Recommended listening: The Soul of Mbira - Traditions of the Shona People
Story
The sun beat down relentlessly on the school's courtyard. The mudstone floor burned hot against the skin of a teenage girl as she pressed against it. With her face screwed up in concentration, she pulled her legs up to her chest, pointed her feet, and rolled repeatedly to her left. Learning this movement and all the other ndayo exercises was a crucial part of her education here at the initiation school. At night, she would be required to perform it alongside other novices in front of all the older girls and teachers. For now, just one older girl had been assigned to her as her ritual mother. Only last year, the teacher was a novice herself, but now she was allowed to grow her hair out and supervise the instruction of another girl. Novices were shaved of all their hair, so the growing hair of the "mother" symbolized her authority within the school's strict hierarchy. She also got to wear necklaces again. The blue and yellow beads glinted in the sunlight. Beyond proving that she had passed the first stage of initiation school, they were a sign of her family's role in a trade network that stretched across three continents.
These two girls were members of the Zhizo culture. A hundred years earlier, their ancestors came from the north to settle where the Shashe and Limpopo rivers met. Of all the inland peoples of southern Africa, they were the first to participate in the Indian Ocean trade network. Muslim traders served as the conduits of trade between Africa and Asia. East Africans exported ivory, gold and slaves in exchange for copper, ceramics, beads and cloth. But the people of the coastal trade city of Chibuene could not access all of these goods on their own: They relied on trade with people of the interior in order to keep up their side of the bargain. It's thought that the Zhizo people moved south into the Shashe-Limpopo basin in order to penetrate further into the interior. They became the southern endpoint of a trade that arced through the Middle East and across the Indian Ocean to India and China. Out of all the trade goods they obtained through this exchange, the Zhizo people seemed to love glass beads the best. Blue and yellow beads are found across Zhizo sites, especially at their capital city of Schroda. These beads had been manufactured in the Middle East, probably around Nishapur in Iran, before making the long journey to Schroda.
Around the turn of the 11th century, however, the Zhizo people were not the only ones interested in staking a claim in this leg of the trade. A group of people known to archaeologists as Leopard's Kopje came up to the Shashe-Limpopo basin from the south. The exact nature of their interaction with the Zhizo people is difficult to determine, since there isn't evidence of widespread warfare. However, the new Leopard's Kopje capital city of K2 soon overtook Schroda as the focus of long-distance trade networks. Zhizo people continued to live in Schroda for another generation or two, but their material culture was profoundly affected by the arrival of these newcomers. Their pottery style changed (archaeologists call this new style Leokwe) and so did their taste in beads. The people of K2 preferred smaller, greener glass beads that were manufactured in distant South or Southeast Asia. Eager to keep up with the new fashions, the Zhizo people started wearing these too, although they carefully preserved the older beads as family heirlooms. As the centuries passed, the Zhizo people were eventually absorbed into the Leopard's Kopje population, with no distinction between them remaining by the time of the foundation of the great palace of Mapungubwe in the 13th century.
Back in the 10th century, though, Schroda was the first urban centre in this part of Africa. It overlooked the Limpopo River from atop a rocky plateau. Organised along the Central Cattle Pattern, it had a cattle kraal and administrative buildings at the centre, with residential buildings surrounding it. This was a gendered division of space with men at the centre and women ringed around them, though there were of course plenty of reasons for men and women to cross these barriers in the course of everyday life. The initiation school was on the southwestern edge of the site. It was a school exclusively for girls, who began attending after their first menses. Initiation schools like this are still found in southern Africa to this day. While we don't know exactly what the curriculum entailed for Zhizo girls, a combination of archaeology and ethnography can give us some idea. Archaeologists have found figurines buried under piles of rocks in the Schroda school that seem to show girls performing ndayo exercises similar to those that Venda girls performed in twentieth century initiation schools.
These ndayo are unique among the Venda's dance styles. They involve repetitive and athletically challenging stretches and movements. Older girls use figurines and demonstrations to teach the younger girls how to perform them. In some schools, each ndayo is accompanied by a different song. The ndayo, their songs, and other teachings and rituals at the school are usually cryptic, teaching through metaphor and physical experience rather than explicit instruction. The ndayo in this illustration is accompanied by singers crying out "Dwana u ya lila," which means "A child is crying." Some teachers say that the song teaches girls that a baby should cry as soon as it's born, while others say that the fetal position of the exercise represents how the novice herself is being reborn through her initiation. Like many of the school's rituals, this activity is meant to prepare the novice for life as a married woman and mother. Some songs lament the end of childhood, some offer warnings and advice, and others celebrate the excitement of embarking on a new phase of life.
