Tonga Religious Life in the Twentieth Century

CHAPTER III. Tonga Religious Vocabulary and its Referents

CHAPTER III TONGA RELIGIOUS VOCABULARY AND ITS REFERENTS Tonga Religious Vocabulary and its Referents The Religious Vocabulary Language affects the way people think and talk of spiritual forces. Ci-Tonga, like other Bantu languages, lacks gender. Its speakers, therefore , are not forced to impute gender to spirit or any other category of being, which may make personification less likely. This has not prevented other Bantu-speakers, including those in western and northwestern Zambia, from personifying divinity and making representations of various forms of spirit (Musambachime 1994; Felix and Jordan 1998; Wastiau 2000). The Tonga unwillingness to personify is probably linked to their focus on what is happening or is to happen. For them “who” is defined by “what” is happening. I have rarely found people much concerned over whether there is only one kind of spiritual essence which manifests itself in different ways or whether the names given to various manifestations represent different entities. Such subtleties are unnecessary in the pragmatic circumstances under which most Tonga deal with spirit, and I have not encountered philosophically inclined elders prepared to consider and expound the nature of divinity and the cosmos. Nor have others working among the Tonga. Nor have we found any developed corpus of myth. Since no one has the power to formulate belief and standardize usage, people develop their own sense of what is appropriate through listening to divinations or the discussions that evaluate indications of spirit intervention, including dreams. Those living in the same village on occasion find to their surprise that they and their neighbours have slightly different vocabularies and use terms differently. The Tonga language, moreover, encourages a play with words, and provides ways to modify a basic root to express a range of meanings through which speakers indicate what they think of the spirit forces affecting them. This is done through prefixes used in Bantu languages to categorize objects and concepts (Collins 1962; Hopgood 1940). The choice of prefix indicates how the speaker evaluates spirits as well as other objects and forces encountered. In ci-Tonga, ma- is used when the speaker is stressing a collectivity, but may carry an implication of disapproval: a spirit designated by ma- probably is seen as acting malevolently or strangely or as of alien origin. Ci- (zi-, plural) again may have a derogatory meaning or imply diminishment. Bu- (ma-, plural) has an 37 Tonga Religious Life in the Twentieth Century abstract sense or refers to the quality of something. Mu- (mi-, plural) is used for some parts of the body, breath, work, the roadway, medicines, plants, various other phenomena, and some spirits. Mu- (ba-, plural) is the prefix used of humans, certain large animals, and some spirits. It is the most honorific (Collins 1962:11-22). Choice of prefix, which then governs the use of adjectival and verbal modifiers, indicates how the speaker evaluates what is happening. The Tonga religious vocabulary consists of verbs referring to appropriate attitudes and actions of appeal to spirit forces, and of nouns referring to spirit categories, religious officiants, specific ritual occasions, shrines and ritualized objects. The vocabulary varies slightly from one area to another, and even those living in the same village may use slightly different terms. It has also changed over time, with the introduction of new terms, the loss of various rituals, and the reevaluation of spiritual forces. Elsewhere in Africa, where secret societies or a specialized priesthood exist, members have developed elaborate esoteric vocabularies taught only to initiates (e.g., Biebuyck 1973:66ff on the Bwami Association of the Lega of Zaire). The Tonga, by the 1940s, had no memory of such associations although it is possible that hunters’ guilds, for elephant and perhaps hippo hunters, once existed. While Tonga delight in punning, proverbs and innuendo, and admire the man or woman who excels in such devices, I have found no evidence of any esoteric vocabulary, with one possible exception. In 1947, then Chief Monze, who was not a spirit medium, gave me a few words which he said had been exclusive to his predecessors, who had been mediums of the spirit Monze (Colson 2006b; Colson fieldnotes 1947). Mediums do frequently speak in glossalalia, a stream of words drawn from various languages as well as nonsense syllables, but these seem specific to the individual. When such words flow in trance, they appear to be emotive rather than instructive, and they are interpreted by an assistant who orders the...