Innovative reworkings of ancestor ritual as a response to forced villagisation: an Eastern Cape example

Abstract

In the mid-1960s, the people of the rural settlement of Cata in the Keiskammahoek district of the then Ciskei bantustan were moved by the apartheid government’s “betterment planning” programme, from their small patrilineal-kinship-based residential clusters into larger, more concentrated residential areas; they were thus effectively forcibly villagised. This paper examines what appears to be a new ritual that has arisen in response to members of these agnatic clusters now being scattered throughout these new residential areas. The ritual of “fetching the ancestors,” thus of collectively bringing the ancestors of an entire local agnatic cluster from the old settlement areas to the new villages, embodies elements of, but is significantly different from, existing ancestor rituals. By comparing it with other similar rituals elsewhere, including those performed to return the spirits of dead struggle veterans to their places of origin, the paper highlights similarities with those rituals and the innovative dimensions of this particular ritual.