Chronicle Editor
SAMANGIKA is a people’s poet who expertly featured in some theatrical performance that I had the rare privilege and honour to watch and sample in Lusaka not so long ago.
He was presented as an eloquent and expressive voice of the people, one who highlighted and articulated their grievances. “If a vote will not bring about change, of what use is it?” he screamed poetically and convincingly.
His antithesis, a well-built figure who represented, embodied and symbolised the establishment responded brusquely, tersely and abruptly with a commanding baritone voice, “So, if you are that creative, why don’t you gaze the heavens and wax lyrical ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high. Like a diamond in the sky’”. The burly-figured man saw it safer, prudent and appropriate to stay clear of political issues that invite trouble.
Heavenly bodies have always inspired human beings on the terrestrial realm. Even the most accomplished poets have not been spared. The cosmos, as an extra-terrestrial realm, intimately relates in several ways to its complementary terrestrial realm.
When the sun goes down to commiserate with its mother down the horizon other stars take centre stage to celebrate being left alone without the dwarfing sun. “Kusinwa kededelwana,”say the Ndebele people when they express the need for dancers to create spaces and opportunities for other dancers to also display their dancing skills.
In modern governance parlance, the message is that leaders should not rule and vacate only after they have been dragged kicking and screaming to their graves. Admittedly, this is what Africa has known for centuries until they were unwillingly coerced to adopt a different governance regime from elsewhere.
Given the imagery of stars, in particular the sun, kings perceived themselves as divine and equipped with some God-given right, authority and power to rule until the sun sets.
For the purposes of this article, our thrust is on the names of cosmic bodies that have been adopted and used here on Planet Earth. Though I may be said to be the master of the art of forgetfulness, I still vaguely remember a Ndebele poem that we recited at Sankonjana Primary School in the early 1960s:
“Phezul’ ezulwini,
Ngibon’ izinkanyezi….’
Well, not different from what Samangika a people’s poet was being advised to keep within its boundaries of sanity and safety.Speakers of English looked up and saw the stars, enchanting stars, whose luminescence inspired poetic inspiration and creativity. It was the same with speakers of the Ndebele language.
There was not a single community on earth that failed or was unwilling to observe and admire the heavens. This was especially the case with regard to the nearest moon that orbits the earth and the stars that chased away the sun so that they too would dance, not in a selfish manner and style as happens with the latter. Stars danced collectively and that way enhanced their glory, splendour and magnificence.
The numerous articles that I have penned to date sought to highlight African communities’ perceptions regarding cosmic bodies. Almost without exception, all of them recognised that cosmic bodies told time.
During those ancient days and times, calendars and clocks were still to be invented.
Agricultural communities and societies relied on the movement of cosmic bodies to know when to initiate critical agricultural processes. The articles were written under the banner of “African Cultural Astronomy” within a column titled “Cultural Heritage” that at the time featured the aptly named “Journey to the Stars.”
Slowly, the spacecraft launched over a year ago is preparing to land, not in Iraq (Mesopotamia) as did spacecrafts from Planet Nibiru where aliens lived and came to our planet in search of gold.
As I said before, when the end is reached, a new beginning dawns. The circle that we featured in several articles as the new universal building block is perceived as having no beginning and no end. When death sets in, life begins. Death waters the tree of life. Life is the precursor of death that it precedes. Where there never was life, there cannot be death. The cycle and cyclicality underpin eternity, in relative terms.
When a glass falls onto rock or cement floor, it dies or may die. Virtually all-African languages remark in the same manner with regard event in the same manner that when glass and clay vessels fall to the hard ground they die, which is to say they lose their lives.
Conceptually they must have possessed life before dying. In the same manner, a car dies. Before it does that, it had a life, not as defined in terms of Western science. The referred to life in an African cultural context, has to be understood in African conceptual terms. The word “die” (kufa/ukufa) is expressive of an African philosophy, worldview, perceptions and beliefs. Using languages across cultural and lingual barriers or boundaries creates conceptual challenges. Deep philosophical meaning is lost. One of the languages loses its essence when lingual imperialism asserts itself against the background of political hegemony.
