HomeOld_PostsIs there scope for remembering the non-Christian way?

Is there scope for remembering the non-Christian way?

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AT a fairly early age I had learnt to recite my family tree up to my paternal grandmother.
“Uri mwana waani?” was a common question and with time I had learnt to say, “waMhambu,” my father’s name that was known within the village and surrounding areas.
Mention of the name always drew comments of my father’s fist-fighting notoriety at the local dip tank.
This was a piece of history that was missing from family chronicles as told by my parents and grandmother.
My father spoke highly of his school and professional achievements which he prayed we would surpass.
My mother spoke of my father’s struggle to pass ‘JC’ in adult education.
My grandmother spoke of my father’s early truancy and how her rod had helped straighten him.
She also spoke of father’s pre-marital mhosva, misdemeanours.
In my grandmother’s junk suitcases we came across some impressive exercise books from my father’s school days.
The village head, a very old man in the 1970s, always referred to me as sekuru, calling me Chirwa and owner of the country now called Njanja.
He was very spiritual about this issue.
There is no official repository of this history which is scattered in various stakeholder memories.
My grandmother also spoke with palpable emotion about how our grandfather, Mujubheki, had abandoned a young family for Johannesburg and later Cape Town, leaving her to weather social and economic shame as she fended for my father alone.
She was not kinder to the reckless role my great-grandfather had played in all this as he abetted rather than mitigated my grandfather’s transgressions.
We grew up away from my paternal family, save for my father, and I picked nothing more from what my grandmother shared.
It was a history from an estranged daughter-in-law.
My mother’s family had a more compact history because of its sustained royalty.
There are family traditions on the Mangwende paramount chieftainship that are corroborated by Portuguese documents going back to the late 16th Century.
The chieftainship family tree has been well documented since the 1870s.
My mother spoke highly of her paternal lineage and princess status.
She also boasted that her maternal grandmother was a daughter of Chingaira Makoni.
I learnt bits and pieces of her personal history from my aunt and uncles
“Dori akange akangwarisa (Dori was smart and naughty),” they all used to say.
During visits to my maternal uncles I have, however, been impressed by the level of their history that is kept and shared by their wives and daughters-in-law, anambuya vangu.
They recall minute details around courtship, births, witchcraft and illegitimacy within the family.
They are the most reliable chroniclers of the Nhohwe family histories.
Yet they are not allowed to sit on the dare of their communities.
The men with permanent seats on the dare tend to chronicle very partisan, in today’s parlance, ‘successionist’ versions of history!
It was the same with the latter when Chanaiwa visited Nhohwe country for his seminal research work on this community in the 1960s.
There was no official repository of this community’s history, except for the little that was in Jesuit Archives in Goa, India and Lisbon, Portugal and Native Affairs department registries.
There was no official custodian of Nhohwe history.
Elders who were consulted shared the usual problems with oral traditions; short memory span, lack of chronology, influence of succession politics and colouring of testimonies with nationalist agenda.
The closest there was to an official custodian of Nhohwe history was a svikiro, spirit medium, of the Duku people, autochthons of the area pre-Nhohwe.
He was well versed in the history of the Duku and their Mangwende rulers.
He had a well-organised and chronological historical recitation of the people.
His recital of history was a ritual event of remembering, honouring and respecting ancestors.
As in the case of my father’s childhood peers or my maternal ambuyas, a reliable history of a people comes from outsiders.
But most importantly is the role of spirituality in archiving memories of a people.
Spiritual archiving is a much ignored subject.
Whereas we accept biblical archives at face value including its off-shoots like missionary archives, for example Portuguese Jesuit archives, we refuse to recognise spiritual archiving.
In the last few years we have offered arms-length support to the Fallen Heroes Trust’s spiritually inspired reburials programme.
Reports have been awash of toddlers getting possessed by spirits of departed fallen heroes and leading delegations to exact spots in foreign lands were the fallen heroes would be buried.
Government has quietly supported the reburials, but we have failed to give official recognition to this genre of remembering.
Because we are too Christian?
And in Matabeleland there are reports coming in of an incarnate from Mzilikazi’s time who is mesmerising believers with his knowledge and detail of life under Mzilikazi.
He has the 19th Century present with him in his 21st Century existence.
For how long shall we continue to run away from our shadows?

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