Cultural Heritage with Pathisa Nyathi
WE have, for quite some time now, been focusing attention on domestication of animal and grass species, a process that revolutionised human existence and led to the creation of world civilisations. Food security is important when it comes to political stability, peace and development.
From the perspective of African cultural astronomy, we saw heightened attention to cosmic bodies, particularly the nearest celestial body, the sun. Proximity of a cosmic body to earth increases its impact on Mother Earth. The members of the solar system (planets and their moons) inevitably exert greater and stronger influences on the earth.
The same goes for our moon that is under the influences of both the sun and the earth. Farther away, cosmic bodies exert less influence on Planet Earth. All the same, some influences may not be easy to detect. The Dogon people of Mali tracked the movement of the Dog Star (Sirius) and yet it is a faraway celestial body.
Cosmic bodies announce and pronounce impending events including the onset of rains, which took on a greater significance after domestication of grasses and wild animals. Of necessity, the agriculturalists who were no longer subsisting on hunting and gathering, sought to get more hints and expressions from cosmic bodies.
Farmers and herders did appreciate that cosmic bodies were important astronomical calendars and harbingers of coming events ranging from pestilence to good harvests. In some cases, the coming events were catastrophic. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. With heightened dependence on a broader environment, both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, there emerged new religious and spiritual ideas that constituted new ideologies.
Rain deities emerged and controlled relations between humans and the wider environment. It was acknowledged that rains were important. Spirituality that hinged on cultural interventions to induce rain to fall were introduced. New conservation strategies and measures informed and underpinned by spirituality were introduced. Spirituality and religion were to the service of humanity and not the other way round.
Domesticated goats
The benefits of a more secure lifestyle headlined a litany of measures all calculated to preserve and protect the environment. Observances hitherto unknown were introduced. All this was informed by the realization that agriculture and animal husbandry were depended upon the availability of rains, availability of grazing areas, water for domesticated animals and nutrients in the soil.
While there were newly introduced cultural interventions, the importance of livestock brought in its wake, wars and raids over the new resources. This, in turn, led to alterations to the built environment in order to provide security to the domesticated animals. The Central Cattle Pattern (CCP) saw cattle pens being centrally located with huts surrounding them. The cattle byres were assured of protection and security.
Cattle assumed some pride of place within communities. They became the mobile currency and markers of wealth. Several ideas were generated to guide gendered, political, social and economic practices. Those who raided for cattle became rich and ascended the echelons of power structures. The king became the richest man in the land.
Because of his cattle wealth, he was able to marry several queens. His large numbers of children extended his boundaries of influence and entrenched his power. The princesses got married to powerful and rich men who, by virtue of being sons-in-law, owed allegiance to the king. The sons too enhanced the political and social influence of the king.
Trade in grain increased. New technologies were innovated in order to enhance productivity. Some of these technologies emanated from spiritual ideas. A good example was the use of nodules derived from iron smelting sites. Iron smelting was couched in fertility terms. The furnace containing charcoal and iron oxide (hematite) constituted the female part of the industrial process. The bellows on the other hand were perceived as the male constituent.
The nodules, known in TjiKalanga as manyilo, were thus endowed with fertility attributes. The nodules were scattered in a crop field in the belief that their imbued fertility attributes would be transferred to the crops in the field. These and several other ideologies emerged after domestication of what hitherto had been grasses growing in the wild. The far-reaching changes were wrought at family, community and societal levels. The changes influenced several aspects of life: social, cultural, economic, and spiritual.
In some communities the desire to ensure adequate rainfall led, as was the case in the Matobo Hills, to the emergence of rain shrines such as Njelele, the most preeminent in the hierarchy of rain shrines that included Ntogwa near Ramakwebane, Manyangwa, Zhilo (Zhamu), Dula and many others. Some of these shrines performed other roles beyond rain inducement. Controlling or influencing rain gave a leader political and economic power.
