Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2001

From: Abigail Stamm

Subject: Yao initiation (Malawi)

Traditionally, the Yao have three initiation ceremonies, or zinamwali. The first, Nsondo, is the one I witnessed on 29 August 2001.

It is for prepubescent, or as Mr Zembani says, premenstrual, girls. In it, the girls are taught the behaviour expected of them as Yao females. I believe they are also circumcised, but I do not know to what extent.

The second, called Ndakhula (literally "I have grown up"), is for girls who have begun menstruating. In it, the girls are taught what the Yao culture considers a proper woman and wife. The third, Jando, is the only one for boys. The boys are about 17 years old according to one source and about 9 according to another. It begins with their circumcision, then after their wounds (penises) have healed, they are taught the expected duties of Yao men to prepare them for adulthood. Each ceremony used to be several months long, but our Traditional Authority, T/A Kalembo, ordered that they be shortened to one month or less in the Ulongwe area. He argued that those undergoing the initiations were missing almost an entire term of school, which was not necessary. Evan told me that in Namwera, the ceremonies still run well into Term 3. He is a Peace Corps English teacher there.

There are also shorter ceremonies, but I have not attended any. One is the Sadaka, a feast following a funeral. The idea is that a happy party will drive bad spirits away so no one else will die in that family. A second is Litiwo, a ceremony for women who are experiencing their first pregnancy. A third is Fisi. If a woman fails to become pregnant, she goes to a special man, who is called the fisi (literally hyena). He has sex with her. If she becomes pregnant, it is assumed her husband is infertile. If not, then she must be infertile. In other areas, I believe the fisi also has the role of having sex with girls in the Ndakhula or its equivalent as part of the initiation. The girls are then encouraged to find sexual partners to practice before they marry.

These ceremonies are still practiced by the Muslim Yao, but the Christian sects, including the Catholic Church, have been trying to discourage them and introduce their own rituals, such as Communion. In the ceremony I attended, the friend who brought me, Amayi Zembani, is Catholic, but most of her family is Muslim and the girls being initiated were her relatives. A couple generations ago, the Christian sects allowed the ceremonies, so Amayi Zembani went through this one. Of course whenever anyone is initiated, villagers from all religions attend to enjoy the festivities.

I joined the procession on the last day of the ceremony as it came past my house. Amayi Zembani had asked me to join her, then had run ahead while I grabbed my tape recorder and locked my house, then threw my keys at her husband with a request to check on my cat. Apparently he obeyed, or sent his son, since when I got home hours later, my cat was in my house instead of in their garden.

I joined the back of the procession, feeling nervous and out of place. All the women were giving me strange looks and the children were staring at me. I scanned the crowd in vain for Amayi Zembani. She is taller than most other women in Ulongwe are, but I am too short for it to make much difference. I kept my electronics hidden in my handbag, deciding it would be wise to wait until the group accepted me before using them, even though Mr Zembani had said it would be okay.

After the initial shock, about four amayis in back took me in and showed me how to do the dance. We were walking down the tarmac through the center of town. As we walked, we danced, or rather they did and I tried vainly to imitate them. I did discover it is easier to try to dance when I am walking than when I am stationary though. The procession was singing just about the entire way. I did not know the words; I think they were in Chiyao. They would sing the same phrase several times, then switch to a new phrase and sometimes a new language, namely Chichewa.

While I was trying to dance with the amayis, Amayi Zembani found me and led me closer to the front of the procession. As we went, she said something to some of the women who had been staring at me. I think she spoke in Chiyao, her first language, which I do not speak. I would guess she said something like, "It's okay, she's my friend," referring to me.

After that, the women left me alone, but the children still periodically needed to be reminded not to stare.

In my new location, I talked/danced between Amayi Zembani and Masauko Bwanali, my landlord's daughter and Amayi Zembani's niece. Nearby I could see Miriam, my worker, too. Ahead of me were the musicians. There were three drummers, all teenage or young adult boys. I was told later that the drummers could be any age and either sex. The only requirement is that they be skilled drummers. Each drum was tuned differently, but looked identical to the others. They had wooden barrels with a smaller base and no bottom.

