Chronicle Editor
Cultural Heritage with Pathisa Nyathi
TODAY we shall be looking at two applications of the same scientific principles with regard to individual identities. The same place is the cradle of humankind. We are here referring to the African continent where the earliest forms of human beings first appeared. We shall not bother ourselves whether the early humans were created or just evolved. It could very well be both.
My own view has been that energy and spirit were present from the very beginning. That was prior to the emergence of the material world that was secondary to the real and primary world of energy and spirit. Anyway, am I not free to speculate the origins of the world and the universe? I could be approaching the subject from a spiritual angle. I have come to accept that physics and spirituality are, after all seeking answers relating to the origins and eschatology of the world. Philosophy is about that too.
Towards the end of this article, we shall see common interpretations of some common scientific principles, laws and theories. Our thrust in this column is to explore, expose and unpack underpinning and underlying, deductive, empirical and informing laws.
Australia may seem to be very far from the human formative locality – Africa. With improved technology over millions of years, humanity began migrating away from the African continent. Black African people went to live in virtually all parts of the world. For example, it has been speculated, probably proven that the land mass between Russia and Alaska in Canada, the Bering Strait, was once frozen or at least shallower.
No wonder therefore, certain African philosophical ideas were exported to the new lands, from Canada down to Central America and beyond to South America. Thought, cosmology and worldview began reaching other parts of the lands across the seas. This we are able to deduce when we scrutinise the migrants’ cultural practices and underpinning arts that are expressions of culture. As expected, for example, the architecture of the ancients was comparable with the circular design as the basic building block.
Today, I will argue that a circular design that encapsulates and embraces circularity is an expression and manifestation of both energy and spirit. Both energy and spirit are expressions of eternity.
At the same time, a circular design expresses eternity, continuity, perpetuity and endlessness. Further, it is an expression of unity, co-operation, social and political cohesion and relatedness. Looking more closely at the idea today, I see a cycle, an unending cycle where unity is embraced and subsequently replaced and followed by disunity.
What I am saying may be demonstrated in the following picture. There may have been one solid and continuous landmass, a single continent. Beyond that followed the separation of the landmass and the tectonic plates underneath the water. From the death of colliding tectonic plates, more landmasses arose. There was creation and that creation emerged out of death. Earthquakes and volcanic activities, the destructive processes result in creation and birth.
Out of collision associated with death of some landmasses, new landmasses were born. One important relatedness in this universe is that life emerges out of death and death is the next stage after life. It is all about unending cycles. We consume or experience death so that we may acquire life. Where there is no death, there may be no eternal life to talk about. This is thinking in circles for us to comprehend circularity and how it has formed the basic manifestation and reality of existence.
Our search for identify and to possibly interpret San rock art in Ward 17 in the Matobo Hills continues. We seem on course to unearth what we had never imagined. True, we are not experts in the field of the San people whose counterparts seem to have settled in most parts of the solid earth-from the Kalahari Desert to the Sahara Desert. When we got to one community, we were advised about the existence of graves in one locality. Could we say we have made some discovery?
We decided to travel to the place and see what we anticipated to be some groundbreaking discovery. That was behaving exactly like Dr David Livingstone. The people were going to show us, how then could we say we were poised to make some discovery?
Panting and walking wearily, we got to the site. I was persuaded to believe these were graves of the San people who lived here thousands of years ago. The answer lay in my frequently stated assertion that ancients shared a common thought, a common worldview and a common cosmology. Had we not, as the Amagugu Team, not seen a human stick figure with no head? Its head was that of a dog.
This particular phenomenon is common in Egyptian mythology where their myths were sometimes externalised in stone as an art form. I had never thought the San in present-day Zimbabwe also shared the same ideas. Yet we were faced with this Egyptian image right in front of us. For me at least, the interpretation will be easy. Was the Sphynx at the Pyramid of Giza not sculpted in the same belief with the same ideas for the same purposes?
In this case, why would we not see more similarities among communities that lived at the same time? These were Neolithic communities who wore the same cultural lenses to view the world. While working on Stonehenge after I had received research results by the Avon River Valley Project led by Professor Parker Pearson of the University College of London, I became familiar with the various designs of English and Welsh graves. One type was known as a dolmen and comprised two vertical stone slabs driven into the ground. The stone slab at the head end was slightly taller than its counterpart at the feet-end.
