Chronicle Editor
Pathisa Nyathi
THE theme of sacredness and holiness that I have been seeking to unpack in the past few weeks led me to look at the calendar where I found certain days which are set aside as Holy Days and holidays.
Holidays used to be very popular with African workers in the cities and towns who, in the colonial period, used to take advantage of these days to rejoin their families back in the so-called native reserves.
The Rhodes and Founders holidays were extremely popular back then and workers looked forward to them.
These holidays fell within the month of July.
Workers trekked back to their tribal trust lands (TTLs) which were a creation and implementation of the Land Apportionment Act (1930).
Male workers were regarded as bachelors even when they were married.
Their wives and children that remained behind in the reserves, since promoted to communal lands in the post- independence period.
The name of one township in Bulawayo still bears the stigma of enforced artificial bachelorhood. Mabutweni or Number 2 was named in reference to the male workers who lived in the township, in a manner reminiscent of the days of the Ndebele State when males were conscripted as amabutho hence (e)Mabutweni who lived in isolated settlements away from women.
That status was reflected in the type of accommodation that they were given. Essentially the accommodation translated to single quarters with small rooms.
Ablution facilities were communal in many of the African townships, a single room was used by several men with some of them separated by a long curtain and others sleeping on floors under or beside the bed.
Qunye Mfihlo Velaphi has penned his experiences in Bulawayo following his expulsion from Mazowe Secondary School in 1962.
His autobiography titled “Qunye Mfihlo Velaphi: An Endless Transition,” gives a vivid and brilliant account of the accommodation situation in Bulawayo’s African townships.
He also gives an equally lucid narration of the political situation at the same time.
Both the nationalist and armed struggles were in their nascent stages.
For some people the most looked forward to holidays are Christmas and Boxing Days, on the 25th and 26th of December.
As children, we looked forward to the Christmas Day.
It was a day of immense feasting. Goats lost their lives. Lobels bread was consumed in large quantities, so was Sun Jam and Tanganda Tea.
New clothes were another welcome gift and were worn to show them off.
In my own autobiography, “Pathisa Nyathi@70: A Life Dedicated to Arts Culture and Heritage,” I devoted quite some large space to Christmas Day at Sankonjana in the 1960s.
One day I was looking at the forthcoming Easter holidays or Holy Days, so as to decide when to visit my rural home.
I got hold of a calendar and got to a page where various religious faiths give their holidays.
Actually, it was Religious Festivals and Holy Days.
There were the following categories: Christian Holy Days, Bahai Faith’s Holy Days, Hindu Festivals, Islamic Holy Days, and Jewish Holy Days. That was all!
Many of the Christian Holy Days were quite familiar to me, for example, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter Monday.
I even remember a song by a female South African artist who sang a song, which was about the last two holidays and what goes on during the days.
I knew Christmas Day from my childhood days in connection with sumptuous meals that we otherwise did not consume during the rest of the year.
It was sweets and biscuits galore.
Samp (itshakada) and goat meat (umngqutshu) eaten communally was a treat for us rural children.
I knew not of a single day in the Bahai Faith Holy Days.
The same was true of Hindu Holy Days. Regarding the Islamic Holy Days, I knew only one- the Ramadan.
For our “O” Level Literature in English we did, “The African Child” a novel by Camara Laye from West Africa where Islam has a strong presence.
I knew about Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, not so much as a Holy Day in the Jewish calendar but the day when Egypt waged a war on Israel.
I then looked at Zimbabwe’s Public Holidays.
A few Christian Holy Days are included as holidays, namely Good Friday, Easter Monday and Christmas Day.
Looking at the religious Holy Days, I appreciated the days as relating to the days that are significant in the particular religious faiths.
Pentecost, Christmas, Ascension are associated with important events in the Christian calendar. On 25 December, Jesus Christ is said to have been born.
Of course, the day bore some significance even before the birth of Christ among the so-called pagan religions of Europe where the day marked Winter Solstice.
Holy Days thus may end up as Public Holidays.
For Zimbabwe the majority of the Public Holidays relate to some political events such as Independence Day (18th of April), National Youth Day (21st February), Heroes Day (08 August), Defence Forces Day (9th August), National Unity Day (22 December).
It is easy to explain the chosen holidays.
The 8th of August is when the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) was formed in Enos Mzombi Nkala’s house in Highfield Township in Salisbury (now Harare).
On 22 December the Patriotic Front-Zimbabwe African People’s Union, PF-ZAPU leader Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo and the ZANU-PF leader Robert Mugabe signed the Unity Accord.
There are other holidays which are pan-African/international such as Labour/Workers’ Day (01 May), Africa Day (25 May).
Then the question came to my mind. Before the religious faiths enumerated above did not Africa have a religion?
Was it perhaps more appropriately called African Spirituality?
Why have the African governments and their people not recognised such days if indeed they existed and were duly recognised?
My view is that Africa did have such days and were in the main dictated by the movement of celestial bodies and births of iconic spiritual figures.
Dr Mathole Motshekga writes as follows regarding African Holy Days, “The African Calendar is rooted in African Spiritual Cosmology which is founded on the belief that celestial bodies-stars and planets including the Sun (Ra) and the Moon (Ma/Mala) are the physical manifestations of God and gods.”
In southern Africa south of the Equator, the New Year was recognised and celebrated on 23 September when the Pleiades constellation appeared and was soon followed by rituals to celebrate and welcome the New Year.
At the same time, that day fell on the Spring Equinox.
The 1st of May was Mogale’s Day.
Those who read my earlier article may recall that Mogale has the same conceptualisation as Mwali/Ngwali, the Virgin Mother of the World.
Anyway, the bottom line is that as Africans we have not bothered to dig into our histories to unearth African Holy Days, which were recognised and celebrated with ritual and ceremony.
In most cases, African Spiritual Cosmology informed these days just as Dr Motshekga puts it.
Are we likely to see movement in the direction towards identifying and recognising African Holy Days, which will be celebrated alongside those of other religious faiths? The spiritual revolution is still far-fetched but it may come some
day in the distant future, led by a different cadre of Africans.
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