Tonga Timeline: Appraising Sixty Years of Multidisciplinary Research in Zambia and Zimbabwe

III. Art and the Sacred Practitioner Among the Zimbabwe Tonga: An Analysis of the Symbolic Interaction

CHAPTER III Art and the Sacred Practitioner Among the Zimbabwe Tonga: An Analysis of the Symbolic Interaction Maxwell Mukova1 and Jeremiah Chikovore2 Introduction It has long been noted that the interactive relationship between religion and art in Africa remains understudied and little understood. This observation is especially true when applied to the Tonga arts in Zimbabwe. It has been simple for scholars of both religion and art to loosely list artistic products without delving into their meanings. There is an interest in African artefacts, as evidenced by the volumes of archaeological studies devoted to them and the collections in Western museums but the value attached to them has largely been commercial (Hackett 1994). In initial contacts between Western missionaries and the indigenous people in Zimbabwe, most art related to religious belief and practice was deliberately misrepresented as primitive, tribal and magical fetishes, thus debasing them of any religious significance. 1. Maxwell Mukova, University of Zimbabwe College of Health Sciences, Harare. 2. Jeremiah Chikovore, Human Sciences Research Council, Durban, South Africa, and Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust, Blantyre, Malawi. Attitudes toward African artistic expression changed in the 1970s when social anthropologists were urged to loosen their pragmatist grip on the study of African arts and allow for questions of meaning and philosophical interpretation to be given attention (Fagg 1973). Doing so allowed for exploration of the meanings in religious art among believing communities. This study places the Tonga arts within the context of religion and explores the relationship between art and the sacred practitioner, thus providing an interpretive context for the religious meaning of art. An exploration of its nature and depth ultimately demonstrates the logic of Tonga cosmology. Guided by the phenomenological approach, this paper is concerned with a systematic study of religion through its phenomena, or that which presents itself to our senses (Bleeker 1972). Such an approach interrogates religious phenomena for its meaning, through empathy, and avoids imposing the researcher’s personal value judgments. It contends that after classifying and describing phenomena, their inner meaning, logic and underlying structures should be probed. We begin by explaining key concepts and background, before discussing four key roles among Zimbabwean Tonga religious practitioners. After that we outline the identity and characterizations of dominant traditional art forms. Finally, we analyse the symbolic functions of art as they appear within the mediational realms of the sacred practitioners. Key Concepts of Tonga Religious Phenomenology Despite the inherent difficulties of definition, particularly within the religious discourse, a sacred practitioner can be generally understood as ‘one who holds for the religious community a role which in various ways, times and locations connects the community with what it regards as being of 68 maxwell mukova and jeremiah chikovore unrestricted value’ (Cox 1992: 104). During mediations, sacred practitioners enable the sacred to manifest itself and for people to respond appropriately. They function in both ritual and non-ritual contexts, though their roles are usually in the former. It is possible to be a sacred practitioner just once in a lifetime or several times (Cox 1992). Practitioners can be classified into three categories – as priestly, prophetic or holy persons – but such classification is defective because their roles overlap widely. In line with Cox (1992), we use sacred practitioner in this paper to refer to anyone among the Zimbabwean Tonga who mediates to various degrees between the human and the sacred realms. This includes those who at face value might appear to have nothing to do with religion in the strictest sense of the word. In terms of what constitutes the sacred, Eliade (1964) defines it as opposite to the profane. The profane is ordinary while the sacred is ‘reality that does not belong to our world’ (Cox 1995: 353). The sacred could be a realm of spiritual beings, or a god in theistic religions, the source of religious awareness and worship, central to human faith, practices and existence (Otto 1969). Due to the globalizing effect of theistic religions, especially Christianity, most cultures now identify the sacred more and more in theistic terms. Likewise, the Tonga people in Zimbabwe have not been spared the influence of Western Christianity. Traditionally the Tonga believed in the existence of an ancestral realm, or abode of the dead. (Borrowing from the concept of hybridity as used in post-colonial discourses (Ashcroft et al. 2003), the term traditional is employed to refer to the inherited cultural aspects of the Tonga cosmology and does not...