The Religious Environment of Culture

 by Kalulu I.G.

                                  

Give me deeds of consolation. I feel mournfully nostalgic. Today, great agogo’s little grass-thatched hat is no longer there, her round kitchen with three stones at its centre is no longer, the maize granary is out of fashion. The well that sustained a bit of sugarcane and vegetables at the edges of M’madala farm dried up. Children are dancing and playing in the light of the moon less and less. During the day, the children would rather travel long distances to watch moving pictures at the trading centre. Anganga the ancestor’s tale was buried with her.

Not many little ones are able to swing on a mango tree anymore, with a little knife in the pocket. The lines are clearly drawn, the mango is for sell. The tree is not our friend, only the fruit when packaged and labelled at the supermarket and the timber when the carpenter gets his money. Even the wild fruits we used to play with and lick are not common things anymore. Many trees have now lost their lives to burn bricks to support modernity, to help the charcoal burner, and to build fences. It is embarrassing that the fences are also passing through our hearts. The green tsanya, the naphini, nsasi, mayiwalitsa, mpando, m’dima, mtanthanyerere, mvunguti, mtondoko, mwavi and the kankhande are no longer ordinary; scarce as they have become, they are a source of commerce. Very soon, our museums will start showcasing “ancient” fruits in the name of m’bungulira, masuku, chitimbe, ntonyongoli, sakalawe, bwemba, malambe and mapoza. We shall pay to view the wonder.

As is often the case, the poor rely more directly on the environment than the rich for their survival, they are mostly on the more immediate receiving-end of the environmental reactions of nature as it struggles to heal the wounds inflicted by human animals. Indeed, now the local herbalist travels to the far mountains and hills to just get a root, a tuber, a leaf and a bark; the same ones he used to send his kids to fetch from the surrounding graveyards and forests. At the reserve wildlife survives by the security-guard’s gun. The locally existing creepers and shrubs like mpwesa, tsache, tsitsi-lamanda, nam’goneka and kamwaza have suffered bush fires; the same bush fire by which the mice have suffocated, and from which the chingolopiyo, the pumbwa, the phwiti, the njiwa, the kantikutiku, the timba, the mpheta, the namchoso, the palanganga and the pingo have fled. The owl rarely frightens little ones to bed, it’s not there in the night.

Luckily, there are still hyenas and lions in the desert. Their two feet looking elegant in polished shoes, walking head-held-high with two deaf-ears, two blind-eyes and one loud-mouth. Ouch! Help please! I have hurt myself! Some two-legged lion is dead. Too bad, too bad. Very soon we shall eat and drink money.

We warmed ourselves to the sacred tales of our ancestors before the fire in great agogo’s round kitchen. Nature was for us a sacrament through which we received the grace of telling the graciousness encountered in the adventure of living. The tree did more than supply instrumental firewood, but healing chemicals, fruits for food and more. It had an endowed value from the God of the trees whom we all worshipped. Its shade was our first classroom and church. We needed no guns to protect nature but a conscience derived from sitting under the tree in silence. The tree thrived on the spot where our ancestors lay resting, its roots were in us and we in its stems and leaves. Likewise, the streams of water from which we drank.

 Our science was a religious one and our religion no less scientific for its time. The normative dimension and the inherent mediation in both science and religion truly pointed to their common source and juxtaposed evolution. To bow before the ancestors in nature and ask them what they desired of us was no superstition, but religion. They knew where the rain hailed from. To sieve the ash from agogo’s sacred fire and transform it into baking soda was not desecration, but science. We never knew a God of religion without a scientific material universe, neither did we know a scientific material universe without the God of religion.

What went wrong then? Two things. First, the science of two-legged deaf-hyena killed God; she sieved the ash to make baking-soda without recognizing the sacred fire from which it came. The hyena with deaf-ears thought she could use the ash without hearing the tales told around the fire in the round kitchen. Yet those were religious tales of what the tree had said about itself before its sacrificial burning between the three stones in the round kitchen. Second, the religion of loud-mouthed blind lions killed the sacraments of truth. When great agogo died, we continued to share the tales without coming back to feel the warmth of the fire, without connecting them to the sacrifice of the wood. The fire became a source of ash, but the process neither brought us together nor warmed us to the sacred tales. The tales lost the lived connection to the intrinsic value of the natural world. We needed dogmas to hold on to what the tales contained, but dogmas by themselves were not enough for an interior motivation to live by the tales or connect with their ancestral characters dwelling in the trees. Shortly, we killed the trees.

In memory of Abiti Likwanya the ancestor.

The author, Innocent Gregory Kalulu is a medical doctor and a member of the Society of Jesus also known as the Jesuit Congregation.