INLSA

Traditional healing: A cleansing ceremony and the slaughtering of a black bull by President Jacob Zuma with a special traditional spear was held in Bloemfontein yesterday ahead of ANCs celebrations today. Pictures: Antoine de Ras

GAYE DAVIS

THERE was a brief bellow from the black bull, and then the sound of women ululating filled the air.

“Everything has been done, we have spoken to the ancestors,” President Jacob Zuma said after emerging from the kraal where the black bull – a gift from Lesotho’s King Letsie III – had put up a fierce fight while being tethered to an acacia tree earlier.

Traditional healers from across the country had been performing special rituals since 3am in the dusty yard at Waaihoek, behind the Wesleyan Church where the ANC’s founders gathered 100 years ago today to form Africa’s oldest liberation movement.

A group of women – dressed in beaded garments and hailing from the part of Limpopo where Modjadji, the Rain Queen, rules – danced to the beat of a drum as people awaited Zuma’s arrival, and as the entrails of goats slaughtered earlier were washed.

Among those allowed to enter the kraal with Zuma were US politician Jesse Jackson, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, party chairman Baleka Mbete, chief whip Mathole Motshekga and religious leaders – including a local bishop.

Traditional healing: A cleansing ceremony and the slaughtering of a black bull by President Jacob Zuma with a special traditional spear was held in Bloemfontein yesterday ahead of ANCs celebrations today. Pictures: Antoine de Ras

INLSA

Journalists and cameras were kept far enough away to prevent them from recording the slaughter, which took place soon after Zuma’s arrival at around 7.30am.

Mantashe said this was done due to concerns about how the ceremony would be projected by the media.

The media were allowed to photograph Zuma holding the ceremonial spear – bound in the black, green and gold of the ANC – which he had used during the ceremony.

“It was done in the most dignified way,” Zuma said later in a brief address in a marquee adjoining the historic church.

On Friday night, the marquee had hosted a night vigil and inter-faith service featuring South Africa’s diverse faiths and religious traditions: Christian, Muslim, even Rastafarianism.

“Today our leaders and traditional leaders had to perform certain rituals before we get on with the very serious business of our celebrations – in other words, to remember our ancestors, our own gods, in a traditional way,” Zuma said.

That included the ANC’s founding fathers.

Zuma said the ANC was “different – it was not founded by people who “shared an ideology or were friends”, but was founded in response to the “national challenge” posed by the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, when the systematic oppression of the majority of the country’s people got under way in earnest.

Zuma said the spear had been handed to him by ANC veteran Andrew Mlangeni, now 85, one of the first members of the movement’s armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe – the Spear of the Nation.

It symbolised “one of the powerful weapons we used in the various wars we fought of resistance and conquest”.

Zuma repeated Mlangeni’s “wise words” during the handover: that the spear was now “not to go and fight, but to keep peace and protect the nation”.

It was “symbolic that today we handed back the spear”, Zuma said.

It could not be confirmed whether Zuma used it to make a ceremonial first cut.

Zuma said he’d wielded it “symbolically” and “the young people did it (the slaughter) practically”.

The slaughtering of the bull ignited fierce debate last week after African Christian Democratic Party leader, Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, objected to invoking “dead spirits” instead of the “living Jesus Christ”.

Under Zuma, the governing party has moved to recognise the traditional culture and rituals he practises as a man from rural KwaZulu-Natal.

“There is always an element of fear of the unknown. If people are uninformed, they are quick to speculate – and to judge,” said Thobeka Kentane-Mekwa.

As the deputy secretary-general of the National Unitary Professional Association for African Traditional Health Practitioners, Kentane-Mekwa has been practising for the past 22 years.

“This is about appeasing the ancestors, appealing to them to look back, to thank them for what has been achieved and to acknowledge the legacy they’ve left us,” she said.

“Our freedom fighters came from all walks of life.”