Signs of the Spirit

Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life

Tony Perman

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780252052132
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

In 2005, Tony Perman attended a ceremony alongside the living and the dead. His visit to a Zimbabwe farm brought him into contact with the madhlozi, outsider spirits that Ndau people rely upon for guidance, protection, and their collective prosperity.

Perman's encounters with the spirits, the mediums who bring them back, and the accompanying rituals form the heart of his ethnographic account of how the Ndau experience ceremonial musicking. As Perman witnessed other ceremonies, he discovered that music and dancing shape the emotional lives of Ndau individuals by inviting them to experience life's milestones or cope with its misfortunes as a group. Signs of the Spirit explores the historical, spiritual, and social roots of ceremonial action and details how that action influences the Ndau's collective approach to their future. The result is a vivid ethnomusicological journey that delves into the immediacy of musical experience and the forces that transform ceremonial performance into emotions and community.

PART I

Foundations

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Finding Madhlozi in Chipinge

Arriving in Chipinge

My first glimpse of the town of Chipinge as it emerges from the surrounding hills and fields brings comfort, anticipation, and awe. Even after fifteen years’ worth of visits, I look forward to the moment when it appears. The town, though it seems sleepy from the distance of a bus window, teems with activity. It is a small island of urban commercialism in a sea of agricultural values; layers of history have shaped a landscape of complexity and contradiction. A relatively small, remote corner of Zimbabwe, tucked along the border with Mozambique, Chipinge District is home to a population held together by loosely shared senses of history, political affiliation, and language yet disrupted by wide-ranging geographic contrasts.

Moving south from the city of Mutare on the A9, our bus descends into the Save River Valley, a parched and barren terrain that remains fully populated, dusty, and dry, as an unannounced cue that we are entering the Ndau-speaking region of Zimbabwe: Gazaland. The heat penetrates the bus. Baobabs dot the landscape. Even the walls of the round houses scattered on the hills on either side of the road look thirsty, cracked with age, drought, and neglect brought with poverty and struggle.1 Life here is as hard as the soil that is so difficult to farm. Drumming here is slow and deliberate, resembling the tempo of local life relative to the highlands to the east. To reach the town of Chipinge, we turn left just before crossing the Save River at Birchenough Bridge, quickly ascend the hills of the Eastern Highlands, and pass the inviting Chipinge Safari Area, lush and seemingly bereft of people.

Life emerges. The earth is greener as baobab and acacia are joined by musasa, mutamba, mukute, wattle, and pine. The gradations of brown in the earth, the homes, and the vegetation of the Save lowlands are transformed as the earth turns yellow and bright red, trees burst with diverse shades of vibrant green, and the brown of the homes becomes a contrast in color. Corporate tea estates that escaped the purge of land reform swell with vitality. We are entering Chipinge’s well-known farmlands, lush with tea, bananas, and coffee. Were we to turn left again we would enter Chimanimani, a tourist haven famed for its national parks, waterfalls, and greenery, though devastated in March 2019 by Cyclone Idai. But we veer right, headed for the center of Zimbabwe’s Ndau districts and the town of Chipinge. After our bus passes the banana fields and tea estates among the villages in the Mutema Chieftaincy, the high-density Gaza township emerges from the hills. By now the townships and wards of Chipinge have climbed their way up the hills, evidence of Chipinge’s steady growth over the past few decades. Perhaps in response to the multiple challenges of life in twenty-first-century Zimbabwe, more and more people have moved to town. Economic, political, social, and environmental instability have made rural life less and less secure. The town bustles with activity as tomato sellers and wireless network airtime vendors crowd the narrow sidewalks. Churches, houses veiled by durawall, stores, and loiterers fill the space. The business district has grown so much that the bottle store that marked the edge of town when I first arrived in 2001 seems to have crept nearer the center of town.

But the Chipinge I came to know remains. The familiar faces drinking at the well-aged Chipinge Hotel, the dusty roads fanning out from the town center out to the residential areas, and the lush green that gives the highlands of Chipinge a welcoming feel all endure. They form the background for the hustle of locals trying to make ends meet during trying times. Day-to-day life can be consumed by struggle. Unemployment remains stubbornly high, as do school fees and the cost of daily necessities. These two truths, warmth and struggle, engender an endless campaign to maintain one’s existence. Daily conversations continuously turn to U.S. dollars, shifting gasoline prices, and possibilities for employment or escape.

