Sevias invited me to accompany him. We walked together across the parched earth as he told me about the great herds he had once owned, of the trees groaning with fruit, of the maize which used to be as big as pumpkins.
We were among the first guests. I sat next to Sevias on a baked mud bench circling the hut and watched the preparations for the ancestor party with keen interest. I had never imagined I would be permitted to observe anything as close as this undoubtedly was to the heart of their cult.
I had a camera, tape recorder and notebook. I was fairly sure that this evening would provide me with the material for at least one academic article, and an impressive one at that.
Chief Mposi sat alone. He was in poor health and gave the impression of being preoccupied. He stared at the mud floor, resting his head on the knop of his stick. With a sudden movement he bawled at his wives to serve beer.
‘It’s sitting there and it’s not doing any good to anyone!’
‘I’m serving it,’ snapped his oldest wife, lifting up the beer pot with her muscular arms.
‘Too late,’ he growled.
The chibuku pot was passed from hand to hand, from right to left, with no unseemly show of haste, like a decanter of Madeira after a dons’ dinner at Oxford.
The silence was broken by the chief calling out the names of his four wives. They were singularly different from each other in age, size and beauty. They answered in turn, knelt side by side, and started to clap. They turned away from the chief, rose to their feet and lit candles, as the other women began ululating and whistling.
A long antelope horn was thrust through the opening into the hut and a triumphant blast silenced the shrill sound of the women. The man blowing the horn was tall and well-built. He was wearing a skirt made of strips of black fur and around his head he had a strip of leopard skin. He was the witchdoctor. His name was Sadiki - one of the Lemba clan names - an unmistakably Semitic name whose presence in central Africa was a mysterious anomaly. He led the ceremony. Magagada rattles made of dried marrows were tied to his ankles with bark fibre thongs. He stamped his feet on the earthen floor of the hut and blew a long haunting note on the horn.
Four elderly women sitting together on the mud bench that went round the hut started pounding on wooden drums. The rest of the guests were clustered behind the witchdoctor, propelled into the small, juddering movements of the dance by the rhythms of the drums and the magagada rattles, barely moving, lost in concentration.
Sadiki stood at the epicentre of the storm of sound, directing its movement. He had an overpoweringly regal air, and looked arrogantly around him. Suggestively he moved a foot. Then a hand. His body followed and, positioning himself in front of one of the drums, he danced, like David before the Ark, pausing to blow the ram’s horn similar to the shofar which had once been blown in the Temple of Jerusalem. The drummers looked far too old and frail to be able to produce such a sound and yet they were to drum for hours without a pause.
The beer started to circulate faster. Poverty had taken its grip on the village. It had been a long time since the beer pots had been passed around so liberally. Some of the men, no longer accustomed to drinking, were already inebriated.
The chief’s oldest wife was apparently already possessed by the spirits of the ancestors. Staring from side to side she fell to the ground weeping. Looking around in an unfocussed way she pulled her long, western-style dress up over her fat marbled buttocks and over her head. She danced naked, positioning herself in the space in front of the women drummers vacated by Sadiki.
The pulse quickened again. Sadiki, sweat pouring down his broad, muscular chest, placed a headdress of black eagle feathers on the naked woman’s head. Sevias told me that this was to show respect to the ancestors. She danced on, casting great shadows on the candlelit walls. She fell to her knees, sobbing, in front of the old chief and tenderly placed the headdress on his head.
The chief was dying. Everyone said so. He looked grey and ill. He gestured to me that I should join him. He took my hand in his and whispered in my ear, ‘The ancestors have come from Israel: they have come from Senna. They are here with us. Goodbye, Mushavi. Perhaps we shall see each other in Senna.’ Senna was the lost city from which they had come and it was also the place they expected to go when they died.
His face, illuminated by the flickering light of the candles, was corrugated with lines of age and illness; his eyes were concealed by dewlaps of mottled light-coloured flesh. He peered at me and then indicated that I should rise and leave him. Saddened and mystified by his words, I went back to the bench to my notebook, camera, and recorder.
I had been here in the village so long I was beginning to feel at home, one of them. I had drunk a good deal of their chibuku beer. After the first few swigs it becomes more or less palatable and after a while positively acceptable. It struck me that this was no time for sitting in a corner taking notes and recording Lemba music. There were more important things to do. This was more a time for observer participation. I removed my shirt in order, as I thought, to blend in with the half-naked men and women whose ghoulish shadows were leaping wildly on the walls and who were falling into a kind of trance all around me. The chief’s oldest wife crossed the hut, leaned over me, her withered breasts brushing my shoulder, and whispered something incomprehensible in Shona, the language of the dominant Shona tribe among whom the Zimbabwe Lemba lived.
I started to dance to the pounding rhythm of the drums. One of the chief’s younger wives was dancing topless in front of me, swaying drunkenly, supplicating the ancestors, running her hands over her breasts and down over her belly and legs.
The women drummers quickened the rhythm of their drums.
Another woman in a bleary-eyed trance slid out of her clothes and moved into the centre of the hut. Men stood around her admiring her slim body and full breasts, urging her on.
‘She is speaking to the ancestors,’ Sevias bellowed in my ear. ‘Soon they will reply. When their voices are heard it will be better for you to leave.’
Towards midnight there was a change in the atmosphere. I imagined that the time had come for the cultic incantations and secret prayers to be offered up. These were the closely guarded things. These were the oral codes which governed their lives and which no doubt held the clues to their past that I was seeking. These codes and incantations were for me the heart of the matter. This is what I wanted to be part of. This is what I had come here for.
My arms were raised; my face was turned up to the straw roof above. Sweat was pouring off me. I felt a great sense of excitement. I had been accepted. I was one of them. The ancestors were about to descend and I would be there to observe what happened next. No one from the outside had ever observed this before. Inside my head I could feel a kind of channel opening which seemed to be a channel of communication with the Israelite ancestors of the tribe.
I was rejoicing in the efficacy of my five-star research methodology when I felt a fist driven into the side of my face. It was the fist of the chief’s oldest and sturdiest wife. I fell to the ground on top of the recumbent and malodorous body of Mposi’s greatest drunk - a sort of tramp called Klopas whom I had met and smelled many times before. For a few seconds I lost consciousness. I was pulled out of the hut by some of the men and propped up against the side of the chief’s hut.
‘Er, I upset the chief’s wife,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
I did not feel at all sorry. I felt bloody furious.
‘Mushavi,’ said Sevias leaning over me. ‘You did not upset anybody. This blow was just a welcome from the ancestors. Perhaps it was also a little warning. Just a little warning. If the ancestors had not wanted you here at all they would not have given you a light blow like this but they would have torn you into pieces. Now you must go because the ancestors are coming among us. The uninitiated must leave.’
The spirits of the ancestors would not be happy to see me there, he explained. Secrets would be shared. There were things