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Sergey Yastrzhembskiy
PATRIARCHAL AFRICA
The Last Sunrise
Photo-chronicle of the Vanishing Life
Volume I
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Dedicated to my dearest – Anastasia, Anisya, and Milan. Without their love and endless patience I could not have spent so much time in Africa, and therefore create this album.
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Contents
Pagina 11
Volume I MEN AND WOMEN 17 63 123 161
Children Women Men Elders and chiefs EVERYDAY LIFE
209 253 313 335 371 415
Habitation Food Agriculture and livestock breeding Trades and handicrafts Hunting and fishing Diseases, treatment, and divination
Volume II BELIEFS AND RITUALS 451 485 486 500 522 540 550 553
Initiation rites Religion Animism Voodoo Christianity Islam Judaism The world of the dead SHOW
589 639 685
Music, dance, and masks Games and celebrations Sexuality and physical beauty
728 734
Peoples’ profile Sergey Yastrzhembskiy. Biography
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In traditional African cultures, the position of men and women in their respective societies is stipulated to a great extent by the phenomenon that anthropologists call “kinship”, which determines affiliation to a certain social group. The most common kinds of lineage are patrilineal and matrilineal, whereby patrilineal societies involve inheritance of the father’s lineage, and matrilineal of the mother’s. Generally speaking, women have a higher status in matrilineal societies, whereas men occupy a privileged position in patrilineal ones. In matrilineal societies, the status of women is so high, and the degree of freedom of behaviour so great, that it endures even with the further transition to patrilineal lineage of certain peoples. For example, the Himba, who live in northwestern Namibia, in the past were a part of previously matrilineal Herero people. Therefore, the Himba retained full freedom in sexual behaviour, even of married women. Children conceived from other men are to be accepted by the husband as his own. Another matrilineal African people are the Tuareg who live in Mali, Algeria, Niger, Libya, and Burkina Faso. To this day, Tuareg women are held in utmost respect. Before marriage they are allowed complete freedom in their sexual behaviour. In contrast to the majority of the peoples of the continent, the Tuareg do not practise polygyny (polygamy), despite the adoption of Islam. In the majority of the patrilineal societies of Africa, the position of women is quite different – their social status is much lower than that of men. Among the Samburu pastoralists in Kenya, for example, women do all the housework, while children and adolescents graze the cattle, and men are engaged in prestigious works like fighting and hunting if they are – young warriors (morans), or they become elders and priests, if they belong to an older class. Among the societies engaged in slash-and-burn farming, men usually only clear new land for crops, while all other stages of the cycle of agricultural operations – from sowing to harvesting – are performed by women. Women are also builders of rural dwellings. And they are an indicator of the status of the males: the more wives a man has and the more children, the more cultivated land he has, and hence the more wealth and prestige. However, in modern cities, polygamy is much less diffuse than in the rural societies. Polygyny does not exist among the societies with bilateral descent lineage (societies whose lineage can be traced on male or female lines) like the Bushmen and Pygmies: their cultures tend to focus on the suppression of social inequalities, including those of gender. Apart from hut-building, the activity of food-gathering (scholars believe that it takes up four hours per day) and leather-tanning are women’s occupations in the hunter-gatherer communities. The men spend all day and sometimes several days in a row in an exhausting hunt for large animals, and then carry the catch back to the camps. Thus, all the strenuous physical work is carried out by the menfolk. However, the Bushmen and Pygmies had almost no wars, in contrast to the patrilineal farmers and pastoralists, as originally the status of warrior provided social superiority of men over women. In fact, here lies the key to the lower status of women in patrilineal African societies. Significantly however, while social relation between men and women are different in various cultures of Africa, there are narratives in the folklore and mythology of many peoples of the continent that shed light on the centuries-old traditions that gender roles play a much more meaningful part than merely the gender-based division of labour. The distribution of roles for men and women within a single society is seen as the manifestation of the general principles bequeathed by the mythical ancestors who created the Universe.
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Children
In Africa as elsewhere, children are adored by the entire community, and mothers usually breastfeed them for a long period of time. The Bushmen do so for three to four years, that is before the birth of a next child. The Berbers of Morocco swaddle their babies, but in the sub-Saharan Africa women often tie them on their backs (like the Surma and the Himba, in leather bags) or on a thigh (like the Bushmen). As children grow, their parents begin to take care of their appearance. The Himba children shave their heads from a very young age, leaving a tuft of hair at the crown. When they grow, these tufts on girls’ heads are plaited into two braids so that they bend forward, and boys’ tufts are plaited in a serpentine braid that falls back. The Turkana and Hamer girls’ braids are greased with a mixture of ochre and fat. Boys and girls from the Dinka and Nuer tribes are scarred on their foreheads (the Dinka do oblique scarring, the Nuer horizontal). Surma (Suri) girls have a hole cut in the lower lip where first a wooden stick is inserted, and then a clay plate, ever increasing in size. And so on, according to social norms and images of beauty in different cultures. Children in Africa enjoy a wide range of activities; these include participating in the dances (like the Ju Hoansy Bushmen), or forms of play, such as standing on large turtles or with hunting with nets (among the Baka Pygmies), or rehearsing with “authentic” weaponry (Berdan rifles among the Dogon), and in some cases with modern firearms (Kalashnikovs among the Surma). Some African children live in desert environments, such as the Sahara and Kalahari. It may be difficult to find water there, but one can turn somersaults on the dunes. In most African cultures, however, this carefree childhood does not last long: children start to work early, doing feasible tasks like fetching water, herding cattle – the Dinka rub ochre into the lyre-shaped horns of cows. Only the Bushmen and Pygmy children start working later, so their games with toy bows and arrows last longer, and then progress seamlessly into real hunting work for small animals (such as lizards) or birds. But times change in Africa as well, and the traditional system of education, of course, does not include school education so necessary in the modern world. Development in this sphere is one of the most important tasks for the African states dating from their independence. But today, unfortunately, even in cities, not all children attend school, and Africa remains the continent with the lowest level of literacy.
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Berber
right: Morocco. Berbers. A boy in the sand dunes of the Sahara. p. 20: Morocco. Berbers. A girl with a tambourine. p. 21: Morocco. Berbers. A 3-month-old daughter of the nomads Fatima and Mohamed. The Berber women breast-feed their babies up to the age of two. 18
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Maasai
right: Kenya. The Maasai Mara. The Maasai girl. pp. 32–33: Tanzania, The Ngorongoro region. The village primary school. 30
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Baka Pygmy
right: Cameroon. A pygmy girl eats rice using a river shell instead of a spoon. p. 52 and p. 53 (top): Cameroon. Passion to football has reached the Pygmies. Boys make balls of rubber collected in the forest. p. 53 (bottom) and p. 54: Cameroon. Toys from the rainforest. p. 55: Cameroon. The Pygmy boy is checking the net his fellow tribesmen are going to hunt with. 50
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Samburu
right: Kenya. Unmarried young women from the Samburu tribe dressed in festive attire. These young women display rich imagination in their decorative work, using a combination of glass beads, buttons, artificial flowers, metal chains, and circlets. The heads of Samburu women are always smoothly shaved. 74
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Dogon
right: Mali. The Dogon produce the cloths of navy-blue colour on their own. The woman with a basket is gathering corn. p. 96: Mali. There are special houses in the Dogon village to isolate women during their menstrual period. p. 97: Mali. Dogon beauty. 94
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