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BuLLouGuH, W. S. 1960. Practical invertebrate anatomy. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan.

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ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

ANNALE VAN DIE SUID-AFRIKAANSE MUSEUM

Volume 104 Band

December 1994 Desember

Part 6 Deel

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DEATH IN PELLA:

MORTUARY RITUALS IN

A NAMAQUALAND RESERVE,

1978-1989

By

G. P. KLINGHARDT

Cape Town Kaapstad

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D3587

DEATH IN PELLA:

MORTUARY RITUALS IN A NAMAQUALAND RESERVE,

1978-1989

By

G. P. KLINGHARDT

Human Sciences Division, South African Museum, Cape Town

[MS accepted 3 October 1994)

ABSTRACT

An ethnographic account of mortuary rituals in Pella, a Namaqualand Reserve com-

munity, has been used to demonstrate that the systematic investigation of ritual, accepted as

essential to reconstructive studies of ‘traditional’ African societies and groups, is of equal

value in the study of contemporary complex societies in southern Africa. The analysis has

followed Van Gennep’s tripartite structure in treating mortuary rituals as communal rites of

passage and has enabled the major features of the social organization of Pella, the different

types of solidarity to be found there, and the main foci of differentiation such as kinship, age

and sex, and religious and ethnic affiliations to be set out. However, it has given no

indications regarding other aspects, such as political affiliations, nor are the structures of

clique alliances and of informal associations represented in symbolic form. The examination

of cultural patterns has shown the essentially European origin of most of the cultural traits

and forms observed in connection with formal religion and mortuary rites and the extremely

small number of remaining traits of indigenous Nama provenance. This indicates, in regard

to the cultural formation of the Pella community, that processes of acculturation and

assimilation have proceeded so far that in cultural terms the community at Pella, in common

with those formed by Reserve-dwellers elsewhere in Namaqualand, can be regarded as part

of a wider synthetic cultural system brought into being by the historical processes that have

given form to the current shape of South African society.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PANERA RIC ETON ase cic ec ae cece ero Se ee Tele a See SLA TS INL chetecetihg eco anne COBRA cat 115

[Pe ee pee EOS GEE EES DICE a POE OET gE UAEDEeh Senne at SAA ME DAUE TUNE Linnie RR UI ENGR MDA ACO PIEETE GIDE SPAR 119

re ParatlOnelOr Gea tM iscesiday scene soe neone sisuiee sonic ec euee ae eee a dean aiec wie ana toma tbeetamasaeacee nes 125

BenWeen Geatiranaithenwa Keessrscte sacs ccincnclnenon soe cicee eer en ee ee Mae ieee eee oan 128

“JUTE, ULL ong ee aa ae i oe SR Be Pian aE VE MD ReneS 132

BCEWEEMENE IV AKCTANGENE LUTE TAL! sccestere cerctarere) ca ranere see clate eistaratett ie Sle ss sc neraie es oil a AN SEL 135

NCEA ATO UITI alps eer eect ts As Yale ee es neem es an ene OUD ATU Aye ADAay OMAR se ea stent 136

PER CTACNE SILING EAL es Neate uh ha RAE aoe itt te cea a AA AE ace PMR EEA 141

ISSMIMECTIONAUONOMINC CCAD. ecco saene eee ee ee eae roe ese SINISE Laas ees 143

YISENIS SHOE oes ee oe AES a ae OE Se ad ROD oa tee 147

RETAIOWICUSCIIEMESE ore ticeee ia ye cules see mee te Sem aT aa DSI eee Se Cacia HERO STe MO Herons Cornea einai 155

RRCLERENCES a ie ee eee eee ae Sitesi e Se nts ticline sae chal arcs ERD USES a bea Ut ete 155

INTRODUCTION

Although there are many descriptions and analyses of communal ritual in

ethnographic reconstructions of ‘traditional’ southern African societies, there

has rarely been a systematic treatment of this topic in the anthropological

literature on complex colonial and post-colonial societies in the subcontinent.

The aim of this paper is to examine patterns in the ritual content of the events

115

Ann. S. Afr. Mus. 104 (6), 1994: 115-157.

116 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

and activities that are associated with the death of a community member in the

Pella Reserve, Namaqualand, in order to show the ways in which these rites

symbolically express and reinforce social relations and values through time by

drawing people together for re-enactments of mutual sentiments about one

another and about their view of life and death.

The experience of death is common to all people, but individuals and groups

differ widely both in their practical treatment of it and in their understanding of

what it means (Matousek 1990). Some might see death as complete annihilation,

whereas others would regard it as merely one stage in a continuing cycle of

existence. Beliefs about the dead are generally a mixture of conceptual opposi-

tions to and projections of the living. On the one hand, the dead may be set

apart by certain characteristics that oppose them to the living, whereas on the

other they may also share or reflect certain features of the social and cultural

organization of the living. The analysis of beliefs and conceptual schemata about

death and the dead may therefore reveal features of the socio-cultural system

both directly, as a projection of the world of the living, and by opposition or

indirectly, as a transformation of the world of the living.

Culturally, the significance accorded death influences the attitudes and

rituals that surround the burial of the dead. As Huntington & Metcalf (1979: 2)

have pointed out, ‘[in] all societies . . . the issue of death throws into relief the

most important cultural values by which people live their lives and evaluate

their experiences’. Human groups possess a social organization of the experi-

ence of death, both as a personal and family crisis and as a crisis of social struc-

ture and role replacement. While in an ultimate sense every person dies alone,

in most societies around the world death is also a social occasion, a time when

family and neighbourhood obligations are taken very seriously. The immediate

crisis is met by the mortuary rites and practices of society, whereas the long-

term problem of transmission of property and position is met by the rules of

inheritance and succession. Though some mortuary rites may themselves be

occasions for disposing of the possessions of the deceased, the significant

property involved is transmitted later through equally complex rituals.

The study of mortuary rites has always been of great importance in anthro-

pology, and the effects of death in socio-cultural terms and its ritual manage-

ment in ‘traditional’ societies have long been of interest to anthropologists.

Ritual connected with death takes a wide variety of forms, but it may be seen as

providing the structure for the reaffirmation of social values and ties and for the

transition of the deceased person from one social order to another. Rites and

practices relating to death in general should be seen as a rational response to the

threat of death, for in ending life and resisting all forms of control, death rep-

resents the greatest possible menace to both the individual and society. In the

process of transition, funerary ritual brings to the fore symbols of reintegration

and continuity, serving as a reaffirmation of life in the face of all-negating

death.

Contemporary analyses of mortuary ritual have been strongly influenced by

the work of Hertz, Van Gennep and Turner. In his attempts to relate the type of

rites to the type of social organization, Hertz (1909) drew attention to a theme

later stressed by such other writers as Van Gennep (1909) and Radcliffe-Brown

(1952): how society coped with the disruption caused by the disorganizing effect

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 117

of the death of one of its members. Structure-functionalists such as Malinowski

(1922: 490) asserted that ‘death . . . causes a great and permanent disturbance

in the equilibrium of tribal life’, whereas Radcliffe-Brown (1948: 285) observed

that ‘death constitutes a partial destruction of the social cohesion, the normal

social life is disorganized, the social equilibrium is disturbed. After the death,

the society has to organize itself anew and reach a new condition of equilib-

rium’. Hertz (1909: 76) showed how the division of the funeral obsequies into

parts enabled people to mourn the disruption of society, but later to re-establish

its order, and he also pointed out that differentials in the forms of rituals varied

according to the status of the deceased. In this way, he was able to draw atten-

tion to the striking similarities between mortuary and initiation rites, a theme

that has been echoed ever since in both the theoretical and the ethnographic

literature on many areas of the world.

