The Sunday Mail
Pathisa Nyathi: Tracing African Roots
On 29 November (2015) I read in The Sunday Mail an article penned by Flora Teckie on the Baha’i Faith. The article gave an interesting Baha’i perspective of life after life.
It was particularly of interest to me in that there were similarities between the Baha’i Faith and what is espoused by African Traditional Spirituality (ATS) which has ideas regarding the same subject.
Ideas about life after life or life after death have exercised the minds of several communities and individuals over the ages. Such ideas have informed and influenced many cultural practices. Today’s article seeks to unravel umbuyiso, a ritual practised by the Ndebele people of Zimbabwe.
May we, at the very outset, reiterate that our approach in dealing with African cultural practices seeks to identify and interrogate the underlying meanings or cosmological underpinnings.
When this is done we begin to see similarities in African thought among the African communities. As we have argued before, our Africanness is a shared trait at the level of worldview and underlying beliefs rather than skin colour or being domiciled on the African continent.
Sadly, many people researching on Africans have concentrated on cultural practices or procedures at the expense of fundamental beliefs that inform behaviour.
Writing about some historians and anthropologists, Ambuya Muhera said, “… others focus on procedures without understanding the reasoning (meaning) behind those procedures (2915:35).”
African Traditional Spirituality should be explained so that we all read from the same hymn book.
Once again, we turn to Mbuya Muhera for elucidation. “African Traditional Spirituality refers to the belief system of the indigenous Africans regarding the nature of reality and the world of spirit (Op cit: 38).”
Scholars have used the term African Traditional Religion (ATR) but sadly the term does not capture the spiritual nature inherent in ATS. African Traditional Spirituality has been around from the very beginning of humanity and contrasts fundamentally with the modern proselytising religions such as Christianity and Islam which are young, at the age of about two thousand years.
The manner in which the modern religions are organised and structured differs from African Traditional Spirituality. Besides, African Traditional Spirituality pervaded all aspects of human life; it was omnipresent.
Before we deal with umbuyiso we need to clarify a few issues so that we understand the concept better. African thought posits that humans comprise both material and spiritual components. Human life is ephemeral or transient. Africans used to believe that at death the spirit uncoupled itself from the body which is the material component.
The spirit moves to the spiritual realm where it joins other spirits in the same lineage. It is important to realise that we are here not talking about a long journey to some physical location. It’s some distance in spiritual terms which is about accessing a non-physical realm; the spiritual sphere.
Some excavation of the language used to refer to death will reveal the dual character of human beings. When one dies the Ndebele people will say ‘usedlule’, he has passed on. Clearly, this is not a reference to the body, for it has gone nowhere.
This is a reference to the spirit which has exited the material world and gone to the spiritual realm. Another term that is used is ‘usethule’, he has gone silent. Here there is reference not to the departed spirit but the remaining body which will speak no more. Another term equally used is ‘usehambile’; he has gone, walked on.
Once again, what has gone after the divorce of the duo is the spirit. What is being underscored here is the fact that the spirit has left the world, the material world that is, on a journey to another plane, the spiritual one. Language expresses a people’s culture of which it is a repository, including beliefs, worldviews and cosmologies.
It is acknowledged that the divorced two entities still share something in common. The departing spirit is provided with funerary items that are used by the human being during life on earth. As a result, Africans place various items on the grave for the sake of the departing spirit.
Some plants may be placed on the grave to reinforce the conferment of immortality of the spirit. Lineages do this in various ways.
The spirit should not wander aimlessly. To assist it locates kith and kin the relatives of the deal will place the body in a particular orientation in the grave. The body may be so positioned that the corpse’s head faces the direction of the rising sun.
The rising sun symbolises regeneration and rebirth both of which concepts are traits of the immortal spirit. Further, the face may have to look in the direction of migration of the particular clan. We have in fact given you the burial practices of the Nyathi (Babirwa) people of Gwanda South who migrated into the south western part of Zimbabwe from South Africa in the first quarter of the 19th Century. When the body of a Nyathi person is so oriented her spirit is assisted to locate its kith and kin in the complex and vast spirit world.
In fact, it becomes an important consideration when the pall bearers are chosen. Total strangers will not assist the spirit of the dead to navigate the journey to the spiritual realm.
