Chronicle Editor
Cultural Heritage with Pathisa Nyathi
I remember with some sense of nostalgic pride and fulfilment when, in the year 1971, I presented myself to a panel of interviewees. It was a selection interview to win a place as a trainee at the then Gwelo Teachers’ College (GTC).
Strangely and uncharacteristically, I still remember the names of lecturers who constituted the interviewing panel: Patrick M Brett, the Principal and Irish man, the Vice-Principal, a Mr DG Griffiths who later became Principal of the then newly established Mkoba Teachers’ College, also in Gwelo (now Gweru) and the Head of the Mathematics Department, a Ms Mes, of Afrikaner stock.
The panel was convinced that I should do languages. Their argument was based on my O-Level results in 1970 when I attended Mazowe Secondary School. I was equally convinced that languages, in which I had excelled, were not my kettle of fish.
An uphill struggle faced me.
I had to convince the interviewing panel that I wished and deserved to train as a Science teacher. I had done well in Biology and Physical Science. All the same, I was expected to work hard in order to win the battle. I did win and found myself doing Science for three years.
I mention this experience because if I had not successfully argued my case through, I would have ended up doing languages, in particular the works of the likes of William Shakespeare and others in that league.
The sad thing for me was going to find myself in the same unfortunate league with Africans who do not believe there is science in African culture. To them, African culture does not embrace science. At best, these people see demonic and devilish things in everything African. How I hate to be in a class of self-haters and self-hurters who are liberally equipped with classic ignorance about things African.
For me, it is unimaginable how I would successfully grapple with African culture, in terms of both practices and their underpinning cosmological, thought and worldview, without some rudimentary grounding in science I am presently excavating what I have termed Ancient African Science (AAS), which today is embraced and practiced within fields that have been demonised, trashed and despised. Mention of witches and traditional healers invites, scorn, disdain and derision.
After several decades of excavating, analysing and interpreting AAS, I am convinced there is a science beyond Western-oriented science. That science seems to fail to explain the presence of force and power. Instead of seeking to understand the nature and origin of science behind movement, some people spend a lot of time despising and denigrating what they do not understand.
Why do they not investigate, initially, the veracity of claims that witches can fly? If indeed they do, where are they deriving the requisite energy since we know that in the absence of energy nothing moves?
Yet we expose ourselves to political and economic manipulation, intrigue and shenanigans when petroleum is discovered within our territorial spaces. As long as we despise ourselves as Africans and believe there are people other than ourselves who are better specimens of humanity, we are set to get nowhere beyond being hewers of wood and drawers of water for other people. Painful!
After coming face to face with practical aspects of Egyptian mythology within the Matobo Hills, it became apparent that spirituality is powerful and was not confined to Egypt (Kemet).
The critical question to answer is where did ideas, sometimes expressed as myths in Egypt, originate? Some self-doubting individuals, particularly Africans, will rush to conclude that the origins were located to the north, in Egypt. The south where the Bantu settled in more recent times is excluded.
It is believed, there was a single migration from the north to the south, from a civilised world to an uncivilised one. The migration that we refer to could very well have been the last remembered and documented. For several millennia, before the colonial boundaries were established, Africans were free to roam freely for several reasons. Africans are not good for anything, it is assumed. The challenge as the situation stands now is that we have too many people who will not, for a second, entertain the idea that Africans ever established civilisations.
There seems, these days, to be some universal consensus that the cradle of humanity on the African continent embraced Namibia, South Africa, Botswana and parts of Zimbabwe. If that were the case, we expect some very early and initial migrations from the south to the north.Usually innovated and invented objects improve with time.
In the last article, we did say the pyramids seem to have their smaller and unrefined forms not in Egypt, but further to the south in states that were more associated with blacks such as Nubia and Kush. However, blacks whose noses in the sculptures were knocked off to conceal their black identity back then inhabited Egypt itself. That was before the arrival of the Arabs from the Middle East
The route that we are centres of witchcraft. I prefer the term that I coined, namely AAS. Some may prefer to call the field witchcraft. I almost took some misplaced and misguided view that I could deal with witchcraft in isolation. Besides, I was going to suffer the same ailment of seeing outside of the science resident in the so-called witchcraft. If I had chosen the short view devoid of the underpinning science, I would have been right to call it witchcraft.
