We need to belong. It’s how we were created, and the need to
belong drives many of our actions and decisions. Many believe that Western
culture has a crisis of belonging. This is despite the teaching of
Christianity, that we are made to belong to God and to one another, and that belonging
takes place within the context of family and Christian community.
Western culture has brought many great things to humanity.
But it has also weakened and fragmented the value of family. I have three
daughters. They live 500, 2000 and 5000 miles away. Even though we’re all
close, we see so little of one another that we can’t be involved in one another’s
daily lives. For each of us, home is where we live rather than where our family
is.
For the amaXhosa – the Xhosa people – home is the physical
location where grandparents, parents, and new generations live. But home is more
than location – it is somewhere to return to, a place of refuge, of acceptance,
of belonging.
The highlight of my stay in South Africa was a couple of
days spent living in Bulungula, a traditional Xhosa village on the beautiful
Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape. This village of 1,200 people, one of a cluster
of villages with a population of 6,000, is remote, hard to get to, and very
poor. The only electricity comes from one solar panel per house – enough to
power a single light bulb, or to charge a cell phone, but not both!
Most of the Xhosa houses are thatched round huts called rondavels
(Afrikaans). They are round for both practical and spiritual reasons that I’ll
explain in a later blog. They also build rectangular common buildings but
rondavels predominate.
A typical home consists of one or more buildings, a kraal
for keeping animals overnight, an outhouse, the grave of the oldest ancestor, a
small-holding garden, and space for cooking, storing wood, etc.
During my stay in Bulungula, I was given an in-depth
introduction to the life of women in the village (called “Woman Power”!) Men
were encouraged to join this educational activity as well as women, and the day
revolved around the cooking of lunch – more on that in a later blog.
My Woman Power guide was a 25-year old unmarried woman who
provided extensive detail on tribal and village customs and traditions. She also
asked me many questions about my culture, and was often surprised by the
answers. In particular we seemed to come back often to the concept of home –
the place to which we turn and return when in need.
For example, we talked about what happens when a child is
born outside marriage and without an involved father. Normally, after marriage
a woman will move to her husband’s home. He will likely build a new rondavel
for his new family, requesting additional land from the village headman if
necessary. The new wife is now part of the team of women who look after the old
people, the children and the men of the extended family. But it is not uncommon
for a woman, or even a teenage girl, to have a child without the prospect of
marriage. While this is considered very undesirable, it is a given that the mother
will remain with her birth family, and be accepted and looked after. Later,
marriage may occur and she will take her child and move to the husband’s home.
In Western cultures, there is no such security. Certainly,
there are many times when a child born without an active father will be
accepted by its grandparents and allowed to live with them and its mother. But
so often this is either not an option or is not offered. Mother and child must
often be separated because she would not be able to provide materially and/or
emotionally. The insecurity and socio-economic challenges that result are both
common and terribly damaging.
For Westerners, there are many Xhosa family traditions that
are surprising or disturbing. The power that men have over women in this patriarchal
and patrilinear society is gradually diminishing, even in the most traditional
of villages. (My guide decided not to get married because “no man is going to
tell me I can’t go out to work”). But still a woman’s life is very hard and
arguably much harder than that of a man. The practice of lobola, in which a man
pays 10 cows for a wife (currently about $7,000 US – a fortune for this
community), may seem rather barbaric. But the price is not for purchase of a
slave, but recompense for the five children the wife is expected to bear him.
Not much better perhaps, but at least it means that girl children are very
valuable to a family!
Still, I felt the importance of belonging to the family and
the village, the relative contentment with little when this sense of belonging
exists. Belonging is so important that most crime can be dealt with by the village
headman because being censured by the village hurts so much more than a
nameless, faceless civil or criminal court. (I remember visiting China in the
early 1980’s before Westernization, and discovering there was very little crime
because people could not survive being ostracized by their communities). More
serious crimes are still referred to the police however, and at least in the
case of Bulungula the relationship between village headmen and police is very
good.
What can we learn? Certainly not that we should turn back
the clock and become more patriarchal again. But treasuring of family
relationships, making the home a refuge, and actively creating and investing in
places to belong – these should all be high priorities for us.
Very interesting!
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