The school in Schroda dates to a later period of the site's occupation, right around the time that Leopard's Kopje people first arrived in the valley. We don't know exactly why the school was founded at that time. Was it simply a new location for an existing school, carrying on an ancient tradition? Did the Leopard's Kopje people look to the Zhizo for ritual instruction, desiring to send their own daughters to Schroda's school? Were the women of Schroda anticipating increased intermarriage with the newcomers and sought to better prepare their daughters for what married life among strangers might entail? We don't have answers to any of these questions. All we know is that at the same time that Zhizo people lost their advantage in the east coast trade to the Leopard's Kopje, they built a girls' initiation school, paved with mudstone and enclosed by a wooden palisade. The grounds of the school are full of carefully buried figurines used to instruct girls about ndayo rituals, along with many other figurines of humans and animals. Whatever the exact reasoning behind the school's foundation, if the figurines do indeed represent ndayo rituals, they mark the beginning of a thousand years' worth of continuity in girls' education in the Shashe-Limpopo basin.
These two girls were members of the Zhizo culture. A hundred years earlier, their ancestors came from the north to settle where the Shashe and Limpopo rivers met. Of all the inland peoples of southern Africa, they were the first to participate in the Indian Ocean trade network. Muslim traders served as the conduits of trade between Africa and Asia. East Africans exported ivory, gold and slaves in exchange for copper, ceramics, beads and cloth. But the people of the coastal trade city of Chibuene could not access all of these goods on their own: They relied on trade with people of the interior in order to keep up their side of the bargain. It's thought that the Zhizo people moved south into the Shashe-Limpopo basin in order to penetrate further into the interior. They became the southern endpoint of a trade that arced through the Middle East and across the Indian Ocean to India and China. Out of all the trade goods they obtained through this exchange, the Zhizo people seemed to love glass beads the best. Blue and yellow beads are found across Zhizo sites, especially at their capital city of Schroda. These beads had been manufactured in the Middle East, probably around Nishapur in Iran, before making the long journey to Schroda.
Around the turn of the 11th century, however, the Zhizo people were not the only ones interested in staking a claim in this leg of the trade. A group of people known to archaeologists as Leopard's Kopje came up to the Shashe-Limpopo basin from the south. The exact nature of their interaction with the Zhizo people is difficult to determine, since there isn't evidence of widespread warfare. However, the new Leopard's Kopje capital city of K2 soon overtook Schroda as the focus of long-distance trade networks. Zhizo people continued to live in Schroda for another generation or two, but their material culture was profoundly affected by the arrival of these newcomers. Their pottery style changed (archaeologists call this new style Leokwe) and so did their taste in beads. The people of K2 preferred smaller, greener glass beads that were manufactured in distant South or Southeast Asia. Eager to keep up with the new fashions, the Zhizo people started wearing these too, although they carefully preserved the older beads as family heirlooms. As the centuries passed, the Zhizo people were eventually absorbed into the Leopard's Kopje population, with no distinction between them remaining by the time of the foundation of the great palace of Mapungubwe in the 13th century.
Back in the 10th century, though, Schroda was the first urban centre in this part of Africa. It overlooked the Limpopo River from atop a rocky plateau. Organised along the Central Cattle Pattern, it had a cattle kraal and administrative buildings at the centre, with residential buildings surrounding it. This was a gendered division of space with men at the centre and women ringed around them, though there were of course plenty of reasons for men and women to cross these barriers in the course of everyday life. The initiation school was on the southwestern edge of the site. It was a school exclusively for girls, who began attending after their first menses. Initiation schools like this are still found in southern Africa to this day. While we don't know exactly what the curriculum entailed for Zhizo girls, a combination of archaeology and ethnography can give us some idea. Archaeologists have found figurines buried under piles of rocks in the Schroda school that seem to show girls performing ndayo exercises similar to those that Venda girls performed in twentieth century initiation schools.
