later, it was this spiritually controlled medium that Silva accessed when he came to southern Africa to gain access to ancient knowledge regarding crop circles.
For very long, I have been pontificating about some decorative designs in southern Africa. The designs, ranging from the circle to whorls and spirals are a secret writing or communication patterns of art that expresses critical messages beyond their superficial and first level role as expressions of beauty or aesthetics.
One of the two dual roles has been lost in the thick mists of time and history. The messages were dimmed in the mists of time while the aesthetic components endured.
The chevron pattern is beautiful because of the African elements of aesthetics. However, their critical underlying messages being announced have been lost.
Ancients posited that the earlier generations of gods possessed knowledge, greater knowledge than that of current generations. The knowledge sometimes does come couched in a verbal language.
Instead, art in its various manifestations and expressions is used to transmit knowledge and information aesthetically, which is to say effortlessly.
One learns through entertainment and consumption of engrossing art.
It is against this background at a time when some communities have experienced the waning of the role of spirituality in accessing the stores of preserved ancient knowledge and information stores, that conservative Africa has remained steadfast.
While it is acknowledged that African Spirituality (AS) is under severe onslaught in order to produce a pliant African who, when instructed to jump, his only response is, “how high, my Lord?” However, there have been and continue to be pockets of resistance that are accessing ancient knowledge and information without which ancient monuments are difficult if not impossible to explain, let alone to interpret.
Modern man has to wear the cultural lenses of the ancient creators and generators of knowledge in order to see in a monument what the creators, designers, builders and users saw and intended in the monuments.
To do otherwise is to engage in beautiful conjecture and excellent speculation. Arrogance, pride, conceit and empty egos propel us towards rich futility.
This sort of detour that we have taken has hopefully provided some background to African perceptions of crop circles that Freddy Silva sought from one man who we recognise, some of us at least, as the epitome and doyen of expressions of African Spirituality-Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa arguably the leading isanuse from southern Africa.
It is pertinent to give some background to the man so that we begin to appreciate the manifestations and maturity of his spiritual endowment and hence his possession of vast ancient knowledge which scholars from the West sought to imbibe. Michael Tellinger, David Aicke and many more visited the man of knowledge while his own people saw very little merit and wisdom in what he was professing and pontificating.
They were just too busy shouting to the high heavens the holy slogan, “How high, Nkosi?”
It is to the historical background of Credo Mutwa that we shall turn to in the next article to provide some explanatory background to his encounter with a leading researcher into the seemingly strange and curious phenomenon of crop circles, Terry Silva.