experience
Throughout history, across Africa, people have actively called for the rains. Songs were sung and rituals performed to please the ancestors – the mediators between humans and a higher power – who would release them, enlivening the earth again. In the Mamaala clan of the Ndebele Tribe, this responsibility fell to priestesses called Baroka, who practised their elemental control from a homeland west of the Kruger National Park, in central northern South Africa. Reaching for the rains: Spring in the Southern Hemisphere starts in late September, and the rains follow in the next few months. But when they didn’t, a Moroka would call for them from a shrine built and decorated with elements of the natural world, which few were permitted to enter. Young, abstinent males would embark on a barefoot hunt for hard-to-find buck or lizard, led across undulating terrain by an elder. Their live bounty, along with the flesh of a sacred snake and a branch of a sacred tree, would be placed at the shrine’s entrance, and all would chant, “ Pula, Pula, Pula ”. “ Rain, Rain, Rain .” Young, abstinent females would also collect water from a specific waterfall in a calabash
using their left hand and return to the shrine with it balanced on their head. If it fell, they would leave it and chant, “ Pula, Pula, Pula .” If they made it back, they would leave it on the ground and chant the same. With these resources, the Moroka could begin her ritual, stirring the water in a clay trough and sprinkling it over a great reptile that lived in the centre of her shrine. And so, it was said, the rains would come. But, if they still didn’t, women would collect water in the same way as the girls and pour it over the graves of deceased rainmakers in order of seniority, chanting “ Pula ” at each one. And if that didn’t work, the boys would mix water with the bark of a specific tree, and move in procession around the village, pouring this mixture on every mark of impurity before sweeping it with a wattle branch and chanting “ Pula ”. Then they would smash their calabashes in the Moroka’s maize field and shout “ Pula ” again, before returning to the shrine, where they would be doused with water, then pour it on the roof of one of the Moroka’s female relatives and pass under its dripping thatch, chanting one final “ Pula ”. Always, there was a way to reach for the rain.
Previous spread The spectacle of storm shows in its scale, and what comes after. Right All life has a relationship with water, some more unique than others. Following spread Rain coaxes creatures big and small out from hiding.
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