This was not unique to the Nyathi people. Even in ancient Egypt the pharaohs’ tombs were aligned in a particular way and there were tunnels oriented in a particular way to help guide the migrating spirit. Pyramid writings also assisted the Pharaoh’s spirit to get into the right direction towards the intended destination in a particular stellar constellation.
Africans, being a functional or utilitarian people, derived benefits from the departed spirit which turned into an active dead (Aeneas Chigwedere’s parlance or the living dead (John Mbiti’s terminology). The eternal spirit is indestructible and powerful.
It has access to knowledge which living human beings cannot access. That the dead were sometimes buried under stone was to symbolise the spirit’s eternal quality. Rock represents solidity and eternity. Even when Africans were not using stone-built pyramids, a headstone was driven into the ground to symbolise the idea of solidity and continuity. Sometimes a smaller tombstone was placed at the feet of the dear departed.
Among the Nyati Shonga (Makoni) people of Rusape their kings were buried in mountain caves. The bodies were embalmed through the use of a fire that emitted slow heat. A mountain has spiritual significance and differs from lower ground. The cave, sometimes being dome-shaped, accentuated the spiritual character of the site where the chief’s body was buried. So it was among the Ndebele. The king was buried in a cave on a mountain. The remains of King Mzilikazi were interred on Entumbane Hill, an outlier of the Matobo Hills.
The nature of spirit is such that it will affect things on the material plane. Recently, I was told of a story where a gentleman in Bulawayo instructed his relatives concerning the animal that would accompany him when he died. His wife was one of those who were told about the selected ox that was to be killed. The man was not ill at all when he gave the instructions. After some time the man died and his eldest son, for reasons best known to himself decided a different beast would be slaughtered.
The dead man’s widow became accomplice to the son’s schemes that defied his father’s instructions. The dead man took action the very night after his he burial. The spirit of the dead man appeared before the terribly frightened widow and held her by her hand and quizzed her why she became accomplice to the son’s misdirected actions.
The angered spirit of the dead man appeared to the widow several times on that fateful night. She could hardly fall sleep and in the morning went to the relatives of her late husband who too were privy to the instructions of the late man. Indeed, the very beast that had been identified was killed after some palaver involving close relatives.
The City Council was approached and the matter explained to them. The family wanted to open up the grave of the dead man who had been defied by his living son. After the correct animal was slaughtered some parts from the carcass were cut off and placed in the man’s open grave: brain, blood, heart, liver, and skin, inter alia.
It was those carcass parts that constituted, represented or epitomised the beast. To the spirit of the dead man instructions had been finally obeyed. The son however, lost his mental faculties and in fullness of time he lost his life.
The one quality of the active dead that the Ndebele and other Africans sought was the fact that he/she looked after her living progeny. Africans sorely sought to achieve continuity. Through sexual reproduction they achieved that goal.
The resulting babies had to be protected throughout their period of growth and development till they too participated in the all-important natural duty of contributing to the lineage’s extension. The people who posed a threat to that desired goal were the wizards and witches. The living dead came handy in providing the necessary protection to the vulnerable progeny.
The cardinal principle here is that each active dead takes care of his own progeny-the biological products of the person or human being when they still lived on earth. No man or woman was expected to look after other people’s living progeny. However, it was not all persons who died who would have their spirits summoned back during the umbuyiso ritual.
Anybody who died violently did not qualify to have his/her spirit brought back. This is true even today. Recently, I had a relative who was run over by a train. His body was not taken into his house. Instead, it was buried without having lain in state at the man’s home.
Those who died during the war and therefore died violently did not have their spirits summoned back. Witches and wizards were another category of people whose spirits were not brought back.
The active dead took possession of the living at the very time of conception. Spiritual mediumship was important as the medium, through the resident spirit, accessed knowledge from the past which was then passed down to future generations. This was one way of archiving a people’s cultural heritage and patenting it.
In order to retrieve the archived knowledge and information, it was important to do so using the same retrieval methodologies – the spiritual methodologies which worked through regeneration or transmission of generational spirituality.
It has been important to render the cosmological underpinnings of umbuyiso so that the general readers of this column and students of African Traditional Spirituality appreciate the worldview that informs, directs and sustains the ritual. Cultural practices are not performed without justification, reason or meaning.
There is some basis or significance behind them.
Pathisa Nyathi is an Arts and Culture expert specialising in African Thought. Email feedback at [email protected].
This article first appeared in The Herald Review.
