Zambia’s Kankanga Dances: The Changing Life of Ritual

Zambia's Kankanga Dances The Changing Life of Ritual Edith Turner Ritual among the Ndembu of Zambia has changed drastically through time and shows no signs of stabilizing. In 1985, after an absence of thirty-one years, I returned to the tribe where Victor Turner and I had worked to make a restudy of girls' initiation rituals. I found they had been greatly reduced and altered. However, during the few months of my stay further changes took place before my eyes, including a rebound to an older form, first ludic in style, and later by chief's decree. I had not realized that the tradition had never in fact been stable and that it was able to alter according to circumstances . GIRLS' INITIATION 1951-54 To enable the reader to grasp the fluidity of the ritual style I will give the performative processes as they existed in the fifties and will follow with the variations I noted in 1985. The prime dramatic focus in the earlier initiations was the Kankanga, the initiate herself, not the women as is the case today; the occasion I will describe is for Mwenda, a sulky romantic girl who has been teased continually about marrying her cross-cousin, whom she is a little keen on anyway. She is an active young woman, used to digging and pounding; she battles at every turn with her mother about why she should do the water-carrying, and so on. But her day is coming, for the cousin has given her an imba shell, the token of marriage. Now this is an absolute personal situation. She is going to get free of her 57 mother, by means of initiation. This shows the contrast with theatre performance where no actual social relationships are changed by what is performed . It is true effective ritual. The desires of a real person are going to be satisfied-elaborated and enriched by the older women she admires-in fact she can't wait for the hot development of sex (a strong element in the initiation). At last the longed-for time has come. Kankanga's body is melting into a richer stranger form, sprouting in front with big teats. It is time for her to go into seclusion. This is an example of how the desire for the performance of a great ritual arises in Africa. Here it culminates in a final display dance by the girl-and in every initiation there is success. Let us compare that with performance among the general American public. Here and there a gifted child finds a gifted teacher, and enthusiasm for the art fires. But in our system such a one quickly ruptures through the social fabric. She or he leaves her original society, the world of ordinary humanity, and becomes a member of a professional group. In this way common society is looted of its talent by the professional world, leaving the dull mob to carry on without it, to be content to just watch; and such a tendency is very hard to combat. Among the Ndembu in the fifties every girl was in this elite. Mwenda is taken by her "midwife," the older cousin chosen to "cause her to menstruate" and laid down at the foot of a milk tree in the bush. She has become a baby, lying in the fetal position, entirely covered in the womb of a blanket, while around her dance the women from dawn until dusk. This existential experience, say those who have experienced it, hatches out strongly the desire to be considered a woman and join the others. Physical experience is the basic power source for ritual, which, when carried out genuinely , feeding this desire, will in fact work. It is therefore likely that the performance of physical acts in the theatre has similar effects of power, waiting, as it were, to be transmuted into ritual-even though the theatre defines such performance as make-believe. Kankanga lies there and becomes a baby-sex-sapling herself, in an entranced sleep beside the Tree of the White Sap where her male cousin's arrow is planted upright among its leaves. And atop the arrow hang her "spirit children" beads, white...