The two stones then had a bigger stone slab placed above both. The result was a structure comprising two vertical stone slabs with a table joining them. The table was, as a result, sloping towards the feet end. This was a dolmen. I have always wondered how and why I ended up in possession of the book from Professor Pearson. Now, I am beginning to see the reason.
At the site in the Matobo Hills, we observed three stones lying on the ground with the dimensions true to the English and Welsh dolmens. Baboons were said to be responsible for the collapse of the dolmens. The three stones however still lay close to each other. If the three stones were to be re-arranged to look the way they did after burial, the result was likely to be a dolmen as developed in Eastern Wales. Only time will tell.
Rock boulders, rock shelters and rock caves have preserved ideas about the ancients in terms of their cosmology, thought, worldview and beliefs that gave rise to cultural practices, the designs of artefacts and the development of the numerous arts genres that have yielded comparable features of a spiritual dimension to be found on the Australian subcontinent. This is particularly so in the genre of the visual arts. We turn to it to reveal its ancient secrets.
Archaeologists identified the ritual that is being celebrated. The evidence of the ritual was unearthed in a cave in Australia. The cave findings were associated with the Aboriginals that have lived on the subcontinent for thousands of years. The story appeared in CNN where Issy Ronald presented it. The ritual is deemed the oldest surviving ritual that is touted as being 12 000 years old and has been passed down the ages for about 500 generations.
What is being celebrated is the fact that it is the oldest known continuous cultural practice in the world. Evidence of the ritual was found in the Clogg Cave not far from Buchan. The evidence lay in a piece of wood that was found protruding out of the ground. A small piece was cut and subjected to carbon dating to determine the age of the curious piece of wooden stick. The results produced the age of 12 000 years. Archaeologists indicated the wooden stick must have existed from the time of the last Ice Age.
Professor Bruno David at Indigenous Studies Centre for Australian Artefacts at the University of Monash pointed out that an artifact did not survive that long. They simply disintegrated, in particular if they are of a perishable nature. In 2017, Professor David and colleagues were invited by Australia’s GunaKunai people to investigate the evidence of an old ritual of sorceress in the Clogg Cave, The ritual was associated with the people known as the mulla-mullang of the tribe referred to above as the GunaKunai.
Of course, the researchers who belong to a different culture associated the ritual with wizards and witches. That was what captured my interest that perceived association with wizards and witches whose science is of special interest to me as I seek to unpack its underlying science. The ancients, as I have said repeatedly, shared a common cosmology, worldview, beliefs and commonalities were expressed and manifested through cultural practices and sometimes the arts that embraced and encapsulated a people’s cultures.
The ritual and the manner of operation intrigued me and dovetailed with what I have already explained in some of my articles. Key to the process was either to harm or heal an individual. For that to happen, some unique attribute of that individual had to be obtained. That is precisely what I have been harping upon for quite a while. The ancients, Africans included, were au fait with some elements of genetics and what they implied and their prospects in healing and bewitching an individual whose identity has been extracted and harnessed as explained in one of the articles.
I found solace in the fact that researchers from different cultures posited that witchcraft and healing are two sides of the same coin. Witches and traditional doctors both derive their professional prowess from the same field. The difference is that one aspect seeks to harm while the other seeks to heal. The latter is positive while the former is negative.
Both relied on possession of a bit of the whole that bears the whole and bears an individual’s identities. Related to that was the fact that some wooden stick with animal or human fat was applied to immobilise the animal whose spoor was collected. The stick was placed next to a fire and subjected to light heat.
The ritual ties well in its working principles with what is practiced in Africa. For example, the identity of an intended person has been captured and spiritual power applied in providing requisite energy to drive and power the ritual. Human fat is derived from the most developed species-humans. There is nothing higher than humans in terms of development. That translated to power and is why witches and sometimes traditional healers consume human flesh. They are consuming and concentrating spiritual power of the highest order.
Fire is unique in that it may, in terms of AAS, destroy or build. Africans have been known to collect the footprints of a buffalo; for example and heat it together with certain herbs to immobilise the buffalo whose identity has been extracted to access and cast a bewitching spell on it.
Fire will also build and produce a different form of a product such as firing bricks whose molecular alignment will change through the agency of a fire. The wooden sticks were made to assume a slanting angle and would represent the targeted victim, for better or for worse. So, after all, the researchers were alert to the principles of AAS and their interpretations were not divorced from what is applicable on the African continent.
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter