Environment and Activities
The Bemba were the dominant tribe on the North-Eastern plateau of Northern Rhodesia. They have a centralized government with a paramount chief, the Citimukulu, whose empire formerly consisted of the territory between the four lakes, Bangweulu, Mweru, Tanganyika and Nyasa. The Citimukulus were the most powerful monarchs in this part of Central Africa and at one time they were able to exact tribute from as far north as Tabora in Tanganyika. The Bemba are still proud of their former position as a ruling tribe and feel that their traditions should be kept alive. Women as well as men are conscious of their superiority over the surrounding peoples.
The Bemba are a small tribe. At the time when these observations were made they numbered about 150,000. But they live widely dispersed over the plateau at a density of some 3·67 per square mile, in villages of 30â50 huts built at anything from five to twenty miles apart. Their territory is therefore larger than their numbers might suggest. The Bemba practise shifting cultivation of the slash-and-burn type. Their staple food is finger millet but they grow sorghum, maize, beans, peas and cucurbits. The growing of cassava is a modern introduction which does not feature, as does the cultivation of the other staple foods, in the chisungu rites.
The women are responsible for most of the food supply. To make a garden the men lop branches from the trees and the women pile them in the centre of a cleared patch so that they may be burned to form an ash bed on which the seeds are sown. The dragging together of the branches is heavy work of which the women seem proud. It is their task also to select the seeds and sow them. They reap the main millet crop and dig and sow the garden mounds round the villages on which vegetables are sown.
The land of the Bemba is well watered but its soil is poor and it has a low yield per acre. There is an annual shortage of food which approaches famine in the worst years. This food shortage is probably greater now than it was formerly, owing to the constant emigration of able-bodied men looking for work in the mines. Yet hungry months seem to have been a feature in pre-European days, to judge from folk tales and the stories old men tell. For this reason, perhaps, great emphasis is placed on a womanâs importance in controlling and husbanding the food supplies. Many forms of Bemba ritual centre round the production of food. There are, for instance, rites for sowing and reaping, first fruits ceremonies and prayers which precede the slashing of the trees before clearing new garden sites.
The Bemba live on high plateau land standing at a height of four to five thousand feet and this is covered with bush, scrub and low trees. It is typical savannah forest with few breaks in the vegetation except for the clearings formed by small river beds. The Bemba can be described as typical forest people. They depend on trees for the fertility of their millet gardens since they believe they can only sow their staple crop in the ash beds formed of burnt branches lopped off high trees. Bemba men are great hunters, and though game is not now plentiful, hunting, a forest pursuit, is considered the most pleasurable and exciting of activities. One of the most important forms of ordeal they perform is divination by hunting.
The bush also provides much of the peopleâs food in the form of wild vegetables, mushrooms, honey and caterpillars. A Bemba woman must study and know the resources of the bush round her village since without such knowledge she and her family could not survive during the hungry months. A Bemba girl of about ten or eleven is able to distinguish carefully among the thirty or forty different kinds of mushrooms used and can tell which are edible and which are poisonous. Wood is also used for housing, the making of furniture and cooking utensils and for fire wood. The trees of the bush are believed to have magic properties as well as economic uses and even the most casual collection of âmedicinesâ will reveal as many as forty to fifty different trees with well-known magic properties.
The Bemba divide their world into village (mushi) and bush (mpanga). The village represents the civilized, orderly way of life and the bush a more mysterious, dangerous environment which must be cajoled to yield its resources for manâs benefit. Spirits move about in the bush and trees can be used for their magic properties. As in other Bantu languages, the word for tree (muti) is also the word for âmedicineâ. This distinction between the forest and the village, between the untamed and uncultivated sphere of life and the domestic and cultivated is constantly reflected in the chisungu and other rites.
There is little specialization in Bemba economy. Crafts are ill-developed. Men make clothing, baskets, mats, furniture, drums and other woodwork while pottery is the only craft in womenâs hands. As will be seen, the making of pottery images is an important part of the chisungu ceremony.
