TRADITIONAL wooden or clay dolls are sometimes considered dangerous items; they are usually kept in very secluded areas in houses because many people believe they are used for witchcraft.
For the BaTonga of the Zambezi Valley, these seemingly fearsome items have been used for traditional worship and as good luck charms as well as protection tools in case of disasters or witchcraft.
Among other things, these figures and dolls represented ancestors and spirits to whom the BaTonga people address their needs and desires.
They are placed on personal or village shrines and offerings are made to them to propitiate the ancestors in invoking protection, good luck, prosperity or fertility.
Some are used as dolls to teach young girls about motherhood and may be treated as real babies or children – to the extent they are ‘fed’ and nurtured as if alive.
These dolls or figures are carved from light wood and are painted black or dark brown.
The doll has aspects associated with fertility and exhibits the high degree of abstraction of torso and limbs typical of modern Western dolls.
Wood is the traditional material generally used to make the dolls that usually do not have limbs.
All the dolls are female and usually have pendulous breasts.
The distinctive aspect of these dolls, serving to distinguish geographical regions and individual carvers, is the shape of the head.
The dolls are purchased by mothers for their daughters who cover the dolls with leather and decorate them with beads or shells.
In spite of their role as toys, they are subject to religious considerations.
The young ‘girl-mother’ considers the doll a child and has to pay close attention to it.
Hence any damage to the doll, although accidental, calls for consultation with the diviner who sees invisible things hidden from ordinary people.
For this reason, the dolls are handled with great care.
They are passed down from sister-to-sister, from mother-to-daughter and sometimes from a remote great-grandmother.
The dolls are also given to a first-time mother.
She has to wash the doll she played with in childhood before washing her own child.
The doll is considered the first child of each young girl.
Although the dolls are toys aiding in the education of the young girl for motherhood, the doll remains important into adult life.
When a woman leaves her father’s compound for the house of her husband, she takes the doll with her, ‘enabling’ her to become pregnant within a month of her initial sexual experience.
The doll is believed to allow the soul of the new infant to enter the world of its parents and to prevent the child from falling sick as well as assuring that the child would not die and thus return to the realm of the ancestral spirits.
The heads of the dolls are generally a semicircle with the flat side down. Occasionally, a small piece of light-coloured metal, intended to represent a comb, is inserted into the hair.
Lines are incised on the figures to represent braids and characteristic traditional scars.
In addition, there is always a small hole in the base to represent the anus and the labia and vulva may be indicated.
Some dolls are wrapped in hide to give a more natural appearance.
Although these dolls are quite abstract and roughly carved, they accurately portray the most important physical attributes of the young BaTonga mother.
After the birth of the first child, the older women who assisted in the delivery vigorously massage the mother’s breasts to facilitate lactation.
The stretched breasts are a desirable symbol of motherhood.
In addition, incised markings on the chest and stomach of the dolls accurately reproduce the cosmetic scars that every respectable Tonga girl receives as she approaches puberty.
It is quite common to see dolls in Tonga villages, where they often lie abandoned in a corner; dusty, worn and of a uniform, unattractive dull grey.
They appear to have been kicked around on the ground for years.
Little girls play with dolls that they or their parents or older sisters have crafted from objects lying around.
Dolls may be made from roughly carved sticks, short sections of millet stalk with a blob of mud for the head, rolled-up cardboard, or a corncob with the dried husks braided into an elaborate hairstyle.
Many children in wealthy families, especially in the larger towns, play with more modern plastic baby dolls imported from Western countries.
Although many of the dolls are playthings that aid the education of the child, others are of greater importance for adult women.
The BaTonga attribute to these dolls the power to increase fertility in women.
They believe that it is a form of power entering a woman that causes her to conceive, and if she is unable to do so she or her husband must offer a sacrifice to a doll so that it may come to their aid.
Although dolls may be used as fertility symbols by women who have had difficulty conceiving and thus acquire the successive applications of vegetable oil that produce a dark, shiny surfaces, most are used by little girls as playthings.
Few parents attach any real importance to the way the child treats the doll, and it is a mistake not to realise the symbolism associated with most of these toys.