Ndembu Erotic

Few African peoples of their size are as familiar to anthropologists as the Ndembu, and nearly all of that fame traces back to one couple. In the early 1950s Victor and Edith Turner lived in Ndembu villages in what was then Northern Rhodesia. The rituals they recorded there became the raw material for ideas such as liminality, communitas and the social drama, which now turn up in theater studies and theology. The Ndembu themselves are less abstract. They are a Lunda-speaking people of the wooded plateau of Mwinilunga District, in Zambia's North-Western Province, with kin across the nearby borders in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Zambezi rises in their country.

Ndembu chiefs trace their line to the Lunda kingdom of the Mwata Yamvo in present-day southern Congo, and the senior chieftainship of Kanongesha still carries that claim. Their language, Lunda, is a Bantu tongue close to the Ruund of the old Lunda heartland, and it is one of the seven regional languages Zambia uses in schools and broadcasting. Villages are small and sit among cassava gardens, and hunters have long held a special prestige, with rites of their own. Descent runs through the mother, but a wife traditionally moves to her husband's village. Turner argued that this pull between loyalty to the mother's line and married life kept villages restless and quick to split. Quarrels were settled, or at least named, through divination and ritual.

Most Ndembu today are Christian, and missions have worked the area since early in the twentieth century. The Kalene Hill mission near the source of the Zambezi dates to 1906. Conversion has not sent the shades of the dead away. Illness, infertility and bad luck in the hunt have long been read as signs that an ancestor feels neglected. The traditional answer is a cult of affliction: a healing rite run by people who once suffered the same trouble. In the ihamba rite, a doctor draws out the tooth of a dead hunter believed to be biting the patient from inside the body.

Liminality, Turner's best-known idea, took shape around Ndembu initiation. Boys once spent months in Mukanda, a circumcision lodge in the bush where masked figures appeared. In a girl's Nkang'a, the novice lies wrapped in a blanket beneath a young mudyi tree for a full day, motionless, while women dance and sing around her. Cut the mudyi and it bleeds a white latex, which Ndembu read as breast milk, the bond between mother and child, and the mother's line itself. White, together with red and black, makes up a color scheme that runs through Ndembu ritual life.