The functionalist approach to the study of mortuary rituals has been heavily

criticized as being incapable of dealing with the dysfunctional components of

religious behaviour and their contribution to the transformation of cultural sys-

tems. Geertz (1973) has argued that a semiotic conception of culture as patterns

or systems of meaning would make it possible to obtain a fuller appreciation of

the significance of death-related activities in the creation and communication of

symbols of meaning through time. The reality of everyday life is constructed

and maintained through a dialectical process in which the individual projects and

objectifies his own meanings into the world around him, with this apparent

reality then being reappropriated and transformed from ‘structures of the objec-

tive world into structures of the subjective consciousness’ (Berger 1969: 4).

Death, which emphasizes the precarious and unstable nature of people’s lives,

constitutes a crisis that could destroy the socially constructed world of an indi-

vidual. However, death rituals as symbolic systems provide procedures for the

maintenance of reality in the face of death by telling those involved in them that

there is some aspect of the individual that transcends death and through its

immortality allows the process of social construction and transformation to be

continued.

Death rituals may be considered as rites of passage and their structure

examined to understand the way in which they bring about a transition from life

to death and in so doing construct a new reality for the bereaved. In his outline

of rites of passage, Van Gennep (1909) divided the ritual process into three

Stages: separation from one state or status, a transitional or liminal period, and

reincorporation into a new state or status. According to Turner (1984: 22), the

liminal phase is the critical stage in the process, and is often associated with

special behaviour, symbols and objects: ‘Liminality itself is a complex phase or

condition, it is often the scene and time for the emergence of a society’s deepest

values in the form of sacred dramas and objects. . . .’ In some societies, death

itself may also be regarded as a rite of passage in which the experience of death

is wrested from chaos and the dying person is initiated into a cosmos of sacred

meaning (Goa 1986) through the process of becoming an ancestor who will con-

tinue to have a social personality. In other societies, the dead are completely

removed from the sphere of social life among the living, though the recently

dead may often be seen as continuing to influence or manifest themselves in the

world of the living, as there may be a period of transition in which they are not

118 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

fully separated from it. Components of the mortuary rites and their associated

activities may be directed towards attempts to influence or control the powers of

the dead during this period in order to protect the living.

Social ceremonies consist of complex structures with communicative func-

tions (Hoppal 1983). Funerals, like weddings and similar social occasions, are

among the most routinized acts of microcommunication and represent nonverbal

forms of social behaviour developed and passed down through the generations

in a given community (Szecsk6 1971), offering some of the most profound

insights into the social and psychological structure of cultural groups, past and

present. At the same time, they provide opportunities for the expression of indi-

vidual meanings in gestures and acts, or the lack of them, through the trans-

formation of a person into a discursive object. This has implications for the

theoretical determination of historical and contemporary forms of cultural

identity at both the local level and in a wider context.

After a brief summary of the main features of the community setting, the

principal activities connected with death in Pella are presented along the lines

given above, and an interpretation is offered in the discussion that follows. A

fairly detailed account of the objects and usages associated with death is given

with a few observations on the wider historical and contemporary distribution of

burial and mourning practices in Namaqualand.

The published anthropological material concerning usages associated with

death in this region consists mainly of information relating to graves (e.g. Biden

& Kling 1912; Laidler 1929) and little detailed analysis of the social significance

of the accompanying social practices has been attempted. A. W. Hoernlé, the

first anthropologist to work in Namaqualand (Carstens ef al. 1987), was seeking

to reconstruct the precolonial ‘traditions’ of the Nama and presented her field

observations accordingly, although admitting that even at the time of her field-

work, ‘the series of rites connected with death have perhaps undergone more

disintegration than any of the others described. They have been telescoped, as it

were, into one another, so that often enough as many of them as remain are all

carried out on the same day, after the burial is over’ (Hoernlé 1918: 79).

Carstens (1961, 1966) addressed issues relating to death in the Steinkopf

Reserve as part of his studies of the Namaqualand Reserves in the 1950s, but

his account reflects the beliefs and practices of the Protestant majority and not

those of the Catholic minority in the Reserve.

This paper is based on analyses of twelve Catholic funerals that were

observed during periods of fieldwork in Pella between 1978 and 1989, though

particular reference is made to a sample of seven funerals and their

accompanying activities studied in 1978 and 1979. Lengthy residence in Pella in

the course of an extensive community study made it possible for the researcher

to make observations of all the various aspects of the death rituals as they were

carried out and to conduct detailed interviews with informants (including the

local Catholic missionaries) on beliefs and practices associated with death. A

number of the researcher’s older informants died during this decade of research

and additional information was obtained from discussions of their funerals and

the related activities with members of their families. Of the twelve funerals

observed, nine were of men and three of women. Five of the deceased were

aged between 25 and 43, and seven were aged between 61 and 86. In terms of

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 119

ethnic affiliation, it was possible to study several individual cases of the funeral

practices for members of all but one of the major groupings in Pella; five of the

funerals were of Basters, four of Damaras and two of Namas, but there was

only one of an elderly European man. There was little obvious variation in the

way in which these funerals and their related activities were enacted, despite the

elapse of 10 years between the first and the last ones observed. It has thus been

possible to make some broad generalizations about the ritual patterns followed

and their significance for the local community, without limiting the scope of the

paper by focusing on any particular funeral as a case study.

Despite the long history of missionary endeavour at Pella, dating back to

1812, there is surprisingly little information on folk beliefs and practices con-

nected with death to be found in the extensive documentation preserved in the

local mission archives, and the material available also relates mostly to places of

burial and grave forms. In the absence of material that could give a substantial

time depth to the study, and with no anthropological work having been carried

out in Pella prior to that of the present researcher, this paper has therefore been

written in the form of an ethnographic account of a past present (the period of

fieldwork) that is situated within the wider context of ongoing socio-historical

processes (Sanjek 1991), in order to provide a baseline for future comparative

studies in Pella and in other Reserve communities in Namaqualand.

PELLA

Pella Reserve is situated about 30 kilometres north-west of the town of Pof-

adder and is some 48 000 ha in extent, two-thirds of which comprise semi-desert

plains to the south and the rest mountainlands above the valley of the Orange

River in the north. In 1985, the population was some 2 000 (comprising

455 households, all Afrikaans-speaking), with about 1 700 people living in the

village of Pella, the ecological centre of dominance in the Reserve, and some

300 in hamlets and farmsteads elsewhere in the Reserve. Though there is a large

core of permanent residents, the overall population has tended to increase and

decrease in size in response to environmental factors (which have influenced the

viability of stock-holdings) and economic considerations (notably fluctuations in

employment opportunities in nearby mining operations). Pella village contains

the Reserve’s main service institutions—the local government office, postal

agency, school, clinic, shops and recreational facilities. The focus of the village

is the Roman Catholic mission and its fine cathedral, which is the seat of the

Bishop of the Diocese of Keimoes-Upington. The mission grounds are some

20 ha in extent, comprising land in the centre of the village and a small irri-

gation farm on the south bank of the Orange River; a substantial proportion of

the income of the mission is derived from the cultivation of dates on its property

in the village and from the hiring out of the farm.

At the time of fieldwork, only a small proportion (12%) of the population

was engaged in full-time stock-farming in the Reserve, though many households

kept a small number of goats or sheep on the commonage for domestic pur-

poses. The cultivation of grains, vegetables and fruit, a significant economic

activity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had almost ceased at the

time of fieldwork, and in only a few households did farming activities provide

120 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

more than a subsistence living. For a livelihood, the great majority of house-

holds were dependent on income from non-farming activities and sources both

inside and outside the Reserve: from employment for wages from commuter

labour to a sillimanite quarry that opened in the Reserve in 1952; from migrant

labour to the copper, lead, zinc and diamond mines elsewhere in Namaquaiand

(especially the Black Mountain Mine at Aggeneys, which is close enough for

weekly commuting); and from government funds in the form of wages, salaries

and pensions. Thus the economy of Pella cannot be regarded as peasant in

character, for through involvement in employment outside of the Reserve and

oscillation between the Reserve and regional urban areas, the inhabitants form

part of the wider class structure of Namaqualand (Sharp 1980). Only those

people dependent on farming for an income, based for the most part on the

production of karakul pelts and low-grade wool, could properly be called

peasants. Living in rural surroundings and following codes of behaviour usually

associated with the peasant farm-family ethos, the inhabitants of Pella are never-

theless part of an industrial economy whose cultural forms and social differen-

tiation they have to be familiar with and have to accept in order to gain a

livelihood.