As already indicated above, the cosmos and the earth interact and are in some seminal way integrated.The food we consume, for sustenance, gives us energy. When the present spacecraft finally lands, we shall be taking off in a yet another spacecraft that requires energy in one form or another to take off at a speed that defies the down-pulling force of gravity so that it stays along some orbit.
Keeping in motion within an orbit demands availability of energy. We are moving more and more into the essence of being that is characterized by the presence of energy. It is a field associated with what some people see as Western science. I see it as intimately associated with Ancient African Science (AAS) whose remnants and legacies continue to exist in the much maligned field of witchcraft.
My view is that science is universal, operating on universal laws, and principles. It is these laws that require unpacking when we launch the new spacecraft into a new higher energy orbit. Those with perceptive and predictive minds will have seen we are now getting closer and closer to Ancient African Science into which wizards/witches, spirit mediums and traditional healers derive their knowledge to power their professions, and symbolically their gravity-defying spacecrafts
When a spacecraft travelling at a constant velocity (whether it then is accelerates or decelerates) requires changes in energy from within or without to change course(direction) or velocity.I was penning the book, “Mhande” that unpacks some Karanga traditional dance when it just dawned on me that sound from drums, handclapping, hand and leg rattles and the mbira(hand piano) we are dealing with patterned energy pulsations(or pulses) of different rhythms, pitches and other traits of sound energy.
So, when I consume sound from Vusa Mkhaya’s music, I am consuming specific and unique pulses of energy that carry the identity, signature and the DNA of Vusa Mkhaya’s energy emanating from his musical instruments and ensemble.
For very long, I knew and taught about energy and yet I never perceived I do now. Things changed when my mind went through some dramatic and unexpected transformation in terms of understanding. My mind and perceptions transformed when new insights about energy bounced upon my mind. Within a year my perceptions, sensitivities and discernments concerning energy, underwent some revolutionary transformation.
The latter was initiated by some conversation I held with Major-General Tapson Hlanganani Dube of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) when we talked at the Josiah Magama Tongogara Army
Headquarters in Harare. The former, however, was some kind of lightning revelation as I allowed my mind to wander and explore related phenomena at some philosophical level.
My new understanding of art was such that I began taking a more incisive and critical look at San rock paintings. Were they art for art’s sake or we are to perceive them as onion bulb with many layers of meaning beyond the aesthetics? Art for art’s sake is like deodorized dog s..t as succinctly and eloquently expressed by Africa’s iconic writer Chinua Achebe. I happen to concur with him. In Africa, art was never for art’s sake, to be consumed visually and end there. Beyond aesthetics, onion leaves await peeling off to expose deeper layers of utility and functionality.
In recent months, I have frequented several sites of San rock paintings in caves within Matobo Hills, a World Heritage Site (WHS). Each time I view the art I think about what Achebe said and what the eyes of my mind see. A healthy mind is symbolically both malleable and ductile. I perceive San rock art differently now. Indeed, there are layers of aesthetics that effortlessly carry and buoy roles that are of a functional nature. Such artistic designs and renditions are in line with elements of African aesthetics that are never designed solely and exclusively for artistic consumption.
The route that I have pursued in rendering this article may have wandered off target a bit. However, it still will get to the chosen destination, the heavens and how these have left their indelible footprints, fingerprints, identity marks, and the DNA on Planet Earth.
Designs carry messages. Designs as art forms, bear languages that communicate. Designs that we sometimes see as forms and shapes carry messages couched in the cultural context of the community. Cosmic bodies have been depicted in a more expressive and lucid manner but in less obvious but symbolic ways. When we express ourselves, sometimes we do not realize that we are borrowing the languages of cosmic bodies. When the San drew their paintings on the surfaces of rocks in caves, how often did they capture the cosmos to carry and transmit meanings and messages that they wished to convey? Are we not hamstrung when we confine their paintings to aesthetics and nothing more and beyond? Would we not be in a position to uncover and excavate more symbolic representations and expressions of the cosmos?
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