These ndayo are unique among the Venda's dance styles. They involve repetitive and athletically challenging stretches and movements. Older girls use figurines and demonstrations to teach the younger girls how to perform them. In some schools, each ndayo is accompanied by a different song. The ndayo, their songs, and other teachings and rituals at the school are usually cryptic, teaching through metaphor and physical experience rather than explicit instruction. The ndayo in this illustration is accompanied by singers crying out "Dwana u ya lila," which means "A child is crying." Some teachers say that the song teaches girls that a baby should cry as soon as it's born, while others say that the fetal position of the exercise represents how the novice herself is being reborn through her initiation. Like many of the school's rituals, this activity is meant to prepare the novice for life as a married woman and mother. Some songs lament the end of childhood, some offer warnings and advice, and others celebrate the excitement of embarking on a new phase of life.
The school in Schroda dates to a later period of the site's occupation, right around the time that Leopard's Kopje people first arrived in the valley. We don't know exactly why the school was founded at that time. Was it simply a new location for an existing school, carrying on an ancient tradition? Did the Leopard's Kopje people look to the Zhizo for ritual instruction, desiring to send their own daughters to Schroda's school? Were the women of Schroda anticipating increased intermarriage with the newcomers and sought to better prepare their daughters for what married life among strangers might entail? We don't have answers to any of these questions. All we know is that at the same time that Zhizo people lost their advantage in the east coast trade to the Leopard's Kopje, they built a girls' initiation school, paved with mudstone and enclosed by a wooden palisade. The grounds of the school are full of carefully buried figurines used to instruct girls about ndayo rituals, along with many other figurines of humans and animals. Whatever the exact reasoning behind the school's foundation, if the figurines do indeed represent ndayo rituals, they mark the beginning of a thousand years' worth of continuity in girls' education in the Shashe-Limpopo basin.
Artist's Comments
It is good to be back with a new illustration after about two and a half months. I spent a long time thinking this was going to be a picture of a rainmaking ritual, but then when I learned about the girls' initiation school, I just had to draw that! The pose was definitely a challenge, but I'm happy with how it came out. It's cool to show someone exercising in the series. I'm also just in awe of how these beautiful beads came all the way from the Middle East and South or even Southeast Asia. What a perfect symbol of Africa's connection to worldwide trade a thousand years ago! I also like how the green and blue of the beads on the girl's neck connect to the blue and green of the trees and skies beyond the school.
Happy New Year! Here's to another year of meeting women from the past. ~ January 3, 2023
Happy New Year! Here's to another year of meeting women from the past. ~ January 3, 2023
Resources
Want to learn more about Zhizo people and other medieval women in the Shashe-Limpopo basin? Here are some recommended resources.
"Some interpretive notes on a Schroda figurine type" by J.-M. Dederen and J. Mokakabye
This is the article that made me decide to set my illustration at the Schroda initiation school. The authors hypothesize that some of the unusual figurines found at Schroda may show girls doing ndayo exercises. I picked one of the exercises they thought a Leokwe-period figuring represented. The authors based their interpretation of the figurines on ethnographic information from mid-twentieth century Venda girls' initiation schools, as described in John Blacking's article "Songs, dances, mimes and symbolism of Venda girls' initiation schools, Part 1: Vhusha". Blacking's article gives a lot of fascinating details about what the schools were like in the 1940s, which informed my illustration and story a lot. J.-M. Dederen has another article about women and Schroda figurines called "Women's Power, 1000 A.D.: Figurine Art and Gender Politics in Prehistoric Southern Africa." However, I wasn't very impressed by his dismissive approach towards ethnography: He tries to interpret sexual symbolism as cultural universals, which makes me question how much his analysis is rooted in local people's actual beliefs vs his own preconceptions. The article on the ndayo figurines seems much more rooted in ethnographic reality.
"A Glass Bead Sequence for Southern Africa from the 8th to the 16th century AD" by Marilee Wood
Wood's chronology of glass beads in southern Africa is laid out in a way that's very easy to understand. It's also illustrated with gorgeous photographs of the beads from different periods, which I used as models for my illustration. Women's necklaces were a major way of showing off the wealth and status the Zhizo people acquired through the Indian Ocean trade. For more of an understanding of how archaeological artefacts from this period relate to women's adornment, check out "Ancient artefacts, adornment and archaeology" by Sian Tiley-Nel.
"A revised chronology for the Zhizo and Leokwe horizons at Schroda" by Annie R. Antonites
This article includes a really helpful map of the excavations at Schroda, including the area believed to be the initiation school. I used it to figure out what the background for this illustration might look like. The radiocarbon dates Antonites discusses here show that the school dates to the Leokwe period, when the Schroda people were responding to the arrival of Leopard's Kopje people into the valley.
