Sing, eat, pray: transmission of tradition in Lemba communities in Southern Africa

ABSTRACT

Most Lemba traditions and customs are transmitted by means of songs, chants, recitations, praises, proverbs, and prayers, in addition to written documents. Songs, recitations, and certain prayers could be described as poems or set speech; they form part of everyday language and are memorised. Others are sung, chanted, or prayed only on special occasions, such as the ritual slaughter of animals or during circumcision rites. The way the Lemba sing, eat, and pray expresses their unity and their conscious transferal and reinforcement of cultural and religious identity. It also reflects their understanding of their origin and the belief that their religious-cultural practices (embedded in an African culture) have been handed down to them from their Hebrew ancestors.

KEYWORDS:

• Lemba
• Black Jews
• South Africa
• sing-eat-pray

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 He explains that questions need to be asked about the ‘very nature of existence’: ‘Our place in the cosmos and our connections with other human beings – those within our family and culture and those we consider foreign and different.’ ‘Symbolic patterns are acted out in ritual performance’, retold in tales that ostensibly seem to be ancient or ‘encapsulated in proverbs or parables’. Smart stresses that worldviews are neither monolithic nor static, and provides different heuristic categories or dimensions that he takes as a basis for explaining religious aspects of ancient Israel (1983, 2–31). These dimensions often overlap and may be broken down into many other facets, but are helpful in providing a way of obtaining a perspective on traditions and practices.

2 DNA results, specifically involving the Bhuba, which only became known in 1998 and 1999, confirmed a hereditary Jewish priestly ancestry. The Lemba already had these traditions relating to the priestly clan long before the genetic tests – which show their links with the Jewish priests elsewhere – had been done.

3 Henige (1974, 1, 2) states that the historian who asks for answers to chronological questions from oral traditions is in most cases seeking information that these sources were never designed to provide.

4 However, from those written sources, it is clear that authors were uneasy about differentiating or were unable to differentiate between, for example, Jews, Semites, Arabs and Muslims, and Arabs and Swahili on the east coast of Africa.

The oldest oral traditions and written documents available (e.g. the Assyrian inscriptions, 700 BC and the Periplus) refer to the pre-Islamic-Arabian (Sabaean or Yemenite), Phoenician and Hebrew activities in Southeast Africa (Müller 1888). It would seem that at a very early stage, the Semitic world and the southeastern parts of Africa had a reciprocal influence on one another (Le Roux 2010a).

5 After the excursion undertaken by Parfitt to search for the ngoma lungundu, taken to the museum in Bulawayo by the missionary Von Sicard in the 1950s, renewed interest in this special drum was evoked among the Varemba in Zimbabwe.

6 No indications are given as to when this leader lived, and no specific date is connected to this narrative.

7 It may be of some significance that he kept the customs of the ‘Arabs’, but that he circumcised his sons according to the ‘Palestinian law’, and again that he learned the new moon celebration and the circumcision rites from the Arabs and the Jews in Zimbabwe. It is, of course, true that some of the customs of the Arabs and of the Jews are so closely related that it could have been very difficult for observers to discern between the customs of the two groups.

8 ‘They dug holes in the ground and put the legs into the hole. It was sealed and covered with the skin of the animal. They filled it with their jewellery and other valuables’ (Selamolela 2008 – private communication – see above). During ‘harvest time (autumn) they made bigger holes (sesiu/seshego), storerooms for storing purposes’ (Selamolela 2008 – private communication). They dry the food and then store the food in these bigger holes. The holes are lined with maize leaves and the opening is sealed with a large stone. I have seen some of those not far from Mathivha Hill, Moeketsi. The Bhuba also ‘make big clay pots’ (motšhea), about one metre high; two or three for a bigger family, which are set in the ground with just the rim protruding. When it is very hot in summer, the water inside this pot is nice and cold, having been kept cool by the moisture in the soil. When the level of the water in the pot drops, only an adult should fetch water for you. The pot is usually covered to prevent a child from falling in (Selamolela 2008 – private communication).