The Bemba had no form of storable wealth until the arrival of the Europeans. Houses were, and are, impermanent structures and subject to the ravages of white ants. They are constantly rebuilt and whole villages are moved every four or five years. Land is only cultivated for from four to eight years before it is returned to the bush, and garden sites are, therefore, not inherited. Cattle, the most common form of wealth accumulated by East African peoples, cannot be kept since the tsetse fly infests most of the area. Indeed a man had little to leave to his heir except his hereditary bow. The wealth of the Bemba consisted of the right to demand services from kinsmen and protĂ©gĂ©s and formerly from slaves, rather than of the accumulation of goods. The storing of food and its distribution to her household was one of the womanâs most responsible obligations, since on its success depended the building up of a large family unit and ultimately a village. There was, however, little surplus food to be traded. Barter was ill-developed and markets non-existent. A certain amount of food was distributed from village to village in fulfilment of kinship obligations.
No cash crop had been introduced in the area at the time I studied it. In order to get a cash income Bemba men left the territory to look for work in the mining areas to the south. Between 40 and 60 per cent of males were absent from the area in 1931. Although this phenomenon probably only dates from the nineteen twenties it has already had such marked effects on the marriage system of the Bemba that it is reflected in the chisungu rite.
The environment of the Bemba is also responsible for those health conditions which are the source of many of their anxieties. Malaria is endemic and the figures for pulmonary disease were very high during my visit. The mortality of children of under three years of age was very severe. This was thought by medical experts to be due to the fact that children had no milk at all after they were weaned, usually between their second and third year; also to infections resulting in dysentery. Death in childbirth was not uncommon. Girls seemed to bear their first child immediately after puberty, at about 15 or 16 years. They received little skilled care either before or after childbirth, and the wide dispersal of the villages made it difficult for the Government to provide European medical facilities. The traditional processes of delivery were exhausting in the extreme to the mother and it was almost impossible for a Bemba midwife to secure conditions that her European counterpart would consider clean.
Bemba women seemed to accept the period of food shortage to which they had become accustomed but they were obsessed with the risks that their children ran and their magic was very largely concerned with rites designed to save their babiesâ health. The chisungu ceremony is a case in point.
Ideology and Dogma
The Bemba attribute their blessings and misfortunes to supernatural agencies, which are set in motion either by persons, dead or living, or by impersonal magic forces, good or evil. They do not believe in the dogma of chance.1
The Personal beings include: (i) the spirits of ancestors (mipashi) mainly of the matrilineal line, which can be addressed at spirit shrines, the burial places of dead chiefs or in the huts of their individual descendants. They can also be born again with each new child, who acquires a mupashi as a guardian spirit, either from his motherâs or his fatherâs line, or from the royal dynasty of the territory in which he is born. These guardian spirits can also be inherited, and each dead man or woman is succeeded by a close relative of the same sex who acquires his or her name and guardian spirit.
Malignant spirits, (fiwa) who are the spirits of those who died with a feeling of injury because of some violent death, or who left the world with a sense of grievance. Fiwa return to strike their descendants with illness or misfortune.
Living persona who can produce good fortune by blessing (ukupala amate), which they do chiefly by calling on the ancestral spirits to which they have special right of address; or cursing, which they do through some less specified evil force. The blessings of a chief or a man in authority are particularly potent because of the great spirits such powerful persons have access to. The head of a matrilineage, or an important member of it can also bless in this way. A great social personage who has been injured or not given his due, is feared because he may withhold the blessings of the spirits, or actually pronounce curses (ukutipa or ukulapishya). The curse is specially important in relation to procreation and childbirth, since the malevolent wishes of the fatherâs sister can produce barrenness in the woman, or impotence in the man. This is described as âthe great curseâ. There are, however, a number of curses which can be used by injured people, who âthrow lightningâ or are said to be able to âthrow lionsâ, or who can threaten to curse, if their property is stolen, or when specially distressed by the treatment they have received.