These conversations are often accompanied by the sounds of Christianity, as churches new and old sonically dot the landscape of Chipinge. Because the Gaza Township rests against a hill in the distance, the sounds of worshippers there resound off the highlands as though they were a band shell and fill the urban soundscape, reminding shoppers and salespeople alike of the spiritual effort going into the lives around them. Superficially, that is the only evidence of spirituality at hand. One might never know that behind the scenes, and beyond the town itself, numerous residents of the greater Chipinge District rely on their spirits to help them navigate the challenges of today. One could say, “still rely,” but the role of the spirits shouldn’t be a surprise. They have helped for decades, some for centuries. They are not an anachronistic remnant pushing against the inevitability of modernity; they help shape that modernity. But these spirits no longer speak to everyone, as so many in Chipinge’s Ndau community have turned to God in his multiple Christian iterations, leading to the range of faiths typical of many postcolonial environments. But they are still strong; they are still necessary. For those in Chipinge who do rely on their spirits, these strange times demand a continued respect for, reliance on, and confidence in their outsider spirits, the madhlozi.

KUBIKIRA DORO IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: JULY 2–3, 2005

On July 2, 2005, I was invited by Davison and Serena Masiza to attend an event hosted by a friend whose home was on the newly resettled Horus Farm nearby. This particular ceremony serves as the principal site of the ethnographic experiences and analysis presented throughout the chapters to follow. My experience that day redefined my research in Chipinge District. The sources of my appreciation and nascent understanding of ceremonial life are the spirits who define it. The narrative thread here follows my experience of this event, at which I encountered the four communities of spirit delineated in Part II. I was a guest that day when our hosts brewed beer (vabikira doro) as a way of letting everyone know that a ceremony was to be held. The living and the dead alike were invited. People danced and sang from mid-afternoon to mid-morning the next day. During this ceremony four types of spirit arrived, one after the other:

Madzviti: Gaza Nguni soldiers

Zvipunha: Young girls, “nannies”

Mhongo: Spirits primarily from the Danda region of Mozambique

Zvaayungu: Soldiers from the Second Chimurenga in the 1970s

This book is about these spirits in Chipinge, the mediums who bring them back, and the ceremonies in which they emerge. Collectively called madhlozi, they are the “outsider spirits” of distant social encounters that have come to define Ndau identity and history. I augment the events of this ceremony with material from other ceremonies that I was invited to attend and record by the communities who hosted them in the Chipinge District. In describing these events, I address the logic of the madhlozi spirits and the nature of mediumship.

EXPERIENCING MEANING IN CEREMONIAL PRACTICE: A MODEL

In the volatile conditions of twenty-first-century Zimbabwe, where land itself is the unsettled site of political maneuvers and historical wrongs (Alexander 2006), ritual becomes a space for making history, reinforcing relationships, and reifying new possibilities. Spirit mediumship drives ritual action, making emotion and spirituality central features of social life.

Zimbabwe has long been the site of outstanding ethnomusicological, anthropological, and historical scholarship, from within and without the country, with a strong legacy regarding the social importance of music and ritual. But Ndau histories, lives, and sounds have been as tangential to the academic record as to national policy. I follow the lead of the historians John Keith Rennie (1973) and Elizabeth MacGonagle (2007), who shaped the scholarly understanding of Ndau history but whose attention to Ndau ritual was understandably secondary to other concerns. Although other scholars of Ndau life, including the anthropologist Carin Vijfhuizen (2002), the development scholar Phillian Zamchiya (2011, 2013b), the historian Marshall Maposa (2012), the poet Tinashe Muchuri (2015), the religion scholars Tenson Muyambo and Richard Maposa (2013), and Godfrey Museka, Darmarris Kaguda, and Onia Matumbu (2016) address ritual only briefly, each recognizes its centrality to Ndau social life and political engagement.

The broader scholarship concerning Zimbabwe consistently recognizes the inextricable links between land and politics (Lan 1985; Alexander 2006; Moore 2005; Charumbira 2015; Fontein 2015b) and between music and political identity (Turino 2000; Chikowero 2015; Kyker 2016) in Shona Zimbabwe, but Ndau’s historical differences and marginal existence lead to different dynamics between ritual, identity, and politics. In-depth studies of music usually emphasize either mbira music or urban popular music in Harare (Berliner 1993; Turino 2000; Eyre 2015; Kyker 2016). The country’s Ndau-speaking communities live on the margins of its social life and political history and on the edges of Zimbabweanist scholarship.

Madhlozi spirits resemble other spiritual actors who help the living come to terms with colonial and postcolonial realities. Hauka practices in Niger (Stoller 1995), stambeli in Tunisia (Jankowsky 2010), brekete in Ghana (Friedson 2009), and diverse spirits in Madagascar all reveal the importance of outsider spirits on the continent and the dynamism of spirituality in contemporary Africa (Lambek 2002; Emoff 2002). The work by the anthropologists Paul Stoller and Michael Lambek and by ethnomusicologists Richard Jankowsky, Steven Friedson, and Ron Emoff provides models for understanding how madhlozi shape Ndau life and suggests provocative continental dynamics in which young spirits constructively harness postcolonial insecurity, conflict, and ambiguity.

