I’m going to need to sit down with a few Ndebele elders on this one. I am here wondering why the first thing that came into my mind when I saw this topic was mermaids, people turning into snakes or lizards and cannibals. Most folk tales that I can think of ‘ubuhlalusebenkosi, imbulumakhasana, omvundla lonteletsha bedlala umasiphekane,’ … they are straight up horror stories and to make it worse, we would listen to these just before we went to bed. Were our elders deliberately trying to create a traumatized generation? I really do need a sit down with a few of my elders for answers.
Anyway, I love the connection to mythical creatures that we have as Africans and Ndebele people, as is revealed by our folk tales. What is fascinating to me is how bad deeds and selfishness attracted catastrophic disasters. Our folk tales reveal that at the slightest incidents where people were not living in harmony with nature, cyclones and droughts would follow. This also in-turn led to hunger, death and huge misfortunes. We had custodians of nature in the form of snakes, mermaids and seers. Life on land and life in water. Might this be where we are missing it in our approaches to addressing climate change?
Ndebele people have always had traditional means of preserving biodiversity and enabling coexistence. When we assumed our totems we were instructed not to eat the particular animals assigned to our clan because our teeth might fall off. In actual case, this had nothing to do with our teeth, but had everything to do with preserving that specific animal species. Just as with folk tales, we have stories whose characters are animals (hare, baboon, elephant, crocodile etc). These addressed how animals lived together in the forest and those who created disharmony would end up eaten or banished. The folk tales did condemn bad practices such as cannibalism, theft, slavery and child marriages among others. In instances were people had been wronged and they are powerless, mythical creatures were seen coming to their rescue.
I am convinced that these mythical creatures once lived among us because we even have native names for them. I equally believe that straying far from these lessons found in folk tales and the dilution of cultural practices might have caused an imbalance between humans and nature. Though I am a student of geography, I still believe that the answers to climate change lie in restoring coexistence and respecting nature in its most sacred form.
Qhawekazi's Diary 