As a territorial unit, Pella is the smallest (8% of both land area and popu-

lation) of the seven ‘Rural Coloured Areas’, or Reserves, in Namaqualand that

were set apart for communal occupation by people classified as ‘Coloured’

under the now-defunct Population Registration Act. These Reserves originated

as mission stations on Crown Land in the nineteenth century (Sharp 1980: 10)

when Protestant missionaries (from the London Missionary Society, Rhenish

Mission Society and the Wesleyan Church) created more or less autonomous

peasant communities by settling nomadic and semi-nomadic Baster and Euro-

pean stock-farmers and the remnants of the aboriginal Nama pastoralists of

Namaqualand on defined territories granted by the Cape Government. The com-

munities were able to survive into the twentieth century for several reasons, the

most important of which included support from the missionaries for their terri-

torial integrity, and their perceived value as labour pools for the mining industry

in the region. The development of distinctive forms of local identity, arising

from the need to regulate the distribution of internal rights to land for subsist-

ence farming activities, also contributed significantly to the continued existence

of the communities by preventing the inhabitants from identifying with the

situation of the working class in the mining towns and on farms elsewhere in

Namaqualand (Sharp 1977, 1980; Klinghardt 1979). The future of the Reserves

as communal territories in the post-apartheid period was still uncertain at the

time of writing.

Historically, Pella differs from the other Reserves in Namaqualand in that

the Rhenish Mission Society, having failed to obtain a recognized grant of land ©

for its converts from the Cape Government, abandoned its mission work there at

the time of the first Koranna War in 1868, and the mission station was taken

over by the Roman Catholic Church in 1874 (Klinghardt 1982). The Catholic

Church succeeded in securing an exclusive title to the land for itself and estab-

lished a Mission Farm with recognized boundaries. This enabled missionaries of

the Order of St Francis de Sales, a French missionary order based at Troyes

(with German, Austrian, Italian, Dutch and American provinces that provide

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 121

additional personnel) to control the development of the community in ways best

Suited to the extension of the Faith, rather than merely grafting themselves on to

an established community as happened when the Church later began expanding

its activities in Namaqualand (Simon 1959). Through its missionaries (priests

and other religious) and by encouraging European settlement at Pella, the

Church both introduced an established religion and consolidated the general

forms of western European culture among the inhabitants of the area, and it has

been the arbiter in nearly everything—from education and morals to dress and

social affairs—during the past century. Owing to such factors as the secular

authority of the Church, the office of confession and control of education, the

local priests wielded great influence in the local community over this period,

and have continued to do so even after the loss of their secular power in 1974.

The Pella Reserve has been administered by a secular local authority since

1974, when the Mission Farm was transferred to the Administration of

Coloured Affairs. After 1948, the Nationalist government sought to convert the

Mission Farm into a ‘Coloured’ Reserve as part of its policy of rooting out all

forms of multiracial and nonracial communities in South Africa. The aims of the

central government enjoyed the support of many of the local people as these

coincided with their own utopian ideas of a future free of ‘White’ control

(Klinghardt 1982). Despite a long period of resistance by the Church to the

imposition of the apartheid policy on Pella, most of those inhabitants classified

as ‘White’ were compelled eventually to leave in 1973 and Pella became a

‘Rural Coloured Area’ in 1974. The Catholic Church was recognized as the

established church in the Reserve, however, and it retained ownership of the

Mission grounds and a small farm at the Orange River. The form of local

government was initially an Advisory Board drawn from among the politically

active inhabitants to assist the Reserve Superintendent, an appointed government

official who was an outsider. The limited powers of this body were a cause of

considerable dissatisfaction in the community, and in 1987 it was upgraded to a

Management Board, consisting of a committee elected by the registered occu-

piers and headed by a local chairman.

Membership of a spatially isolated administrative unit such as this—first in

the form of a Mission Farm and then of a Reserve—with precise spatial bound-

aries within which all residents have clearly defined rights and duties, privileges

and obligations, has engendered strong in-group sentiments and a sense of

community based on common citizenship in so far as dealings with outside

authorities have been at issue. As in the other Namaqualand Reserves (cf. Sharp

1977 for an analysis of similar processes in Komaggas and Concordia), this has

resulted in the development of an over-arching sense of local identity (‘Pella-

naarskap’), which includes ways of admitting newcomers (‘inkommers’) to the

community, though the emphasis on locally based identity has varied through

time according to changes in the socially dominant groups in the community.

Within the Reserve, however, the community has, since its beginnings in the

nineteenth century, been divided by networks of neighbourhood, class and

ethnic relations that created internal boundaries in multiple dimensions

(Klinghardt 1982, 1987).

Research in contemporary Pella showed that these internal boundaries were

a manifestation of complex processes of differentiation that had their roots in the

122 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

diverse origins and character of the population. Pella has been inhabited in

various proportions through time by the aboriginal Khoisan, comprising hunter-

gatherers (‘Bushmen’, said by informants to have called themselves ‘Tahama-

nannin’) and Nama herders (/Hobesen), immigrant Baster and European stock-

keepers, and Damaras (a heterogeneous grouping of people of Herero and

Dama descent) (Klinghardt 1978, 1982). Historical records show that, by the

mid-nineteenth century, Baster settlers had replaced the aboriginal hunter-

gatherers and pastoralists in the area. The hunter-gatherers were for the most

part destroyed in small-scale conflicts, whereas the pastoralists were forced to

withdraw to the north across the Orange River after the Basters had taken

possession of their pasture lands and water supplies by drawing on the support

of missionaries and the colonial government (Marais 1939; Carstens 1966;

Sharp 1977; Klinghardt 1982). These early Baster colonists, however, were

scattered during the first Koranna War of 1868 (some going to Concordia and

others to Mier and Rehoboth, where their descendants still live) and were

replaced in turn by European settlers and other Basters from eastern Bushman-

land in the 1870s and 1880s. The Europeans were numerically dominant in

Pella, constituting some 70 per cent of the population until the end of the South

African War in 1902, after which they were increasingly overshadowed by the

rapid growth of the other groups resident there; they nevertheless maintained

their politically and socially dominant position in the community until 1973.

Herero and Dama refugees from wars in Great Namaqualand and Damaraland

began entering northern Bushmanland in the 1860s, some to seek work at the

copper mines, others to establish themselves in the Orange River basin with

their livestock, and further waves followed after the collapse of indigenous

resistance to German rule in 1906. Though the leading Damara families in con-

temporary Pella are of Herero origin, the long association with Nama people

north and south of the Orange River has led to the incorporation of many Nama

cultural traits in the pattern of identity of this group of people in the community.

Whereas members of various Nama groups have lived at Pella in varying num-

bers during its history, the few people of Nama origin still there are the

descendants of Bondelswarts refugees who entered the area after the German-

Nama war in German South West Africa in 1906. This summary hardly does

justice to the complex centripetal and centrifugal socio-political forces that have

been at work in shaping the present community but, owing to both historical and

present links, the groupings of people formed by the descendants of these immi-

grants may be considered as forming a continuum in the local population,

though in local eyes the groupings have tended to be regarded as mutually

exclusive, partly owing to perceived differences in racial, cultural and linguistic

origins and partly due to an emphasis on kinship as a determinant of member-

ship (Klinghardt 1982, 1987).

