Outside the hut, a group of elders were looking anxiously at the night sky, hoping for signs of rain. Sevias sat down next to me against the wall. His kindly lined face betrayed signs of concern. His concern was not only for the rain, or lack of it, although this was as critical a matter for him as for the others - indeed his own life and the life of his family depended upon it - but also for me and my disappointment at not being admitted to all the tribal secrets. I had already told him that my fieldwork had not yielded as much as I had hoped.
Head cocked, his hands held in a gesture of supplication, he asked with just a hint of a smile, ‘Mushavi, have you found what you were looking for in your time with us?’
He often honoured me with the tribal praise name Mushavi which the Lemba generally use solely among themselves and which I thought could perhaps be connected with Musawi - the Arabic form of ‘follower of Moses (Musa)’. Perhaps he was trying to flatter me by calling me Mushavi but the rest of his question was incomprehensible. He knew full well that the tribal secrets for the most part were still intact.
I smiled and with as much patience as I could muster said, ‘You know very well, Sevias, that there are still many secrets you have not told me. And don’t forget the elders of all the clans agreed that I should be given access to everything.’
‘Yes,’ he replied gravely, ‘but many times I have explained to you that no matter what was said at that meeting of the clans, there are things which cannot be told outside the brotherhood of the initiated. Prayers, spells, incantations. Many of our secrets cannot be revealed. We told you that. My brother, the chief, told you that. The others told you that. They would have to kill you, Mushavi, if you learned those sacred things. That is the law.’
His lined face became almost a parody of concern and anxiety.
Sevias was a good man. In all the months I had spent in his kraal, despite the drought and the uncertain political situation both within the tribe and in the country at large, despite family difficulties, he had always been calm, kind and dignified. I realized now that I had never been happier in my life than sitting writing under the great tree in Sevias’ kraal.
He shuffled his bare, calloused feet in the parched earth.
‘But how about the tribal objects?’ I insisted. ‘Those things you brought with you from the north, from Senna. I’ve been told about these but I’ve still seen nothing of them.’
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘We brought objects from Jerusalem long ago and we brought objects from Senna. Sacred, important objects from Israel and Senna.’
Senna was the original lost city which the tribe maintained it had once inhabited after leaving the Land of Israel. Professor M.E.R. Mathivha - the scholarly head of the Lemba tribe in South Africa - had already told me a good deal about their Senna legend. The tribe had come from Senna ‘across the sea’. No-one knew where it was. They had crossed ‘Pusela’ - but no-one knew where or what that was either. They had come to Africa where they twice rebuilt Senna. That was the sum of it.
‘Sevias,’ I insisted, ‘can’t you at least tell me what happened to the tribal objects?’
He studied the sky and said nothing. Then he murmured, ‘The tribe is scattered over a wide area. Yo u know, once we broke the law of God. We ate mice, which are forbidden to us, and we were scattered by God among the nations of Africa. So the objects were scattered and are hidden in different places.’
‘And the ngoma? Where do you think that may be?’ I asked.
This was a wooden drum used to store sacred objects. The tribe had followed the ngoma, carrying it aloft, on their sojourn through Africa. They claim to have brought it from Israel so many years ago that no-one remembered when. According to their oral traditions they carried the ngoma before them to battle and it had guided them on their long trek through the continent.
According to Lemba oral tradition the ngoma used to be carried before the people on two poles. Each pole was inserted into the two wooden rings which were attached to each side of the ngoma. The ngoma was intensely sacred to the tribe, practically divine. Sacred cultic objects were carried inside. It was too holy to be placed on the ground: at the end of a day’s march it was hung from a tree or placed on a specially constructed platform. It was too holy to be touched. The only members of the tribe who were allowed to approach it were the hereditary priesthood who were always members of the Buba clan. The Buba priests served and guarded the ngoma. Anyone who touched it other than the priests and the king would be struck down by the fire of God which erupted from the drum itself. It was taken into battle and ensured victory. It killed the enemies of its guardians.
I had first heard of the ngoma months before in South Africa. Professor Mathivha had told me what he knew about it and I had had a detailed account from an old Lemba man called Phophi who was steeped in the history of the tribe. Phophi had told me how big the ngoma was, what its principal properties were and what traditions were associated with it.
I also knew that some forty years before, an ancient ngoma had been found by a German scholar called von Sicard in a cave by the Limpopo, the crocodile-infested river which marks the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. He had photographed it and the photograph had been included in a book he had written on the subject, but apparently the ngoma had long since disappeared without a trace. Mathivha, Phophi and other Lemba elders had told me that the artefact found by the German in its remote cave was without doubt the original ngoma that the Lemba had brought from the north.
One night, a few weeks before the rain dance, sitting up late around the fire with Sevias and other old men, I heard a little more of the legend of the ngoma.
‘The ngoma came from the great temple in Jerusalem,’ said Sevias. ‘We carried it down here through Africa on its poles. At night it rested on a special platform.’
It suddenly occurred to me that in form, size and function the ngoma lungundu was similar to the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, the famous lost Ark which had been sought without success throughout the ages. The biblical description of it, which I knew from the years I spent as an undergraduate studying classical Hebrew at Oxford, was etched in my mind:
an Ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the height thereof […] thou shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them in the four corners and two rings shall be on one side of it and two rings in the other side of it. And thou shall make poles of shittim wood and overlay them with gold. And thou shalt put the poles into the rings by the sides of the Ark, that the Ark may be borne with them. The poles shall be in the rings of the Ark; they shall not be taken from it. And thou shalt put into the Ark the testimony which I shall give thee.
The Ark, like the ngoma, had supernatural powers. It was never allowed to touch the ground. It was practically divine. Like the ngoma it was carried into battle as a guarantor of victory. Sacred objects, including the tablets on which the Te n Commandments had been inscribed and the magic wand of Moses’ brother Aaron, were kept inside it. Anyone who as much as looked at it would be blasted by its awesome power. A priestly caste founded by Aaron, the brother of Moses, guarded the Ark. The priestly clan of the Buba founded by an individual called Buba, who was thought to have led the Lemba out of Israel, guarded the ngoma.
The functional similarities were striking. But the differences in form were significant. The Ark was apparently a kind of box, coffer, or chest, while the ngoma - although it also carried things inside it - was a drum. The Ark was made of wood but it was covered in sheets of gold; the ngoma was just made of wood.
Most critically, there was no connection in ancient times between the world of the Bible and this distant and remote inland corner of Africa. And there was no proof at all, in any way, that the Lemba guardians of the ngoma were of Jewish ancestry. Nonetheless, the area of overlap between these seemingly very different objects