Tonga Religious Life in the Twentieth Century

CHAPTER VIII. Death and its Rituals

CHAPTER VIII DEATH AND ITS RITUALS Death and its Rituals Death and the Human Condition Funeral rituals once encoded much of Tonga thought about the human condition (Moonga et al. 1996). They probably still do for many. The basic theme is a summing up of human life, and the variations from one area to another do not obscure this fundamental message. The rituals celebrate the status achieved and the various sets of relationships created over a lifetime by the deceased, the importance of kinship in general and the continuity of the lineage, and the value of neighbourliness . One evidence of the importance given to funeral ritual is found in the old belief that the muuya of animals that mourn their dead give rise to mizimo (Chapter Five), just as human mourning in the funeral is part of the process by which human muuya is transformed into the muzimo. Funerals are also large-scale gatherings lasting a number of days with rituals orchestrated to celebrate a resurgence of life in the community at large after death has taken one of its members. All members of the community ought to be mourned. This excluded children diagnosed as anomalous at birth and those who cut the upper teeth first, who were defined as creatures of the bush and returned to the bush. In being disposed of without mourning, such children were treated like lepers, who became outcasts during life, and suicides who chose to die of themselves. By the mid-1950s, Gwembe lepers and suicides were mourned, but I know of a Plateau leper whose death was unmourned in 1951. No one wailed. Clan joking partners (bajwanyina) disposed of his body and his personal belongings in an antbear burrow. A single cow was slaughtered to feed those who disposed of the body. There was no death divination, and the muzimo was not inherited (Diary of Benjamin Shipopa, 1951). All this is in stark contrast with what happens when someone accepted as a member of the community dies. Then burial takes place within the homestead or, since the 1950s, perhaps in a cemetery. There is public mourning, and the continued existence of the dead in the form of a muzimo is celebrated. Suicides in the 1940s and 1950s commonly chose to hang themselves, which meant they had a good chance of being found and revived. Since the 1970s, drinking one of the easily available pesticides is the more usual method, though some still survive the attempt. A survivor was regarded as dangerous until ritually treated, with clan joking-relatives making rude fun of the attempt, and reintegrated into the community 173 Tonga Religious Life in the Twentieth Century through a communal meal. The rope used was burned, for otherwise it might kill another. The house where the attempt was made was abandoned: no one should ever sleep there again. But the subsequent death of one who had survived and been treated was mourned like any other death. On the Plateau, from at least 1946, and in Gwembe from at least 1956, infants are mourned with the exception of stillbirths and those who die immediately after birth. In 1948, I heard a Plateau woman insist that she would mourn her dead child, “My child was a person”. She got her way, although others had said the baby was too young to mourn. In 1996, I was told at Siameja in Gwembe South that they mourn a child who dies after having been brought out from the birth house, usually at the end of its first week. This is the time when children are given ancestral names. Even so, the funeral of a child who dies before cutting its first tooth is usually completed on the day of death, and should be an affair of bacembele (old women) only. They dig the grave and carry out the burial, tasks given to men when older children and adults die. They are given cooked grain to eat, rather than the meat provided at the funeral of an older person. This, however, may be changing, with children mourned by the wider community from an early age. This may reflect the drop in child mortality. More children survive and the death of an infant becomes less accepted. At Siameja in 1998, I found both men and women mourning at the funeral of a child of a few weeks, and the funeral ran its full course. The death of...