Rain-making

This article presents a diachronic perspective on rain and water rituals in southern Africa. The authors claim that contemporary rituals can only be properly understood when cognisance has been taken of their deep roots into the past. The authors indicate how water and rain rituals show signs of continuity between past and present, in spite of the dramatic upheavals created by the arrival of colonialism and missionary Christianity. The authors furthermore argue that such rituals are not only of ‘religious’ importance, but also indicative of the material concerns concerning the environment in the communal consciousness of ordinary people. The popular interest in these types of rituals may indeed be understood as the refusal by ordinary people to submit to a dominant globalisation paradigm which has a vested interest in casting them in the role of permanently helpless victims.

An excerpt from one of my contributions to the yet unpublished book "Karoo Cosmos". This narrative is of great ethnographic value among other things because is one of the few indigenous accounts of the use and function of rock gongs in an area laden with rock engravings. The narrative was told in November 1879 by /xam storyteller /han=kass'o, who had heard the story from his wife, who was present during the cataclismic flood that almost wiped out the Karoo town of Victoria West in the night of 27-28 February 1871.