Cultural Heritage with Pathisa Nyathi
IN the night sky, there are numerous objects that we see lighting up the sky. These inevitably include some objects or bodies that do not give light of their own. We see them because they reflect light from the stars and other luminous objects, within which there are chemical reactions that result in the production of heat and white light among other forms of energy.
A queen may reflect the aura from the king, her husband who, after death, the Queen has nothing to reflect. It is apparent that sometimes our ancestors used the same name for all luminous and non-luminous objects.
Planets, the strong candidates for habitability in space alongside the moons, do not produce light of their own. Instead, they reflect light from the sun that is the nearest star to the planets. The sun is the centre of the solar system and around which planets and their moons reflect the light. Indeed, when the moon or planet has the light from the sun blocked, we can’t see it.
Eclipses, full or partial, are a result of some objects not producing light and that objects are opaque. On the 26th of this month, we had the last eclipse of the year 2022. Beautiful pictures of the phenomenon depicted the moon taking a bite at the sun.
It was a phenomenon that displayed the perfect circularity of both cosmic objects. When we deal with the moon, we shall make reference to lunar and solar eclipses and how these were perceived by Africans.
The perceptions held led to cultural practices, some of which had dire consequences on the cultural activities. Communities behave as they believe. Cultural activities are born of the worldview of a community. The bodies we shall begin with are the comets.
These, in particular, the one that appeared in 1910 and was referred to by the Ndebele people as “the star with a tail,” inkanyezi elomsila. Its categorisation as a star was on the basis of the light that it reflected and not emitted.
When cosmic events of a rare kind occur, they are documented in several ways. One way may be to give relevant names. Such rare events characterise a particular year rather than a month. So and so was born during the year when a star with a tail appeared. The event was recorded in the names of individuals, such as uNkanyezi. Whenever one bore such a name, it was a pointer to the year of his/her birth — 1910 for example.
But what is a comet beyond what our ancestors made of it? It is important that what a community believes is what matters rather than what other people believe. Their behaviour, which is real by the way, is what matters. It’s not a question about it being true or false. A community’s behaviour is underpinned by their knowledge or perceptions and beliefs. Nothing short of new beliefs and knowledge will sway them.
Comets are icy bodies found within the Solar System, which when they pass near the Sun, warm up and begin to release gasses, a process that is referred to as outgassing. A comet has a nucleus of rocks, or an amalgamation of rock, rock dust, water ice, frozen carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and ammonia — a kind of dirty snowballs.
The comet that is best remembered is Halley’s Comet, which blazed through the night sky in 1910. It was so spectacular a cosmic phenomenon, some Ndebele persons born in that year were named oNkanyezi in reference to a star with a “tail.” In reality, it was not a star but the Ndebele saw it as such, just like the “Morning Star” is not a star, but a planet that reflects light from the white star — the sun. A comet has a gas tail, a tail that also has dust.
Let us now turn to the UFOs, the Unidentified Flying Objects, sometimes referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Astronauts and cosmonauts flying into space have reported sighting such strange objects. Some have seen military objects over the Ukrainian skies where a war is raging and thought they were UFOs/UAPs. Apparently, there is a lot of mysticism, magic and spirituality that are associated with UFOs.
There are people who see these as testimonies to the aliens existing on planets in outer space. The main characteristic of UFOs is that they cannot immediately be identified, nor can they be explained.
That does not come as a surprise. Science, in its modern form, has been around for over a century and yet there remains more of what it has not identified nor explained. I think there is a long way to anything near understanding our Earth, let alone the universe comprising quintillions of stars and other cosmic objects and bodies.
Where knowledge is lacking, humans seek to offer possible explanations and interpretations. For them to be on top of the world, they think they must understand the phenomena surrounding them.
At the same time, some will posit that what they know wins the day and other people are engaging in hoaxes conjecture, delusions and interesting fantasies.
They are superstitious and everything negative about them. Such we have in our communities of human beings — the arrogant, the self-seeking, the pompous and self-appointed Mr Know-it-all gatekeepers of universal knowledge. I refuse and will refuse until I undertake the return and final journey.
The presence of crop circles, which we shall deal with later, is sometimes thought to be through the agency of powers and magical and mystical forces that abound in outer space. The bottom line is that, we are not humble enough to accept that we do not have the requisite knowledge to explain and interpret the strange phenomena that seem to be a reflection of the universal building blocks of nature, the circle and its geometric variations.
Other cosmic bodies are identified as meteorites. These bodies from space fall to the surface of the Earth. Meteorites are solid pieces of debris from an object such as a comet, or asteroid that originates in outer space, their final stage, before which they were referred to as meteoraiks. Meteoroids are either metal or rock and they too, like planets, orbit the sun. Sometimes they survive their passage through the atmosphere to reach the surface of a planet or moon.
Chemically, a meteorite consists of nickel or iron with small amounts of sulphides (remember the distinguishable smell of iron sulphide, the smell of rotten eggs) and carbide minerals.
So, there is quite a high chance that some cosmic bodies have in their chemical compositions, metals that current and feature technologies may require.
With time, the Scramble for Outer Space will intensify in the same manner the Scramble for Africa intensified during the colonial project. New technologies will create new demands for minerals that exist in outer space.
Advanced technology will build space ships that will get to these bodies. I might arrive there earlier-never mind how. The end justifies the means. At no time would I volunteer to take a free or paid ride on their space ships.
In the next article, we shall deal with the asteroids that sometimes, like frequent solar flares, pose a real threat to the Earth environment together with its life forms including both flora and fauna. We shall look at the dinosaurs that are thought to have become extinct following an asteroid fall that hit the Earth.
The oldest dinosaur on the African continent has been found in Zimbabwe, somewhere near Muzarabani and appropriately named Mbiresaurus raathi. Do you see the Shona name there? What sane mother or father would name her/his baby after something totally unrelated to her/his environment, the immediate terrestrial one in particular? Just imagine the once oil-keeping creature had been found in Tsholotsho. Its ideal name would have been Zhuwanosaurus hhowu.