Focused on the immediacy of ceremonial action, this book explores the historical, spiritual, and social roots and fruits of that action as ritual brings people together and shapes their collective approach to the future. In doing so, it can be summarized in three succinct ways. First, it is an ethnography of Ndau spiritual performance and the role that music plays in spirit possession ceremonies in the rural communities surrounding Chipinge, Zimbabwe. Second, it is an investigation of the immediacy of musical experience and the ways in which the ongoing present of ceremonial performance becomes emotional. Finally, it provides a model rooted in ethnography and the semiotic tools of C. S. Peirce to explain how music, meaning, affect, and experience intersect. I thus engage with three overlapping bodies of knowledge: Ndau spiritual life, semiotics, and studies of emotion and affect. I develop an ethnographically grounded model of emotion that takes the reader step by step from perception to physiologically and culturally informed response to expression. The goal is to provide a theoretical model for exploring emotional experience in ethnograph terms. Semiotic processes inform emotional experiences in important ways that illuminate the tight relationship between sound, meaning, experience, and emotion. Age-old practices remain vibrant and relevant in the twenty-first century.

As becomes obvious with sustained attention to performance in the madhlozi ceremony, experiences are driven by the historical, social, cosmological, and political meanings contained therein. Thus, the minutiae of musical practice connect to the formative moments of identity construction, social coherence, historical understanding, and emotional experience. More specifically, the habits and values that comprise the self inform people’s response to performance signs with numerous effects. Because performance signs are understood to reflect local histories, local expectations, and collective purpose, they can become moving and transformative. Knowledge of the past and hopes for the future are involved throughout in a manner that is all about the present, experience in the moment. Therefore, I focus on the immediacy and importance of the here and now.

With this approach I develop and employ a sequential model of emotional experience that involves semiosis, physiology, evaluation, and expression. I treat affect as a ubiquitous element of experience. The valuation of signs along dimensions of value that implicate and potentially change aspects of the self is the core process in emotional life. In this way dimensions of value define emotions. Semiosis and emotion are shaped by agents, and in madhlozi ceremonies, the spirits are agents just as much as are the people who invite them. Each has desires and participates with purpose. In this model, as in Ndau life, spirits are parts of selves. In-the-moment relationships among the living and with the dead shape local realities. The now, as represented and felt during performance, can actualize the possible, bring the past into the present, and direct the affective dimensions of life productively toward an unknown future. Participants generate deeply meaningful experiences by engaging signs that intersect with the habits and values that shape their interpretation. These experiences only fully make sense within the broader social, spiritual, and historical contexts of early twenty-first-century southeastern Zimbabwe.

In the following chapters I introduce a lexicon drawn from C. S. Peirce and elsewhere as a set of robust and consistent tools with which to illuminate meaning in experience and explore how ritual feels without depending on tools developed for language or physiology. My theory suggests that music uniquely shapes experience, and the study of music as a semiotic domain is uniquely poised to shape a broader understanding of semiosis and phenomenology. Applying the work of Peirce to sound reveals the theoretical utility of semiotics and the practical utility of musicking in the productive phenomenology of ritual life.

In order to succinctly capture the continuity and relations of the theoretical keywords presented throughout this text, I offer the following:

Emotional experiences begin with signs, the gateway to histories, purposes, hopes, and dreams. The living and the dead demonstrate agency by making interpretants to these signs, which are the effects of semiosis that reveal the objects signified, whether via resemblance (icons), contiguity (indices), or stipulated generality (symbols). Through the mutually informed processes of biocultural evolution and socialization, people’s potentially ever-changing habits guide these processes of experiential interpretation, but the ways in which different dimensions of value are brought to bear ensure that life, as semiosis, is never predictable. The affective dimension of interpretation ensures that the self is always implicated in these intersubjective moments of performance, spiritual engagement, and sociality. Identities, selves, and communities are made through subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Musicking in ritual is powerfully effective in ensuring haecceity, the narrow attention to the here and now, and becomes a means of shaping affect, emotions, and feelings through expressive emotives to increase the odds of reifying ceremonial ideals and expectations, transforming possibility, as icons and rhemes, into actuality, now indices and dicents.

I argue that physiology and culture are compatible, that emotion is meaningful and knowable, and that semiotic tools can help scholars avoid the pitfalls of linguocentric or neurocentric approaches by tracing the specific ways in which meaning is felt based on the histories and consequences of semiotic moments. Bringing the work of Peirce to affect offe...