Sacred Drums
Sandy Grant | Wednesday April 27, 2016 11:53
The caption read, ‘Sandy Grant preserves the past of the Bakgatla people. He is pictured sitting with a traditional drum, more than a hundred years old, which the tribes folk fetch from the museum for ceremonial rites.’ The photo has particular relevance in the context of the application currently being made to UNESCO for this very same drum, the womens initiation (bojale) drum to be recognised and listed as a sacred artifact. Supposedly the drum may never be handled by a man, or even by an uninitiated woman. What then might explain my apparent apostasy, my blatant, unprofessional disregard of the sacred, mystical qualities of this drum?
The fact was that the myth regarding the drum began to emerge only in, I think, 2001. It was then that it was first claimed that the opening at the base of the drum was symbolical of the woman’s womb. Thereafter the necessary embellishments began, bit by bit, to be provided. Awkwardly for proponents of the myth, the women’s drum had been historically abandoned by them. The whereabouts of the drums – there are in fact, two – was known by Amos Pilane (male) who showed it to me (male), on my request in 1971. The two drums were found by us in a pile of discarded junk in the lelapa of Leburu Pilane, Amos’ niece (female), behind the kgotla leobo. Kgosi Linchwe (male) said that he (and Mma Seingwaeng) had been unaware of their existence. Amos, noted tribal historian, has been the only person to state with authority that the drums were used during bojale and were brought by the Bakgatla to Mochudi in 1871.
No woman at the time claimed similar knowledge. Neither then nor later did Amos give any indication that the drums were, in any way, sacred. A host of obvious questions arise from this unusual story which really do need to be answered if UNESCO is to be convinced that the drum is what it is claimed to be. The other drum, in the care of the National Museum, is surprisingly in the circumstances, more or less irrelevant because it has never been used in any of the post 1971 bojale exercises in Mochudi. Why were the drums simply abandoned and dumped if they were of such exceptional importance? I am confident that I have the explanation which can, however, wait for another day.
In the meanwhile, I suggest that the Bakgatla have had a long record of re-inventing tradition – either for personal or political reasons or both. These inventions have been most obvious with bogwera which is better researched than bojale. There should be no difficulty for anyone, therefore, in recognising that the ‘ sacred’ bojale drum or drums is yet another, very recent and probably harmless invention. UNESCO, however, may want to know why hard information about the ‘ sacred’ nature of these drums can be taken no further back than 2001?