What would emerge after the construction of rain-related ideologies was increasing knowledge and understanding of cultural astronomy. There was time to commence the rituals at the Njelele Rain Shrine. That came after the initial rituals at the local level. Representatives of the local people undertook took errands to the Njelele Rain Shrine where they delivered tobacco, skins of some small beautiful animals, black calico and African traditional beer
Knowledge of cultural astronomy became handy especially with regard to the calendar of events throughout the year. The spiritual adepts kept watch over the emergence of Pleiades (isilimela) as these were the stars that marked the commencement of the New Year and the onset of the rains.
Women brewers of consecrated spiritual beer arrived at the site to start the brewing process. To have them stay at the shrine and away from their homes was a way to ensure they retained the necessary spiritual purity. It was a requirement that they stayed away from defiling sexual activity.
Traditional beer
If the Pleiades were already known, their heightened significance focused the spotlight on the celestial bodies. Spiritual persons kept watch over the emergence and advance of the group of stars. Cleansing the shrine was important. That meant refurbishing the grass thatch, removing the fallen leaves using stone chips and placing them on black calico.
The cleansing was restricted to a few people who were close to the shrine. Otherwise, spirit adepts, amawosana, from afar, attended the other stages. The catchment for the shrine was large and concentrated, in the main, in the drier parts of the country.
Singing and dancing commenced with the Woso dance acquired from the San who were the original custodians of the shrine, much as they still do in the Tsodilo Hills in Botswana where they retreated. At the centre of all these rituals and ceremonies was the cultural intervention calculated to sustain the environment so that it yielded rains to sustain agriculture in the Iron Age when hunting and gathering were no longer the primary economic activities.
It is difficult to know how domestication of livestock left out some animal species. Cattle were domesticated, whereas it was not the case with buffalos. What challenges were encountered in trying to domesticate buffalos? The same goes for the species of birds. Chickens were domesticated but not the partridges, izikhwehle. The mechanics may be eluding us. Why was the process discontinued? Are there no animal and grass species today that may still be domesticated?
We need to look at the changes that took place following domestication. Hunting and gathering are arduous tasks that consume a lot of time. Human effort was thus channeled towards these economic endeavours that ensured livelihoods. We learn something regarding adoption of new practices.
As we always argue in this column, cultural practices are underpinned and informed by higher considerations-thought, worldview, beliefs, cosmology and philosophy. In all communities there already exist ideologies crafted in the past in accordance with the life styles. Anything new has to come backed by a legitimating and authenticating ideology.
Where this does not happen, the new ways become foreign bodies without incorporation and integration. Rejection is the most likely outcome. The new and the old must relate in a way that ensures the new is not rejected. This is an important consideration when development issues are tackled. There must always be efforts to move from the known, integrate the new to the old, and adapt the new to the old which provides the all-necessary and important foundation on which the new rest and find connectedness and rootedness.
It was the same with food. It was not just about the nutritional value of food. Rather, there were attendant cultural considerations attending to food beyond its nutritional value. Definitely missing from considerations was aesthetics in the case of Africans. It was more important to express cultural ideas in the food matrix than to embellish food containers and have decorative arrangements of food.
Instead, Africans had ideas to express and chose to express them though food. Age was represented and expressed. Equally, gender was expressed and entrenched. A carcass was perceived in social, cultural and economic terms. Beef cuts were so distributed as to express chosen ideas. There were cuts for royalty, cuts for women, and cuts for children. A community is reflected and mirrored on a beast. For example, its head expressed patriarchy. Women who were not heads of households were not expected to consume meat from a beast’s head. They were not heads, seems to have been the argument. In fact, one could learn quite a lot from the tradition of distributing meat cuts among the Ndebele people. A walking beast carries cultural, political, social and economic expressions of Ndebele society.
I encouraged him to proceed in the full knowledge that what he intended to do was tantamount to unravelling, through a beast, virtually all aspects of Ndebele culture and how it has and continues to change as it is bludgeoned by foreign and exotic cultures.