At the time of fieldwork, the Basters comprised about 60 per cent of the

population, the Damaras 25 per cent, Nama 14.7 per cent and Europeans about

0.3 per cent. The first three groups were officially classified as ‘Coloured’ and

the Europeans as ‘Whites’, but few informants accorded legitimacy to the

official racial classification system. Each of these groups included people whose

forebears had come from a range of racial and cultural backgrounds but, in their

contemporary definitions, informants regarded these groups as being based on a

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 123

notion of common origins that ignored the heterogeneity of their origins and

treated kinship and family history as the deciding factors in determining mem-

bership of these groups. The absence of any emphasis on primordial bonds of

attachment in this form of ethnicity at Pella can be ascribed to the fact that, as

shown in genealogies and local parish records, no families could trace their

ancestry to the original inhabitants of Pella in the early nineteenth century, and

few had a continuity of more than four generations in the area. Although a high

rate of marriage between the many offspring of the families within the bound-

aries of the various groups has produced a profusion of kinship bonds among

the population, informal and formal restrictions on marriages among members

of different groups have nevertheless produced patterns of marriage that have

tended to reinforce the existing ethnic and social boundaries in the community

as apparently immutable in the eyes of the members of all these groups.

Strong sentiments of belonging together were also shown in relation to two

types of informal territorial grouping: the small neighbourhood in the village, a

social grouping based on shared residence in a ‘natural’ area; and the larger

districts, or wards, of the Reserve, which are distinguished by the inhabitants.

A natural area was recognized as being based on a distinctive geographical

feature such as a ridge, vegetation or watersource; on a distinctive material

feature, such as a style of architecture; or on a distinctive socio-cultural feature,

such as class or ethnic homogeneity. The principal criteria were homogeneity

within the area and distinctiveness from its surroundings. In Pella village there

were five principal natural areas, divided into 17 neighbourhood areas. The

inhabitants of the oldest areas tended to be homogeneous in terms of ethnic

origin and cultural expression—Basters being resident in two areas and Damaras

in one—whereas those resident in areas that developed after 1952 were more

heterogeneous, with neighbourhoods reflecting class differences based on wealth

and occupation, rather than kin and regional origin, as in the former. In the

Reserve, in addition to the central village, there were five informally defined

wards, of which the three on the plains were dominated by Baster farmers and

the two that included the mountainlands and the Orange River valley by Damara

and Nama stock-keepers.

Perceptions of differences among the residents have played a major role in

generating the internal political process in Pella over the past century, though

their significance has varied according to the issues at stake. After 1974, for

example, their importance declined concomitantly with the growth of shared

community resistance to attempts by the central government to change the sys-

tem of communal land tenure in the Reserve through the subdivision of the land

into economically viable farms, which would have been granted only to those

bona fide farmers recognized by officialdom (Klinghardt 1982). Owing to a

combination of local resistance and changes in government policy, this scheme

was subsequently abandoned in favour of one in which stock-owners would

rotate their stock among five camps, of which one would be closed each year to

allow the recovery of the pasturage. After this success and with the approaching

end of the apartheid era, however, the community had to face the growing

spread of populist ideologies in the wider society that stressed interests and

identities beyond those of the local community. The initial response of the

inhabitants was to re-emphasize the internal boundaries of ethnic groupings

124 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

within the community as a way of protecting themselves against hegemonic

forces that were perceived to be a threat to community control of the land in the

Reserve.

Religion in Pella revolved around the Roman Catholic Church and the

formalized practices and beliefs associated with it. About 95 per cent of the

population was Catholic, a most distinctive feature that has set Pella apart from

the other Namaqualand Reserves, in which the populations have always been

Protestant. Information gathered during surveys, interviews with informants and

studies of social networks indicated that the majority of the inhabitants could be

considered good Catholics, whose theology and religious practice could be best

represented as devotion to the crucified Christ and the Virgin Mary in various

guises. The degree of devoutness varied greatly, however, with men being

rather less concerned with religious matters than women, and it was observed

that many people retained a range of folk beliefs and practices, including a

lively belief in sorcery, that were derived from a variety of sources and that

occasionally emerged in the circumstances of everyday life. The Catholics

formed a single congregation in the Reserve, but the resident priest also served

a satellite congregation, composed mainly of people from Pella, in the mining

town at Aggeneys, and regularly visited small settlements elsewhere in northern

Bushmanland that formed part of the parish of Pella. Of the 150 or so Protestant

residents, most were descendants of relatively recent newcomers to the Reserve

and were mainly Damaras, though there were also a few Basters who had

resisted conversion but had been tolerated by the former mission authorities on

account of their close kinship links with converts. The Protestants were nearly

all members of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church and were considered part

of the Pofadder congregation. Some attended Catholic religious services, though

the minister visited Pella regularly to conduct services. For the majority of

inhabitants, however, residence in Pella implied membership of the Roman

Catholic Church (the established church) and attendance—in common with

members of the wider community—at religious services and at recreational

events in the village hall. Central to the organized ceremonials of the com-

munity were church rituals and ceremonies, including the Mass, confession,

baptism, confirmation and marriage, which followed the conventional Catholic

lines and were wholly under the direction of the ordinary church organization

headed by the priest. Other group or community events were organized by lay

societies associated with the Church, such as the Legion of Mary, the Society of

St Vincent de Paul, and youth groups. Only sports clubs and political groupings

were quite independent of the Church.

The outstanding feature of the history of Pella has been its steady absorption

into the economic, politico-legal and social structure of Namaqualand within

the agrarian-industrial complex of South Africa. In the sphere of cultural

expression, there has been a massive assimilation of the aboriginal population

into colonial society. Indigenous cultural traits (primarily those of Nama and

Damara herders) were submerged in those of European and Baster colonists in

the course of the processes that have produced the present cultural pattern of

Pella. Many traditional cultural practices, extant until little more than a gener-

ation ago and associated with nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralism (which in

the case of Baster people were already a synthetic combination of Nama and

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 125

European traits, and in that of Damara people between Herero and Nama traits),

have since disappeared or were only rarely observed during the period of field-

work. Although the origins of many traits in the cultural inventory of the inhabi-

tants of Pella can be readily identified (Klinghardt 1990)—particularly in cases

of items of material culture such as dwellings, clothing, utensils and farming

equipment—it was often difficult or impossible to determine with certainty the

origins of other components, such as elements of folklore and magical beliefs,

in which a complex combination of European and Nama elements had produced

an entirely new synthetic form. It is only in the persistence of certain ritual

observances that connections could be found between the present and past

inhabitants—and that only in the context of the wider population of Namaqua-

land—though the resemblances may seem superficial when set against the

essential Europeanization of the entire population that had occurred under the

influence of missions, government, traders, farmers and military in the nine-

teenth century. Of the rituals connected with the life cycle, none contains more

deeply rooted ‘traditional’ elements than those practices associated with death,

burial and mourning.

With this brief sketch of the salient features of the Pella community, the

practices relating to death and mourning can now be examined. The activities

and ceremonies surrounding a death may be divided into several phases, each of

which was clearly recognized by informants, and this has provided the frame-

work for the account that follows. This account is restricted to those usages that

existed among the Catholic element of the population. Though information was

collected on Protestant usages, this account would have to be drawn out to an

inordinate length to deal adequately with the differences between these and

Catholic usages and to spell out the sociological and cultural significance of such

differences. These will have to be explored in a future publication.

