The Re-Conceptualization of Shona and Venda Taboos: Towards an Afrocentric Discourse

Introduction Through colonization, many Africans have been made to believe and accept that their ways of life were primitive and sadistic. On the other hand, Western ways have been associated with, and even in most cases, misconstrued as civilization. Today, many African people still measure development and civilization in terms of how close they have mimicked and aped the white man's doings (Kurotwi, 2003: 52), the closer the better. Paradoxically, at a time when most African people have parroted Western ways of life, their problems have worsened, and they seem baffled and unable to deal with them. Among the challenges faced by today's Africa are: the disparaged image of women, circulation of pornographic material, a rise in rape cases, unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, erratic rainfall patterns, environmental degradation and pollution. Traditional Africa, diverse as it is, seems to be the genuine source of confidence in Africa today, as people curve their destiny in life and not follow in the footsteps of those external to their experiences. For example, as traditional food and medicine were once despised and condemned as fit for prehistoric humans; today there is a call for people to revert to consuming such foods and medicines to minimize the effects of HIV and AIDS. It is from the same premise that this work stresses the nobility of African taboos as a way of inspiring the direction and worldview that Africa ought to take today. As Chinweizu and Madubuike (1980) point out, African oral literature is the uncontestable reservoir of the African's imagination and worldview. Hence, we have particularly focused on Shona and Venda taboos to examine the underlying indigenous aspects of African philosophy. The paper encourages what Baker (1980, 141) considers as "the journey back"; a journey meant to unearth, rediscover and explain the cultural wealth of the past and its significance for the benefit of today's citizens. In this journey back, even the obvious needs reiteration in order to encourage both insiders and outsiders to revisit their assumptions about the art and culture in question (Chiwome 1996a, v). And thus, not unusual in a colonial context, knowledge of such cannot be assumed to exist in the correct ideological perspective in the minds of people who were colonized for nearly a century (ibid). In focusing on the Shona and Venda, it should help to disprove colonialist thinking that African people are different by virtue of them belonging to different regional, ethnic and geopolitical situations, including the question of language diversity. Thus, the taboos from these ethnic groups (the Shona and Venda) vindicate that Africans are by-and-large connected despite linguistic and geographical boundaries created by the colonizer. And the other reason for focusing on these ethnic groups is that they are believed to be related, and thus, sharing the same historical features as exemplified by the Great Zimbabwe monuments among the Shona and the Mapungubwe monuments among the Venda of South Africa as Mapungubwe pottery types for example are akin to those of early Zimbabwe (Davidson 1996). Research has also shown that when a Venda medium is possessed, they speak in Shona, and make reference to the Great Zimbabwe, a site they are believed to be linked to. Here, our focus will be on taboos that relate to morality, the position and image of women, and the conservation of the environment and other natural resources, in an effort to show how issues that baffle modern society were approached in the past. Theoretical Framework This exercise makes its observations and argument based on the theory of Afrocentricity propagated by Asante (1990, 1993, 1998, 2003, and 2007) which posits that Western ways of explaining and shaping reality more often than not, produce unwanted and awkward results if implemented on African soil. Thus, it calls for ". all African phenomena, activities and ways of life to be looked at and be given meaning from the standpoint and worldview of Africans" (Asante 2007, 29; Gray 2001, 3). …