"Sacred Powers and Rituals of Transformation: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Rainmaking Rituals and Agricultural Productivity During the Evolution of the Mapungubwe State, AD 1000 to AD 1300" by McEdward Murimbika
Murimbika's PhD thesis combines ethnography with archaeology to understand the importance of rainmaking in medieval southern Africa. Murimbika himself comes from a Shona ethnic group which grounds his ethnographic research in his personal experiences and cultural background. His analysis of how rainmaking might have changed across the 300 years between K2's foundation and the height of Mapungubwe includes a lot of commentary about changing gender roles. Although the archaeological cultures in question are all Leopard's Kopje rather than Zhizo, reading this thesis gives you an excellent insight into the importance of rainmaking to royal authority in the Middle Iron Age of southern Africa.
"How Important was the Presence of Elephants as a Determinant of the Zhizo Settlement of the Greater Mapungubwe Landscape?" by Tim Forssman, Bruce Richard Page, and Jeanetta Selier
This one looks at arguments about why the Zhizo people first came to the Shashe-Limpopo basin. While earlier scholars thought it must have been because of access to elephant ivory, these authors point out that the farming land was much better than it's been given credit for, and also that there's very little evidence of ivory processing at Zhizo sites even though ivory products are found.
"Some interpretive notes on a Schroda figurine type" by J.-M. Dederen and J. Mokakabye
This is the article that made me decide to set my illustration at the Schroda initiation school. The authors hypothesize that some of the unusual figurines found at Schroda may show girls doing ndayo exercises. I picked one of the exercises they thought a Leokwe-period figuring represented. The authors based their interpretation of the figurines on ethnographic information from mid-twentieth century Venda girls' initiation schools, as described in John Blacking's article "Songs, dances, mimes and symbolism of Venda girls' initiation schools, Part 1: Vhusha". Blacking's article gives a lot of fascinating details about what the schools were like in the 1940s, which informed my illustration and story a lot. J.-M. Dederen has another article about women and Schroda figurines called "Women's Power, 1000 A.D.: Figurine Art and Gender Politics in Prehistoric Southern Africa." However, I wasn't very impressed by his dismissive approach towards ethnography: He tries to interpret sexual symbolism as cultural universals, which makes me question how much his analysis is rooted in local people's actual beliefs vs his own preconceptions. The article on the ndayo figurines seems much more rooted in ethnographic reality.
"A Glass Bead Sequence for Southern Africa from the 8th to the 16th century AD" by Marilee Wood
Wood's chronology of glass beads in southern Africa is laid out in a way that's very easy to understand. It's also illustrated with gorgeous photographs of the beads from different periods, which I used as models for my illustration. Women's necklaces were a major way of showing off the wealth and status the Zhizo people acquired through the Indian Ocean trade. For more of an understanding of how archaeological artefacts from this period relate to women's adornment, check out "Ancient artefacts, adornment and archaeology" by Sian Tiley-Nel.
"A revised chronology for the Zhizo and Leokwe horizons at Schroda" by Annie R. Antonites
This article includes a really helpful map of the excavations at Schroda, including the area believed to be the initiation school. I used it to figure out what the background for this illustration might look like. The radiocarbon dates Antonites discusses here show that the school dates to the Leokwe period, when the Schroda people were responding to the arrival of Leopard's Kopje people into the valley.
"Sacred Powers and Rituals of Transformation: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Rainmaking Rituals and Agricultural Productivity During the Evolution of the Mapungubwe State, AD 1000 to AD 1300" by McEdward Murimbika
Murimbika's PhD thesis combines ethnography with archaeology to understand the importance of rainmaking in medieval southern Africa. Murimbika himself comes from a Shona ethnic group which grounds his ethnographic research in his personal experiences and cultural background. His analysis of how rainmaking might have changed across the 300 years between K2's foundation and the height of Mapungubwe includes a lot of commentary about changing gender roles. Although the archaeological cultures in question are all Leopard's Kopje rather than Zhizo, reading this thesis gives you an excellent insight into the importance of rainmaking to royal authority in the Middle Iron Age of southern Africa.
"How Important was the Presence of Elephants as a Determinant of the Zhizo Settlement of the Greater Mapungubwe Landscape?" by Tim Forssman, Bruce Richard Page, and Jeanetta Selier
This one looks at arguments about why the Zhizo people first came to the Shashe-Limpopo basin. While earlier scholars thought it must have been because of access to elephant ivory, these authors point out that the farming land was much better than it's been given credit for, and also that there's very little evidence of ivory processing at Zhizo sites even though ivory products are found.