PREPARATION FOR DEATH

In social terms, it was difficult to determine the beginning of the phase of

dying. As individuals aged, falling prey to illness and debilitation, and withdrew

increasingly from work and active participation in community life, so they

moved closer to the sacred sphere. Their time was increasingly taken up by

attending religious services and solitary prayer and meditation. People discussed

quite openly with relatives and friends the possibilities of living beyond signifi-

cant points in time, such as the beginning of summer (when the first rains fall),

religious festivals such as Easter and Christmas, or even lambing time. Aged

persons endured their fate with resignation and would even console distressed

visitors, reminding them that everyone has to die, or that they had lived long

and well and were now tired. It was considered normal for people to die with

their families, relatives and neighbours around them; many elderly informants

spoke of their fear of dying in a hospital or an old-age home, far removed from

the familiar surroundings of their homes in Pella. As will be shown below, it

was considered vitally important that certain expiatory rituals, which were seen

as forming part of the process of dying, had to be carried out to prevent undue

distress to both the living and the deceased.

126 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

Ideas about death and the after-life were essentially Catholic in form and

content, and bore testimony to the effectiveness of missionary endeavour at

Pella since 1874. Indeed, as early as 1932, Bishop J. M. Simon was able to

review this work with some satisfaction, commenting on ‘. . . the thousands [of]

souls we have gained to the true Faith of Christ, who show in their struggle

with the world and especially when they have to meet Death, how deep the

Religion has penetrated in their hearts . . .’ (Roman Catholic Mission Pella

1932). Death was believed to have entered the world through sin, and bodily

death, from which people would have been immune had it not been for the com-

mission of the original sin as shown in the biblical Creation and Fall, would be

overcome only when the wholeness lost through the fault of humanity is

restored by Christ. The common assumption, in accordance with Catholic doc-

trine, was that at death, in order to make satisfaction even for sins that had been

forgiven, the soul of the departed entered the state of Purgatory where a period

of expiation, which could not be measured in earthly time, would have to be

undergone before it could pass on to Heaven. As all on earth were considered to

commit venial and daily sins, all would need the mercy of God to free them

from sin and its consequences, which could only be achieved through the

sorrows and trials of life on earth or in the next life by purifying fire and tor-

ments, and make them fit for eternal life. Small children who died, however,

were believed to go directly to Heaven. It was not believed that a soul went

directly to Hell, no matter how wicked a life an individual may have led on

earth according to community morality.

From an early age, Catholics at Pella learned to include pleas for a good

dying (‘goeie sterwe’) in their prayers. A good dying meant that the soul

became an ordinary spirit (‘gewone gees’), able to enter the sacred sphere. The

most important criterion of a good dying was the presence of the priest to

administer the sacrament of extreme unction (more properly called ‘Anointing

of the Sick’) in the course of terminal illness and the last rites during the final

moments. The absence of pain and the presence of loved ones at the bedside

were also important, but it was said that these were of little consequence com-

pared with the last rites, because it was individual confession and absolution

given by the priest that constituted the sole ordinary means by which a member

of the faithful who was conscious of grave sin could be reconciled with God and

the Church (Catholic Church 1983: 174) and might thus prevent the departing

soul from eventually descending into Hell. Other important rituals in the process

of taking leave of the world (‘afskeid van die lewe neem’) included making

peace with enemies and asking forgiveness for wrongs done to friends and

relatives.

In general, the dead were not particularly feared, nor was it believed that

they would return under ordinary circumstances. The nature of a person’s death

could, however, under certain conditions cause his soul to return to disturb the

living even after the burial of his earthly remains. If a person died without

receiving the last rites or had failed to carry out the other expiatory procedures

to release interpersonal tensions, had died suddenly as a result of an accident or

had been murdered, or had committed suicide, he was considered to have made

a bad end and his soul was believed to become a ‘swart gees’ (black or evil

spirit, or lost soul), which would appear to the living as a ghost (‘spook’) intent

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 127

on frightening or harming them. A person could also become a ‘swart gees’ if

he was not given a proper funeral and burial, for this neglect caused the soul to

be angry with his relatives and because of this malice could not proceed further

into the sacred sphere. In such cases, close kin would offer prayers for forgive-

ness of the soul and, in certain circumstances, would seek the help of the priest

in alleviating the effects of the ghost, or even have recourse to a sorcerer or

herbalist depending on the severity of the case. However, if a person dreamed

frequently of a dead relative, it was believed that the deceased individual had

returned for a member of his family and that one of the household would cer-

tainly die. There was no remedy possible for such a situation.

Although souls were supposed to go directly to Purgatory after death, some

people nevertheless entertained a belief in the persistence of the soul in the

neighbourhood of its home and family until after the funeral. When dogs barked

inexplicably in the night after a death, this was taken as a sign that the soul had

returned to its former habitation. Preventive measures against possible harm

included the constant provision of light in the death house and, among Damara

and Nama people, the sprinkling of cold water on relatives and visitors and the

mounting of white flags around the dwelling (see p. 131).

At the critical stage, when it was clear that death might occur at any time,

the immediate family in the household acted by notifying the priest and sum-

moning close relatives. It was then the norm that members of the family—

parents, grandparents, children, brothers and sisters, grandchildren and first

cousins—would come to take farewell of the person on his deathbed, and would

visit at least twice a day, remaining for up to an hour at a time, until the death.

Special friends among the neighbours would also look in several times daily and

help the household. Second cousins and more distant relations would not visit as

frequently, perhaps once every two or three days, whereas remote relatives of

the third, fourth and fifth degrees would pay only one call, at which they said

their final farewell. Those who honoured him, a group that would have included

old comrades, fellow-workers and people of standing in the village, would also

pay a final visit. Owing to the belief in the need for a proper leave-taking to

ensure that the soul would depart from the world in peace, a failure to visit the

dying was regarded as a serious social and moral lapse that could have serious

consequences for both the living and the dead. If a religious service took place

while it was known that a member of the community was dying, the priest asked

his congregation to offer prayers for an easier passage into the next world for

that person. Nuns frequently visited the household to assist the family and offer

spiritual comfort to all concerned. There were always one or two people present

to assist the dying person. No desire of the dying person could be refused, and

people went to great lengths and expense to obtain some favoured food or drink

that might have been requested.

When death was near, the priest was summoned and attended at the bedside

to receive confession and give absolution. The priest was obliged to ensure that

the faithful close to death made their confession and received Holy Communion

while they were still in possession of their faculties. Communion given in this

way as Viaticum was a special sign of participation in the mystery celebrated in

the Mass, the mystery of Jesus and his passage to Heaven and, strengthened by

it, the dying person was endowed with the pledge of resurrection in his passing

128 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

from this life (Flannery 1975: 124). The closest relatives of the dying person

were also present if possible—spouse, children, siblings or parents—as well as

friends. Other relatives or friends might call in regularly for information, or

send a child. Consequently, immediately after a death had occurred, there was

already a nucleus of relatives and friends ready to deal with the crisis. A con-

stant vigil was kept, during which prayers were said outside the hearing of

the dying person, prayers that asked for the spiritual calm of the dying person

and for God to be a merciful judge of him. However, excessive weeping and

other expressions of grief had to be avoided until after the death had actually

occurred, as it was believed that premature mourning would hinder the passage

of the soul to the hereafter.

BETWEEN DEATH AND THE WAKE

When a person had died, there were a number of things that had to be done

immediately and the relatives of the deceased would gather at the house to assist

the immediate family in the various funeral tasks. News of a death in the

community spread rapidly, carried by relatives and neighbours of the deceased

to other relatives and friends in the village and Reserve. In the past, the death of

a member of the community was announced by the tolling of the cathedral bell

for about an hour but, at the time of fieldwork, this was done only for people

who had been prominent in community life through their involvement in politi-

cal and social affairs. Close relatives outside the Reserve were notified and

informed of the date of the funeral by telephone, telegram or letter, or through

mobile members of the community, including lorry- and taxi-drivers, commuter

workers, traders and farmers visiting the village. News of the demise of a

prominent member of the community was extremely rapid in reaching every

household in the community, since in such an event special efforts were made to

spread the report.

