impelasonto yami

And what a weekend it was.

I have mentioned the ancestors and the animal slaughtering in the two previous posts, but maybe I should explain in more detail. My family (their surname, or clan name, is Mchunu) was preparing all last week for a very important umsebenzi, or function, to communicate with/honor the ancestors. The umsebenzi officially began on Wednesday, when an inyanga (herbalist) came to the home and made initial preparations. The room in which I was sleeping (with my brother Mnqo) was then cleared out and reserved for the ancestors. An offering of food was placed in the room, along with the skin of a goat that had been slaughtered earlier in the day. Many gogos (grannie) and aunties arrived, and there was much cooking and cleaning.

The cow arrived on Friday, and it was, mercifully, already slaughtered [in Zulu: ukuhlaba, or the passive ukuhlatshwa] by the time I arrived at home on Friday afternoon. There was, however, still the matter of the dead cow in the front yard, and I was asked to help hack it up after it had been skinned [ukuhlinza, ngesiZulu]. My job was to hack through the tendons around the knee and thus remove the hooves, but I wasn't very good at my job so, mercifully again, I lost if after only one hoof. If I recall correctly we weren't served beef for dinner on Friday evening, but I stayed up late with Baba and some other family members drinking and talking (or, in my case, mostly listening and not understanding much at all of what was being said) and we ended up having part of the heart of the cow as a midnight snack. Around 2 o'clock there was what seemed to me to be a semi-formal, very moving call and response that seemed to involve the praise names of the Mchunu clan and the remembrance of several members of the clan who have passed on. That will remain a highlight for me, even if I can't say with any certainty that that was what was really going on (I could, of course, have asked somebody later, but it seemed better just to go with my instincts and stick with my initial interpretation).

Speaking of praises, here's an interesting aside: on Thursday evening some family members arrived with various (modest) offerings, mostly bottles of soda or other cool drinks (it seems, at times, that almost every drink that is non-alcoholic in South Africa counts as a "cool drink," or, in Zulu, i-cool drink), and they were greeted with modest ululating (in Zulu, ukukikiza; you all know what that is, right?). So it occurred to me that I should probably bring something for Baba when I returned on Friday, and I decided on a bottle of scotch, only in part because I would rather drink scotch than the brandy that I was drinking with Baba on the previous Sunday. But I was definitely not prepared for the amount or intensity of kikiza-ing which accompanied my gift: every gogo lined up to shake my hand and say "siyabonga," and the cost of a bottle of Glenlivet was much discussed all evening. Whereas back home it would be unseemly to discuss the price of a gift in front of the giver, it seemed to me that I was expected to be proud of all of the discussion. Still, I was made a bit uncomfortable by the big to-do, not least because I wasn't sure what the right answer to the question "Wasn't that expensive?" really was. Fortunately, a lot of the discussion was taking place in Zulu, so at times I could just pretend that I wasn't getting it -- and at other times, I just really wasn't getting it...

Anyway, on to Saturday: when I woke up and looked out the kitchen window, there were several men slicing up (and divvying up) the head of the cow. Then we had some grilled beef for breakfast. Then more men started to arrive, and we sat in a circle passing around the ukhamba (pot) of utshwala (Zulu beer) and eating more grilled meat. We did this for most of the morning and early afternoon, and when the other students in our program arrived at our house, I was assigned the task of procuring meat for them as well, so after Baba selected some choice pieces of liver, heart, and various other organs, I had to bring them to the grill and then slice and serve to my guests. It's hard to describe the level of organized chaos in the house and around the yard: there were probably 15-20 women (gogos, aunties, cousins) cooking and serving (everything but the beef: grilling is the men's job) all day long, and there were probably over 100 people at the house from around noon until 6pm or so. There was also almost always someone in the bathtub in the one bathroom in the house, and one of my female guests explained that the gogo in the bathtub insisted that she come in and use the bathroom while she was bathing. I could write another lengthy post about the extreme levels of intimacy and lack of privacy that come with the territory, but I'll just leave it at that: one gogo in the bathtub at all times means company while we're using the toilet.

So it was a long, tiring day of eating (meet) and drinking beer (both Zulu and Western). I would have slept well, except that the house was beginning to smell a lot like cow, because in addition to all of the cow parts lying outside of the house part of the cow carcass had now been sitting in the ancestors' room for almost 24 hours. Still, all in all, I feel grateful to have been (or to be, if I can retain the status) an Mchunu, and I'm already missing them, especially my 10 month-old nephew Aphiwe, even if he did wake us up every morning at 4:30. And I feel fortunate to have been with them during such an important week, even if it did mean that I had to eat a lot of strange meats, see a lot of dead cow, and smell a lot of dead cow smells. I'm not sure how much Zulu I picked up over the weekend, since it was coming pretty fast and furious (and, often times, in drunken slurs), but I think some of it will stick with me.

Most of all, I am grateful to the folks of Imbali township for taking us in for the week, sharing their homes and lives with us, and making us part of their families. If the Zulu proverb "Ukupha ukuzibekela" [To give is to keep for one's self] is true, our host families in Imbali have done themselves a huge favor...