The hide tops were held in place by many wooden pegs around the sides. Two younger boys walked with the drummers. In one hand each boy held the base of a hoe blade. In the other was a metal rod with which he would hit the blade in time to the drums. The resulting chime sounded exactly like the warning chime at railroad crossings.

As I mentioned earlier, we were on the tarmac. The procession stretched across the street and onto the shoulders. Every time a car came, someone cried, "galimoto!" (literally "car"). Most of the women, me included, and the musicians would move to the west side of the road.

Most of the men would move to the east. The procession would stop and sing, dance, and drum in place until the car had gone by, then it would spill into the street again.

A few times, I lost Amayi Zembani. Then I would usually end up beside an agogo (literally "grandmother") who was thrilled when I tried to dance and very upset when I simply walked. If I started walking, she would exaggerate her own dance to show me how to imitate it and say something like, "vina choncho" (roughly "dance this way"). Once she even grabbed my shoulders and started shaking me wildly to get me to dance.

It was bizarre. I never minded though. I was too glad that someone who did not know me was glad I was there. I saw a few of my students too and they always smiled at me. I smiled back. Later, Mr Mopiha, our acting headmaster who had not been present, told me that the students who saw me were excited that I went.

After about ten or fifteen minutes, we reached the other end of town. At the edge of the fields, in front of the Chipiku Wholesale Store, where the employees were enjoying the spectacle, we met the initiated girls. Nothing happened for some time except disordered mingling as far as I could tell. The tarmac runs north to south and we had been walking south. No one lives south of the Chipiku store because the fields flood every rainy season. When people in the past had tried to build there, their homes had been destroyed. I was told the girls had been somewhere in the center of town, but they had been brought to the far edge of town to give the celebrants an excuse to dance and sing all over town. We turned around and started moving north again. As we walked, more people joined us, including my landlord and Mr Zembani.

There were five newly initiated girls of different ages, perhaps about 6 to 9 years old. The girls were all wearing nice dresses. Their hair was painted white with some kind of flour mixture to make them stand out from everyone else. They covered their mouths with folded cloths that looked like handkerchiefs because they had learned secrets during their initiation that they could not divulge to the uninitiated. They walked slowly, almost shuffled, and looked at the ground. The people around them held umbrellas over their heads to shade them from the sun. Some got so tired on the walk that by the end, their mothers or older sisters were carrying them. Apparently, this is completely permissible.

We turned off the tarmac onto the dirt road that leads past my house. We kept walking past the dispensary and the north side of my school to a village I had not visited before. We stopped in front of the house of Amayi Zembani's aunt. A makeshift lean-to was set up in her yard. The roof was a reed mat and the walls were bedsheets. The lean-to was prepared, the mat/roof was adjusted, and then the girls were led inside. They sat side by side behind a low table.

At this point I turned away from the girls to ask Mr Zembani what I was seeing. Until then, I had been following blindly, not at all sure what I was doing or what was happening. Mr Zembani is not Yao and does not speak Chiyao, so he usually had to ask someone else in Chichewa. Amayi Zembani, who would know, had left to help distribute sweet beer to everyone. I was offered some, but declined it. Alcohol brewed in only three days makes me nervous. The Zembanis' young son Prescot enjoyed it though.

After a long time in which the only things that happened were the distribution of sweet beer, the drumming with occasional breaks or change in words, but not tune, and the newly initiated girls just sitting quietly, Mr Zembani led me to the much smaller and much less crowded house next door. A couple other women came with me, but no other women were present already and when I left, so did they. Several men were sitting on a reed mat beside the house or on the ledge that runs around it. We sat a little apart from them. Prescot carried a chair around for me. I did not care whether or not I had a chair, the ground generally being more comfortable anyway, but since I did not know the proper behaviour for the ceremony, I simply did as I was told.

