Posted on July 27, 2010
Alf A Mother remembers. Credit: Alf Kumalo
Dear Colleagues
Last month Ancestral Stories brought you a series of blogs on ways in which people are engaging with the histories of their families or larger groups with which they are affiliated. This month our blogs focus on the ancestors and on how groups that start from the premise that their ancestors are important, are convening to remember events that happened almost two hundred years ago and are forging identities for the present and the future based on the appreciation of their forebears. Velaphi Mkhize, prominent radio presenter-turned-academic, cultural commentator and founder of Umsamo African Institute, talks about why the ancestors matter. Mkhize's blog is accompanied by two blogs on groups that are trying to honour their forebears by gathering people of izibongo (family names) that trace their pasts through the same ancestors: the Ndwandwe who hold Zwide kaLanga aloft and the amaNtungwa kaMbulazi whose founding father is Mbulazi. Phineas Ndwandwe writes about their efforts to convene the Ndwandwe and I report on the annual gathering of the Ntungwa in Ngome that I attended on 17 July 2010. The amaNtungwa (which include the Khumalo, Mabaso and other family names) call their organisation the Insika yamaNtungwa while the Ndwandwe are the Ubumbano lwamaZwide. Maanda Mulaudzi tells us how he found out about family history associations in Venda and what they do. In the future we hope to go inside some of these associations and see them from closer. For now let us look more closely at the Khumalo and the Ndwandwe.
We know from available evidence that historically the Khumalo were resident in the Ngome region of what is today northern KwaZulu-Natal. They neighboured the Ndwandwe among others. According to historians, in the 1800s the Ndwandwe were one of the powerful kingdoms in the east of southern Africa. In this period the Ndwandwe leader was Zwide while the three sections of the Khumalo were under Donda, Bheje and Mashobana. At the Khumalo gathering it was acknowledged that the Ndwandwe killed at least Donda and possibly Bheje. The Khumalo were said to be related to the Ndwandwe as Mzilikazi's mother was a daughter of Zwide's.
What is common to the Ndwandwe and Khumalo groups that are convening today, and to many others that are doing similar activities which we will hear about in the coming months, is that they share a sense of not knowing who they are. They explain this as resulting from the dispersal of their ancestors when their kingdom or chiefdoms fractured after defeat by the Zulu. Some Khumalo or Ndwandwe were incorporated into the Zulu kingdom while others fled to other parts of southern Africa – as far as Zimbabwe in the case of the Khumalo and Mabaso, and as far as Tanzania in the case of the Ndwandwe diaspora.
Both groups (and others such as the Mkhize, Gwala, Buthelezi, etc.) hold in place the notion that people of certain izibongo (family names) are closely related. This is based on the understanding that people of those family names belonged to the same isizwe (nation) under the same leaders. These leaders are held as the common ancestors of all the people of those family names. Hence at the gathering of the Insika yamaNtungwa, it was Mbulazi and Mntungwa who were mainly upheld. They are considered the ancestors of all those who identify themselves as amaNtungwa. For the Ndwandwe, Zwide and Mkhatshwa are the main ancestors. In each case these ancestors are honoured daily through their names being used as the izithakazelo (kinship group praises) of each group. The praises are used as polite forms of address and to call up ancestors during family rituals.
The efforts to reunite these closely related people proceeds from a common assumption that the isizwe was dispersed and under previous political dispensations people did not have the space to convene because the political circumstances did not allow it. Now that there is relative political freedom and stability in southern Africa, this means the freedom to associate with those one shares close ties with. We are therefore seeing many people trying to work out their personal identities in the context of political freedom. When they think back to who they have been historically, they seem to be stumbling at the lack of coherence of the histories of their kinship groups. To many, coherence only looms in times prior to the rise of the Zulu kingdom. So, many are turning to the past in order to look to the future. Healers tell them that their ancestors are not at peace because they died in war or fled from their homes where the graves of their own predecessors were and died as fugitives.
Part of the effort, it appears from conversations, speeches and interviews, is to soothe the pain of the ancestors by showing them that their children have found their way back home and have found and rescued one another in the wild where they have been wondering homeless for almost two hundred years. Another part of the effort is to revive marriage taboos about marrying one's isihlobo (relative) whose group is historically closely related to one's own. At the Ntungwa gathering, for instance, one speaker exhorted those present to stop intermarrying between the Khumalo, Mntungwa and Mabaso. The Ndwandwe, Nxumalo, Masuku and Madlobha are not supposed to intermarry. Moreover, finding one another as children of the same ancestors in each of these two groups entails rediscovering which other groups were part of the same isizwe, efforts that both the Ntungwa and the Ndwandwe are continuing.
The gathering of these groups raises questions that we hope to take up in face-to-face meetings that we are going to hold: What is family history in groups that hold such an expansive concept of umndeni (family) that sometimes means the same thing as isizwe (nation) in the sense of each being an extended family? What is the place of history in reshaping our identities for a free society given how groups are looking to precolonial and pre-Zulu pasts in order for people to find ways to move forward with a coherent sense of who they are? Finally, what is a family?
In the coming blogs we will continue looking at other ways of, and reasons for, seeking family pasts in different parts of the country.
Sincerely
Mbongiseni