Impersonal forces include (i) Magic in general (bwanga), which is the force contained in the leaves, roots or barks of various trees or shrubs and a number of activating agencies (fishimba), such as parts of animals or human beings, which can be used by the specialist magician (Ćanga) for beneficent purposes (health, the production of crops, fertility and success) or for harmful purposes (illness, death or crop failure). Buloshi is evil magic or witchcraft, handled by people believed to have supernatural powers.
The magic influence of sex, blood and. fire which, when brought into wrongful contact with each other, are thought to be highly dangerous to every Bemba, but particularly to babies and young children, who are believed to be vulnerable to so many dangers; and to chiefs, on whom the prosperity of the land is held to depend. This system of beliefs is extremely complex, and yet it is necessary to try to understand it, if the meaning of the chisungu is to be grasped. The dogma relating sex and fire is the idée maßtresse behind most of the ritual behaviour of the Bemba.
Briefly speaking, sex relations according to Bemba dogma make a couple âhotâ. In this state it is dangerous for them to approach the ancestral spirits in any rite of prayer or sacrifice; and any chief or headman who attempted to perform such a ceremony without purification would run the risk of bringing disaster on his district. The chiefâs shrines are guarded by old women or hereditary priests who keep sex taboos. For the chief to be casual in keeping sex taboos, or to approach his ancestors without purification is âto spoil the landâ (ukuonaula icalo).
All persons of sex maturity are in fact distinguished by a special term (wa kuboko)and are excluded from a number of rites on the ground that they are âhotâ, or are likely to be âhotâ. Such people can pollute the fireplace of a hut by touching it, and then a baby fed with gruel cooked on this fire might sicken and die. Parents who do not purify themselves after intercourse run the risk of killing their children by accidentally touching the family hearth. Adulterers are more dangerous still, as they cannot purify themselves since the necessary rite can only be carried out by husband and wife. Small babies and their mothers are therefore kept away from beer drinks where âbadâ people congregate drinking round the fire without care. The babyâs gruel is often cooked on a separate hearth and in a separate pot. The art of Bemba motherhood in fact consists very largely in guarding children from danger from fire. A newly born baby is âunripeâ (mubishi)and is in a specially precarious position until it has been âtakenâ by its parents (ukupola umwana)by an act of intercourse and the lighting of new fire, when it is a few months old. To save the baby, it must be âbrought to the fireâ by being held over the flames of a doctored fire when it is first placed to the breast, or when the cord falls off (ukumwalawila). If its father is away and the ceremony of âtaking the childâ cannot take place, the baby is given medicine (umuti wa lueshya). The mother and the midwife extinguish the old fire, mud the hut and light a new fire. Then they carry the baby to the menâs shelter where there are presumably many youths âwith heatâ or âwith bad thingsâ, or to a kitchen where the people have been known not to have done the purification ceremony. In this dangerous company, they give the baby gruel cooked on the new fire to make it immune. The rite of ukumukokotola is a ceremonial spitting of raw food on the baby by a menstruating woman so that the baby can be safely touched by a woman who is in this condition. All these methods are believed to secure immunity on homoeopathic principles.
The chiefâs sacred fire, the fire of the land, must be protected with even greater care. It is placed in a separate hut and watched by a senior wife, past child bearing. The chiefâs food is usually cooked by a man and not a woman.
To remove the dangers due to sex intercourse a special ceremony is required and this is one which can only be performed by a legally married couple. Hence the close links between the rules of ritual and those governing marriage ties, and the great importance of magic belief in determining the strength of the marital relationship. At marriage each girl is presented by her paternal aunt with a miniature pot about 2œ inches in diameter which must be guarded with the utmost secrecy. With this the purification rite is carried out. It is filled with water and ...
