The Spirits of the Dead

The Sukuma are pastoral agriculturists living on the semiarid steppe of north western Tanganyika, administratively divided into a series of loosely federated chiefdoms. So far they have been little influenced by either Christianity or Islam and continue to practice their own form of ancestor worship which is the subject of this paper. It is essential before we pass to a consideration of their actual religious practices, to understand what they regard as the principles of life and to proceed from that to their worship and the reasons for their beliefs. In the absence of a written tradition their beliefs have wide variations and few Sukuma have given thought to such problems so that it is only from the everyday phrases exemplifying certain words that a loosely coherent system can be constructed. If we ignore for the moment the supernatural forces which mould the intentions of a human being, the chain of causation from desire to action is from the heart to the brain which translates the desire into action. The heart itself is the centre of life maintained by the breath. Breath lives within the body and looks after it so that when it leaves they say that death follows and that shortness of breath accompanies weakness; in fact breath is given to man so that he may work, and is the force which holds the body erect. Although breath is in every part of the body, it comes from inside the heart myuyi ikingaga mu moyo. If a man dies the Sukuma say that his breath is finished munhu uyu washilaga myuyi and following on this that breath not only looks after life but also death as well. Each man has his own breath with which he is born and which is not the same as that of anyone else. Breath increases with the growth of the body and sickness is regarded as the outward expression of the breath's illness

Ancestor · Ancient history · Archaeology · Genealogy · Geography · History · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

• Uchawi Upo

  Amy Nichols-Belo•Libra•2014

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