The Afrikaans phrase ‘bo die grond’ (‘above the ground’) denoted the period

from the moment of death to the time of burial. During this time, only members

of the household and immediate family were expected to observe any prohibi-

tions, such as abstaining from work and not attending dances, film shows or

parties, but these were not rigid requirements. In households actively engaged

in farming operations, certain routine tasks had to be carried out for the well-

being of livestock. There was no general abstinence expected from people in the

neighbourhood, though parents kept their children from playing near the house

of mourning and social functions planned nearby in the area might be post-

poned. Formerly, when the village was small and under the direct control of the

missionaries, a general abstinence from non-economic activities was required on

the death of a prominent member of the community. Although the entire com-

munity would have been affected in some way by a death, except perhaps in the

case of a young child, not all sections and categories of the population were

affected in the same way, and certain forms of behaviour were expected only of

close relatives and those people living in the vicinity of the house of death.

The major share of responsibility for dealing with the crisis of death almost

always lay with the closest adult male relative of the deceased, who could be

teferred to as the chief mourner. In the last two decades, this role has been

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 129

filled increasingly by the principal survivor, mostly the widow or widower, for

the spouse was considered to be closer to the deceased than the latter’s parents,

siblings or children. The reason for this change can probably be found in the

increasing emphasis on the nuclear family as the basis for legal and social

relations, particularly in regard to inheritance and the transfer of occupation

rights in the Reserve. It was the duty of the chief mourner to see that the rel-

evant authorities were informed of the death and to obtain a burial certificate,

and to notify the deceased’s burial society or obtain the services of an under-

taker or otherwise ensure that a coffin was obtained. This person, usually in

conjunction with other relatives, also had to ensure that supplies of food, bever-

ages and liquor were purchased or procured for the initial tide of visitors and

for the wake. Liquor was purchased on a general shopping trip to Pofadder or

Aggeneys, or from illegal local sources. It was also the responsibility of the

chief mourner to arrange for the preparation of the grave. The chief mourner

inspected the site in the cemetery and requested three or four male relatives to

come and dig the grave.

The costs involved in the arrangements for the wake and the funeral were

considerable. A coffin had to be bought, vehicles hired, and the transport costs

of relatives met. To cover these costs, there were three possible avenues.

Though a few people (mainly teachers) would have made provision for funeral

costs in their life insurance, most would have taken out a policy with one of the

burial societies (usually referred to colloquially as the ‘doodsvennootskap’, the

‘doodsklub’ or ‘society’) represented in Pella. A person made a regular con-

tribution to a communal fund and, when a death occurred, the association met

the costs involved or at least that of the coffin. A third possibility was through a

collection taken up by the chief mourner among the people of the neighbour-

hood or area, which might be enough to cover costs.

Unlike in Steinkopf, where the burial societies were local organizations

associated with the Dutch Reformed Mission Church (Carstens 1966), the two

burial societies at Pella came from outside the Reserve and operated indepen-

dently of the Roman Catholic Church. One worked through a local agent (a

relative of a prominent Baster member of the local authority in the Reserve),

whereas the other sent an agent based at Pofadder to collect the monthly pay-

ments. Both societies co-operated in using a small building (owned by the

locally resident agent of one of them) in the village to store coffins until they

were required. Membership (one member per family, usually the breadwinner)

entitled everyone in the family to a full burial. The types of subscriptions avail-

able varied; policies could be taken out to cover all the arrangements for the

funeral or for only the supply of a coffin (which differed in the quality of the

wood and fittings according to the amount paid by the member). Although some

might prefer an elaborate funeral and more expensive coffin and were prepared

to pay the extra costs, others were content with just the supply of the coffin.

Expenses for the wake were not covered by these policies.

Before the introduction of these societies, close relatives of the deceased

often had to collect money from other relatives and friends so that the costs

could be met. As in Europe, the burial societies active in Namaqualand had

their origins among the poorer classes in the mining towns, who attached

great importance to having a ‘decent burial’—a pauper’s grave was the final

130 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

humiliation of poverty. The locally based societies in the urban areas and the

Reserves appear to have started out as savings co-operatives specifically aimed

at providing their members with funds for this purpose. It was said that in Pella

until the mid-1960s, only European families had belonged to such societies and

that few other people had made use of them, allegedly because they did not

understand how they worked or what was entailed in taking out a policy, but

mostly because they were unable to afford the membership fees. Only one of the

societies was willing to assist non-members with making funeral arrangements.

In one case where the deceased person was not a member of a burial society,

his personal savings were sufficient to cover the costs of his funeral—most of

which involved the purchase of a coffin, goats for slaughter and liquor for the

wake—and his family did not have to ask for assistance from others or a burial

society.

In the village as well as in the hamlets in the Reserve, there were elderly

women who regularly undertook to lay out the bodies of those who died in their

neighbourhoods. After death, the female relatives present closed the eyes and

mouth and, after a suitable interval (but while the body was still warm), male

relatives carried the body into a back room of the house and laid it on a wooden

table on its back, either dressed or wrapped in a blanket, with its feet together

and the arms crossed over the chest. It was then washed with water and soap

and dressed by these women after the men had left the room. There was no

special term for these women, and their role in death was not connected with

any other specialist roles they might have had in the community. As many as

three or four might carry out the washing and dressing in a single case. They

were given food and refreshments at the house of the death, but they ate

separately from the rest of the household.

The remains were usually dressed in the deceased’s best clothes (‘kispak’),

in nightclothes, or wound in a sheet. Informants stated that it was taken for

granted that a corpse should be clothed, and that to bury a person uncovered

was never done as this would be considered scandalous. The garments were

prepared by the nearest relatives, and could be either purchased or locally made

items. Older people from conservative Baster and European families have been

known to insist that they be buried in locally made clothes. This was explained

as being a way of maintaining, even after death, a symbolic continuity with the

values cherished by their pioneer or ‘trekboer’ forebears, whose way of life (in

which they might themselves have grown up) was characterized by a strong

sense of individual identity and values of self-sufficiency and independence. One

elderly informant recalled that his grandmother had been placed in her coffin

fully dressed with bonnet and white stockings and with two pennies on her eyes

so that the lids would not open (cf. Botha 1925). The latter practice does not

seem to have been widespread, though not uncommon in Namaqualand, and is

no longer done. Though grave goods are not part of a Christian burial, some

small item of jewellery might sometimes be left on the corpse, especially in the

case of women, and pins used in the deceased’s clothing or shrouding were also

left in the coffin to avoid bad luck. Once dressed, the remains were covered

with a white shroud (‘doodsmus’) supplied by the deceased’s family and then

placed reverently in the coffin to the accompaniment of prayers led by the chief

mourner. According to Christian custom, the deceased was laid on his back

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 131

and, in most cases, with the arms stretched along the sides or sometimes slightly

bent at the elbows so that the hands rested on the thighs. The coffin was then

moved into either the front room of the house or the bedroom, and placed in the

centre of the room on a stand composed of chairs. If the coffin was not yet

available, the body was placed on a similarly positioned bed, called the ‘cold

bed’ (‘koue bed’), until the coffin arrived.

At the time of fieldwork, the coffin (‘kis’ or ‘doodskis’) was usually supplied

by the burial society. Formerly, a coffin was either purchased beforehand and

stored ready in the house, or it was constructed by a local carpenter when

required. When on trek with their livestock in Bushmanland, stock-farmers

usually had some wooden boards slung underneath the wagon for a coffin and, if

a death occurred, the person was buried in the veld. Informants stated that,

during the nineteenth century, few of the dead among the poorer people away

from the Mission were laid in coffins, and that most were dressed in shrouding

garments and buried in a side-chamber grave (‘grondkis’). This type of grave,

consisting of a circular or rectangular shaft with a niche cut into the wall at the

base, into which the corpse was placed, was extensively used by the Khoikhoi

(Inskeep 1986: 224). Examples of side-chamber graves excavated at Henkries

near the Orange River (Drury, n.d.) and at Vredendal (Wilson pers. comm.)

suggest that they were employed mainly for adult burials. Their continued use

by nineteenth-century Christian converts can be seen as both a means of meeting

a practical need and reflecting the notion, still current, that a coffin was desir-

able but not compulsory.

