Contributing to the cultural repository.

 I have started thinking and worrying about the fact that I do not know how to make umqombothi and I am not sure that my sister does either. We did not grow up in a family that made it often and even the times they did, I was too young to care or get involved. Our parents and knowledgeable elders of our family are late, so we are the elders and we simply do not have the knowledge. There are much younger members of the clan who may need this kind of information as they grow up and even if they never need it, I think it is important that they at least have a repository to refer to.

Umqombothi is an example of a host of practices, ideas and customs I worry we do not have information about as relates to our family. We were raised by christian parents and grandparents who though born in families where traditional ceremonies were conducted as young children, did not continue to practice these in their adult lives because they were in contradiction to new sets of beliefs they had adopted. This was further complicated by their migration from ookhaya khulu in pursuit of work and in response to life’s other demands. So we inherited the very little they exposed us to and I am realising that it is simply not enough, especially after having exited religion in its entirety.

Colonialism was brutal in its assault of our ways of being as black people in South Africa, a fact all reasoning people accept. The unfortunate habit around our acknowledgement of this fact, is emphasis being placed on the economic implications of the colonial project and overlooking of cultural impact at the very nucleus of all societies, the family. Even government policy is geared towards economic redress and very little as relates to the restoration of our societies holistically. Then we wonder why laws/regulations and around slaughtering and ceremony and their reinforcement in suburban South Africa are as bizarre as they sometimes are. Dr Lwazi Lushaba’s work on decolonisation and the exploration of what he calls capitalist modernity have been instrumental in contextualising the broader implications of colonialism to me. Zooming in my lens from seeing the implications at a national level primarily, to seeing them in my actual life and that of my relatives. The negation of indigenous knowledge systems and prioritisation of western thought is at the centre of our issues as a people.

Colonialism was intentional about disrupting the passing down of traditions and critical information from one generation to the next. One of the most jarring examples of this is the French government’s Laval Decree introduced in all its West African colonies in the 1930’s. This law stated that Africans were not to allowed produce images of themselves. This meant that it was illegal for black people in the French colonies to produce films of themselves. Gatherings, ceremonies, milestones and even the most ordinary days of their lives, could not be captured neither for memory, financial gain nor for knowledge sharing. So, you have to wonder why it was so critical to the colonial project to restrict the preservation of our ways of living and thinking about life. To then make its ways the standard and the main reference for a people who had lived long before the violent encounters that led to our domination.

There is a case to be made for ukuzilanda (recalling of self) being a responsibility that rests on our shoulders. Thinking about life and the world outside of western rationale and welcoming the ideas of life conjured by our ancestors. They too thought about living and the best ways to go about it and organised society with intention. It is from those ways of thinking that sociological ideas such as ‘Ubuntu” stem. Unlike the people of West Africa in the 1930’s, there is nothing inhibiting our ability to document our family histories, cultural practices and recipes.

We need to take time to sit with the elders and ask the questions. We need to consume the available literature. We need to attend family gatherings as participants and observers, taking in both process and reasoning. Culture is by nature malleable and we may change the methods of practice without foregoing the intention and purpose of its practices. I think that this may also be a salve to the feeling of helplessness about the country and continent and the conditions of black people in these. Doing the things we can do to preserve black thought and history to help ourselves as well as posterity.