I was sitting at home this week watching the kombies and open-backed lorries go past, cram-full of excited singing girls on their way to umhlanga, and thinking, ‘Yes, it’s that time again.’
Tomorrow
the public and plenty of tourists will be watching these girls, along
with thousands of others, dance and dance and dance until the excitement
is in everybody’s heads and streaming from the skins of perspiration
into the air. There will be noise and glamour and all the thrill of a
big day long-awaited. But that will not be the main event. The main
event is today, when the reeds are delivered to the Queen mother’s
kraal.
One
of the earliest cosmological narratives collected from this part of the
world is that of God creating people from reeds. In this story, the
world was already formed but without people and so God went down to the
river’s edge and created humans from the tall reeds that were growing
there. It is Southern Africa’s parallel to the Genesis account of people
being made from clay.
The story is remembered in the clan praise-title, Wena Weluhlanga, ‘You (people) of the reed’, and this is the true significance of Umhlanga,
the Reed Dance. The week’s events are in fact a celebration of our
common beginning and continued existence, a modern echo of an ancient
story. When the tribes began to settle down in this region and build
more or less permanent homesteads and collect cattle, the defining
technology was in the creative use of reeds and grass for building and
thatching. That is still a defining technology in the rural areas
because cattle and their kraals are still central to Swaziland’s
homesteads and culture (think, for example, of the old Tinkhundla
elections, when candidates sat in front of kraals and voters went inside
those kraals to be counted). Reeds therefore are one of our central
focusing images.
The
dancing, then, is not what the event is really all about, although it
is the flashing breasts and plumping buttocks—framed in the vibrancy of
blue and overwhelming red—that attract the eyes and the cameras of
visitors.
Yet
the dancing is not without significance, for dancing is a sign of
vibrant life: if you look at a bed of reeds moving in the wind you can
imagine them dancing, and that’s an apt image for life itself. The reeds
are animated, alive because they have movement. Death, after all, is
supremely a stillness. Life can be seen therefore as a kind of dance:
sometimes a noisy, crazy, careering one, but still a dance.
There
are, I know, many critics of this annual national event, who either
believe the Dance belongs too firmly in the past to make sense in the
present or else squirm uneasily to see so much young flesh shaking and
quivering in public view. But the Dance—precisely because it has links
to the creation myth—is one of the bedrocks of what it means to be Swazi
and southern African. In an era when so many trumpet the call of being
unique and presenting an authentic voice within our global village, it
is only Umhlanga and iNcwala (and really not so much else)
that provide the links and foundations for national and individual
identity. It is when the nation’s origins and persuasions are on
display. Today and tomorrow then, it is not only the girls but also the
whole nation that will be dancing. By watching the swaying, jostling,
singing girls at Umhlanga and imagining them as that amazing
thing, a bed of living reeds, we can deepen our understanding, and
perhaps regain something of the wonder of life itself.
© Kenneth Rowley 2014 (originally published Saturday, September 02, 2006)