The body was seldom kept in the house for more than two days. Normally,

after a day and a night and the day and night of the wake, it was removed to the

cathedral where it remained unattended until the funeral service. In cases where

the obsequies had to be delayed, the body was removed to the mortuary facili-

ties in Pofadder. In the past, preserving the body until the time of the funeral

often constituted a serious problem, especially in the great heat of summer, and

to overcome this wet cloths were placed over and around the body and kept

moist so that the corpse was cooled by the evaporation.

The house of death itself was made ready for the major social occasion that

followed a death by means of symbolic rearrangements of its furnishings and

ornaments. The curtains might be drawn on either all the windows or, more

commonly, only on those of the death room. In some houses all the pictures,

except religious ones, in the death room were either removed or turned to the

walls, and mirrors covered or removed. It was said that the latter practices had

been introduced by an Irish family that settled at Pella in the late nineteenth

century. A bowl of holy water was placed beside the coffin; Catholic mourners

dipped the fingers of the right hand in this and made the sign of the cross before

kneeling to pray. A set of Rosary beads might be placed on the chest of the

corpse or entwined in the hands. A candle or lamp was placed beside the coffin,

usually on a chair or small table on the northern or left-hand side, and was kept

alight while the body was in the house. Among Damaras, on the morning after a

death, white flags were hung on the house and in a rough circle on bushes

around it as sign of mourning. This created a spatial zone of exclusion around

the outer perimeter of the death house, and it was noted that people who came

to visit and to participate in the wake generally remained inside the circle of

132 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

flags. All these arrangements served to situate the remains of the deceased as

the focal point of the mourning process, which would reach its climax in the

wake held on the eve of the funeral and burial.

While the body was in the house of death, a permanent vigil was kept. Most

daytime visitors were women and children; for practical reasons men usually

came in the evenings and night-time. Group prayers were said at intervals,

closing with the request that God assure ‘the repose of this soul and the souls of

all the faithful departed’, whom the deceased was presumed to have joined.

Relatives up to the third degree of consanguinity and affines of the deceased

were expected to make special efforts to pay their respects before the wake,

as were all close friends of the deceased, neighbours and the deceased’s elemen-

tary family. The degrees of relationship cited here were determined by the num-

ber of generations separating given individuals in the same line of descent or

separating them from a common ancestor. Parents and children were related in

the first degree, as were siblings; grandparents and grandchildren were in the

second degree, along with first cousins; individuals sharing a common great-

grandparent (second cousins) were in the third degree, and so on.

Invitations to visit were not issued (cf. Botha 1925), but it was also expected

that visitors would bring food and refreshment to supplement the household

stocks. Among Damaras, people entering the house of death, or approaching

where the body was lying, were purified by being sprinkled with water. Close

relatives arriving from outside the Reserve were purified in the same way when

they reached the outer perimeter of the dwelling, the gate or the line of stones

surrounding the swept area around the building or hut. This was done in a

serious fashion to ‘cooi’ them and was accompanied by a prayer for protection

from evil, a practice that can be traced back to Nama origins (Hoernlé 1918,

1923). Other relatives and visitors were sprinkled informally when they arrived,

but this was done casually and often jokingly. During the day, prayers and the

Rosary were said, but there was no singing. For the refreshment of the many

visitors, each family (people mostly came in family groups) brought something

with them: a goat, flour or bread, coffee, tea or sugar, but this was not a strict

duty. In one case, a bereaved Damara family put out a tin for donations to cover

the costs of providing refreshments.

THE WAKE

The wake (‘lykwaak’) was generally held on a Friday night and the funeral

proper followed on the Saturday afternoon. This timing at a weekend was

important as it enabled migrant members of the community to attend the funeral

and its associated activities (and then to go to confession) without interfering

with the solemnity of Sunday observances. Wakes were usually held in the

house of the deceased person but, in the past, if a person died in a hamlet in the

Reserve, the corpse was brought into the village and the wake was held at a

relative’s house if the burial was not to take place at the hamlet.

As part of the rite of transition bridging life and death, the wake had two

purposes. It was regarded as an obligation on the part of the surviving relatives

to pay public homage to the deceased in order to appease his spirit so that it

would become an ordinary spirit (‘gewone gees’) that would not return to

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 133

disturb the living. Secondly, it served as an institutionalized gathering where the

bereaved could publicly express their feelings of loss, be comforted by their

relatives and friends, and so overcome their grief. Informants stated that, as a

mourning practice, the wake was considered more important for the living than

for the dead, and that it would be held whether the body and coffin were present

or not—it had to be seen to be done. In the case of a prominent person, a vigil

would be held for several consecutive nights, even without the presence of the

body.

Wakes began at sunset on the evening before the funeral and continued

through the night until dawn. Though the wakes observed all conformed to a

general pattern, certain significant differences between those of Basters and

Damaras were noted. A European wake could not be observed, as in the one

European funeral studied, the death occurred in Cape Town and no wake was

held; there was only a formal tea after the funeral in Pella. Contrary to popular

opinions expressed by urban-dwellers in Namaqualand, wakes took place in an

orderly fashion and, though frequently animated, did not degenerate into

drinking parties even with the occasional presence of intoxicated individuals.

In wakes held by Basters, the body was ‘watched’ by male relatives and

friends and the closest adult female relatives throughout the night. Anyone could

attend a wake, but generally only relatives and close friends would be present

throughout the night. At least one of these people, almost always male, but not

necessarily the chief mourner, maintained a vigil by the side of the coffin, while

the others sat in the living room or the cooking shelter. Visitors came and went

at various times during the course of the evening, and it was not unusual for

them to arrive carrying bottles of wine or beer to supplement the supply of

liquor already procured by the chief mourner. Some less pious visitors would

also bring strong drink with them, which they consumed in secret, going away

from the firelight into the darkness to have a swig (‘dop’) from time to time.

Other refreshments included tea, meat, bread and cakes. The men sat at the fires

discussing male topics—work, farming (goats and sheep), local affairs—and

cracking jokes, taking turns in sitting beside the remains for spells of about a

quarter of an hour. The women were usually busy preparing food and bever-

ages, serving the men and cleaning up in and around the cooking shelter and

fires, but they too conversed on a wide range of topics. On several occasions

during the night, all moved to the death room for prayers, Rosary recitations

and hymns. The Catholics knelt and prayed aloud, but on such occasions

Protestants stood silently, with bowed heads, behind the kneeling group. No

particular person was responsible for deciding when these periods of prayer

should take place, but it was always a close relative of the deceased, usually the

chief mourner, who led the praying, except on the rare occasions when the

priest happened to be present.

Damara and Nama wakes followed a similar pattern, but tended to be more

formal with a greater emphasis on religious activities. At the beginning of the

wake, the coffin was taken out of the death house and placed outside on a stand

composed of chairs, with a lamp standing on a chair on the northern side at the

head. The coffin was orientated with its head in the west in order to face

towards the sunrise and in the conceptual direction of Jerusalem. Thus pos-

itioned, the deceased became a focal point within the circle of light cast by

134 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

the cooking-fires lit around the death house inside the ring of flags and was

accorded an integral place in the communal gathering of family and friends. The

chief mourner spent most of the wake seated on a chair by the southern side of

the coffin, speaking with and being consoled by relatives and friends. Close

relatives and friends were informally grouped by families, and sat in small

groups around fires outside the house for much of the time. Outside of this

clustering were several informal groups of less closely related old and young

people gathered around the outermost fires which were being used to cook meat

and boil water. Relatively few people were present when the wake started at

sunset, but the numbers increased as the evening wore on and towards midnight

many people would arrive after the end of evening entertainments in the village

hall, some of them drunk. Throughout the night, under the direction of one or

more of the Damara leaders or prominent members of local lay organizations,

prayers were said and hymns read at intervals. All knelt during prayers and

when the Rosary was recited. From time to time, all gathered around the coffin

to pray, the immediate family taking the lead and forming a circle, while the

rest gathered around them. The coffin was opened (the lid would not be fastened

until the coffin was made ready to be transferred to the cathedral the next morn-

ing) and the lamp on the chair next to the coffin was raised and held to the face.