As it turned out, I avoided pride and prejudice of some racial and exotic nature. African traditional healing and witchcraft are informed by and tap into the same science. The field is much broader than the two aspects put together. This is the combined field that we are excavating and seeking to unpack in a more definitive and empathetic manner so that other people begin to see the underlying science in the hope that they will see beyond the prejudice, partiality, predispositions and preconceptions.
Therefore, we are back to the hard elements of AAS. As pointed out from the very outset, we seek to go beyond the mundane, the obvious and the pedestrian. Some few months back I wrote articles on domestication. It all seemed fine.
I, however, have realised that where there is lack of satisfaction and the presence of disillusionment, the search for more knowledge and information is ignited. It is easy to simply state that some animals were domesticated without saying how that was achieved, the modus operandi in the process.
When I made enquiries pertaining how some birds and animals were domesticated within the field of witchcraft, I began to see the concept of domestication rather differently. It is known that there are creatures that are domesticated. These serve as familiars in the company and service of wizards and witches and some traditional doctors as well.
Let us start with the concept of cloning that we referred to in some earlier articles. We argued then, that ancient Africans possessed the knowledge and technology of the process that has come to be known as cloning, assuming I comprehend the concept in both western and African conceptualisation. As will be shown below, cloning in the African sense resulted, in the main, from ritual killing especially of humans in the young but mature age.
The choice of body parts to target demonstrates an understanding of sustainability usually through fertility. What value would a toe serve when fertility is sought, be it through sexuality or through cloning body tissues that play some critical roles in fertility or sexuality that are usually understood in the same context and purposes? Sexual organs are targeted as these are the body tissues that drive continuity, perpetuity, eternity and endlessness.
Stories abound where an individual has been murdered and found minus some body parts.
Breasts are involved in that they sustain a baby that has been born and suckled by its mother. It is such organs with some bearing on fertility that are targeted and sold to those who possess the requisite knowledge to clone miniature humans. The final products may go by different names such as umkhoba, untikolotshe, isituhwane and undofa, inter alia.
It is in the same vein that ritual killing is perceived as driving sustainability or profitability within business enterprises. Businesses ought to flourish and in economic terms that translates to growth and development as perceived in biological terms. Symbolism is at play and those who peddle appropriate body parts are into some lucrative industry.
Generative body parts are then mixed with some plant roots and other extracts to produce miniature humans who have roles to play in the lives and activities of witches and wizards. This is particularly the case in relation to the domestication and possession of familiars that are not products of cloning.
Rather, they are products of domestication through rigorous transformation and close supervision by the products of cloning.
Cloned products possess supernatural powers and complement the spiritual powers of witches and wizards to engage in the taming of familiars that are part of witches’ nocturnal entourages. I was very young when I began seeing these nocturnal expeditions. It was all part of my spiritual endowment and today I consider those youthful experiences as having been very dangerous. Then, resident spiritual bodyguards shielded me. I am alert and conscious not to over-reveal the journeys that I have travelled to date and continue with them.
They exist in material form and yet remain undetectable to normal humans. Some of these perform tasks, the most important of which is to take instructions from witches and carry out intended objectives.
Those who go to South Africa and meet entrepreneurs who are in the lucrative business of manufacturing these. Some of these people opt to buy and bring them back home to perform various domestic chores.
Stories are told that these sexual maniacs may have to be acquired in opposite gendered pairs. Those who import females end up with these creatures going for male owners. If males alone are imported, they eventually go for the owner’s wives especially when South African labour migrants stay away from home for elongated periods. When the cloned creatures are sexually starved, they go for their owner’s wife. Sometimes it becomes necessary to get rid of the lustful mini-creatures.
Getting rid of them has created hilarious stories. A man was said to have carried one in his car with the aim of getting rid of it. He mixed finger millet grains with sand and, arriving at some distant destination, he asked the cloned creature to get down from the car and separate finger millet grains from sand grains. The man had imagined the creature was going to take a lot of time carrying out the laborious task. He had not bargained for what was to follow.
The man quickly got into the car and sped off back home celebrating that he had finally gotten rid of a passionate and romantic creature that knows no boundaries in the erotic field. As soon as he got back home, he heard words the most depressing words from the panting and very tired supernatural creature, “Ngiphothe ngathala!” I almost remained behind. The man was mesmerised. The damn thing was back in the home to continue with its romantic mischief.
The cloned miniature creature is useful as long as it does other household chores and confines its amorous and lustful desires outside of the owner’s bedroom.
Online Reporter