Shortly thereafter, we went back to the main group and Mr Zembani handed me five one-kwacha coins. He explained that these were to give offerings to the girls, one coin to each, to show the happiness of the rest of the community. As the various celebrants dropped their coins into the dishes, one for each girl, the musicians and dancers sang, "Ndalama migolo migolo," over and over. (Chichewa: money buckets buckets, or "We have money to fill buckets.")

Other songs that were explained to me were: "Kuti nipange chonchi atalephereka kuli matope" (Chichewa: say make like this after s/he will fail there is mud, or "A man says, 'will you do this (have sex)?' The woman answers, 'no, there is mud.'") "Akwerekwende" (Chiyao: s/he should climb up, should go, or "S/he should get on [a car] so that it can move.")"Andolo andolo" (Language unknown. In Chichewa, it means either earrings, or the people who wear them.) I could not understand any of them, even after I had been told the words, and there were too many to write them all. I did record a few on my cassette recorder, but there is so much other noise that the words are hard to hear. At one point when I was trying to record, a woman started blowing a whistle right next to me. I had taken out my recorder and notebook shortly after joining Mr Zembani, deciding if anyone protested, he could translate for me, but no one did. I did not use my camera at all, though I had it with me. In the past, every time i tried to photograph some village event, children would run in front of my camera and block the view, then do some stupid pose from a kickboxing movie hoping I would photograh them. I did not want to deal with that or with any other disruption a camera might cause.

After the offerings to the girls, offerings were made to the uncles, beginning with my landlord, Mr Bwanali. He was led from the smaller house under the shade of the official ceremony chitenje to the larger gathering. The chitenje pattern changes from one ceremony to another and those wearing them, including Miriam and Amayi Zembani, were the ones specially invited by the initiates' families. The chitenjes were red, yellow, and black with a repeating leaf/wave colour. I drew the design in my notebook, but have no way to include it here. Many other women wore either the same colour in a

different design or a different colour (often with blue), but the same design. About six or eight people helt the chitenje aloft. A small group of men and women escorted my landlord, singing and dancing. They sang, "Aye dzuwa lalowa." (Chichewa: possibly let's go [like "tiye"] or an exclamation, sun enters, or "It is unfortunate the sun is setting. The ceremony must end.") I did not see anything offered to him since he got lost in the crowd. I was told all of the uncles are given offerings, but I did not see any others escorted in that way.

I also saw a boy, maybe ten years old, who had found a wild bird, barely old enough to fly. I am guessing that it fell out of its nest. He was not hurting it in any way, but he was showing it off to all of his friends and manhandling it excessively. I just watched and did not even try to interfere.

I left with Mr Zembani before dark and Amayi Zembani and Prescot joined us later. They invited me to eat with them and we sat on my verandah, which is much bigger than theirs. They thought it was a great achievement that I remembered to offer them water to wash their hands after eating. Because the meal was rice, I used silverware anyway. I do not remember now if they ate with forks or their hands.

Miriam did not come to water my plants that evening. Normally she is reliable, unless she has gone to a ceremony somewhere. There were several other ceremonies that week. I was not invited to any others, but she attended most of them. Once they were over, she started coming regularly again. I thought it was interesting that I did not see her daughter at the ceremony. I did not ask about it though.

Prescot's initiation is next August and I have been asked to attend if possible (anyone who wants to visit me is invited too, Uncle Ted). He will not be initiated as a Yao since he is Catholic and as I said, the Catholic Church condemns the Yao ceremonies. Never mind that all the Catholics go to the Yao celebrations anyway. He will go through the Catholic initiation, which may be similar to First Communion or Penance or Confirmation. The description was not clear, so I will ask for more information next August.

Boys and girls are initiated separately. Mr Zembani was surprised when I told him that a boy was confirmed with me. He was also surprised that I did not undergo some kind of ceremony when I began menstruating. I assured him that some groups in America do, but not all.

Basi. I hope this is informative, if subjective and incomplete. As I learn more, I will expand on the information here.

Abby

Address: PO Box 43, Ulongwe, Balaka, Malawi