After the prayers had been said, each family member in turn placed a hand on

the forehead of the deceased, manifestations of grief being strongly marked at

this point. In contrast to Baster wakes, where food and drinks were freely avail-

able throughout the night, refreshments were served by the women at particular

intervals between the religious activities; coffee and bread were served at about

nine o’clock and three o’clock, meat and tea or coffee at midnight and again at

about four o’clock in the morning.

The most significant feature that distinguished Damara from Baster wakes

was the performance of protective rites of purification using blood from the

goats slaughtered to provide food to mark those attending the wake. The meal at

the wake was no ordinary meal, and it was believed that under certain circum-

stances it could be dangerous to the participants. These rites of protection can

be traced to Nama funerary practices (Hoernlé 1918: 80), but no informants

knew the origins of these rites, claiming that they were old Damara usages.

When the goats were slaughtered, the blood was collected and soot scraped

from a cooking pot mixed with it. Those attending the wake were marked on

their arrival with this blood by an elderly female member of the deceased’s

immediate family. This was known colloquially as ‘streep’ or ‘streeptrek’

(‘striping’) or, in Nama, mdi-!nab or mdai-//6ab (mdi refers to putting right; /nab

to the stomach; //dab to the arm) (Rust 1969: 262, 278, 321). On women and

girls, a cross (‘bloedkruis’) was drawn with the right forefinger on the stomach,

a vertical line from above to below the navel and a horizontal line above the

navel, with the words, ‘’n Goeie maag!’ (‘A good belly!’). In the case of men

and boys, the cross was drawn on the inner side of the right forearm, with the

words *’n Goeie arm!’ (‘A good arm!’), though at one wake there was a vari-

ation in that boys received only a line (‘bloedlyn’) drawn down the inside of the

right forearm on the grounds that they were not yet mature. With this one had

nothing to fear from the meal, but nobody (including the researcher) was

allowed to eat or drink before having been marked in this way. The words were

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 135

the same in form for both males and females, but it was clear from informants’

statements on the meaning of this practice that an absence of protection would

have had different effects on men and women. In the case of women, the effects

were directly physical, for without the blood cross a woman would experience

extreme hunger during the wake and afterwards suffer stomach pains and diar-

thoea. In the case of men, however, the effects would have had to do with his

livelihood and thus the well-being of his family or household dependent on him.

For a man, eating without having been striped would have resulted in misfor-

tune in his work; he might lose his job, or it might become increasingly difficult

to obtain money in whatever way. The striping of men was often accompanied

by joking references to the generosity or otherwise of the guest’s contribution to

the refreshments, and even in the case of boys, who would not have brought

anything, the elderly woman advised them not be stingy when they were grown

up and had become rich. The striping of children was said to prevent sickness

resulting from being in proximity to death.

BETWEEN THE WAKE AND THE FUNERAL

The wake ended at dawn, either with the appearance of the morning star or

at sunrise, and the participants dispersed to their homes to prepare for the

funeral in the afternoon. In the course of the morning, a number of close rela-

tives and friends gathered at the house to assist in the transfer of the coffin to the

cathedral. This was spoken of as the ‘raising’ (‘opligting’) of the coffin.

When the time came to prepare to move the coffin, the lid was opened and

those present filed around it, each in turn touching the face or hands of the

deceased as a farewell. The priest, or the chief mourner in his absence, led the

group in prayer as the coffin lid was closed over the body, placing particular

emphasis on the imminent departure of the deceased from the house. At this

point, manifestations of grief, especially among the women, reached a height

only to be exceeded at the burial.

After the lid had been screwed down, the coffin was lifted by six men and

carried out to a light truck or van in which it was to be conveyed to the

cathedral. Until the 1950s, a wagon drawn by horses which, in contrast to

donkeys or oxen, were regarded as prestige animals and thus served to honour

the dead, was used for this purpose; it was said that only in the early days,

when there were few people at Pella and all lived close to the mission station,

did bearers carry the coffin to the cathedral on foot in a silent procession. The

chief mourner, the bearers and a varying number of others then proceeded to

the cathedral, the truck leading and the others following in cars or light trucks.

The procession took a roundabout route to the cathedral, even when the distance

was very short, and avoided passing in sight of the cemetery; this was, as it

were, the offering of a final view of scenes familiar in the deceased person’s

life. Non-participant bystanders were expected to stop and bow their heads as

the cortége went by, to ‘honour’ (‘eer’) the procession. It was noted that old

women and children turned their backs to the passing coffin and crossed them-

selves, but informants could offer no explanation as to why this was done.

On arrival at the cathedral, the procession was met by the priest, or nuns in

the absence of the priest. The men removed their hats as the coffin was blessed

136 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

at the door. Then all entered the cathedral led by the chief mourner behind the

coffin, which was placed on a stand in front of the high altar. After the coffin

had been given benediction, the mourners departed, leaving it alone in the

empty cathedral until the funeral service in the afternoon. The coffin was placed

directly in the grave only when death had been due to disease or if the corpse

had reached an advanced stage of decomposition. In such a case, the coffin

received benediction at the door of the cathedral and the procession then pro-

ceeded to the cemetery. For the purposes of the funeral service, an imitation

coffin, made of wood and painted black with a white cross on the lid, was put in

front of the high altar.

FUNERAL AND BURIAL

The funeral proper (‘begrafnis’) began with a service in the cathedral. When

the priest was not available for the funeral, he appointed someone to conduct it

in his place, usually a member of the Parish Council who was also the leader of

a church-based community organization. In the past, when a priest could not be

present at some remote hamlet or other place in the Reserve, a locally respected

person filled this role. In the nineteenth century, Catholic people were fre-

quently buried in unconsecrated ground, on the land where they had lived or

wherever they might have died, with a stone at the head and foot of the grave.

When in due course a priest came that way, the stones were pulled up, holy

water was poured down the holes left by the stones and sprinkled over the

mound, and a service was read over the grave. As it was not considered good

Christian usage to lay people down in unconsecrated ground with only a brief

service of committal said over them, the Catholic missionaries insisted that their

parishioners should bring their dead, even over long distances, to be buried in

the only Christian burial place in the region, and thus be laid to rest in conse-

crated ground in accordance with Canon Law No. 1180 (Catholic Church 1983:

208), and by the mid-twentieth century this had become general practice.

In the funerals observed, the process of taking leave of the community took

place in the cathedral, and the ideal was that all Christ’s faithful who had died

should be given a Church funeral. At the time of fieldwork, the Funeral Mass

was conducted as a matter of course, though in the past, in cases of people

dying in areas remote from Pella, it had been done only when it had been

expressly desired. It was considered important that, even if the coffin had

already been placed in the grave, prayers for the dead should be said in the

cathedral as a communal farewell before the actual committal. For a proper

burial the deceased had to be borne to the cathedral, be present during the

service and then be buried with the appropriate prayers read or sung over them

by the priest. Church funerals were conducted according to the ordinary norms

of the Roman Catholic liturgy. In these funeral rites, through the union of all

with each other in Christ, the Church prays for the spiritual support of the dead,

it honours their bodies, and at the same time it brings to the living the comfort

of hope (Catholic Church 1983: 207). In the funerals observed, the Funeral

Mass was performed on the day of burial, and normally included a short homily

designed by the priest to reach those who did not often come to Mass but might

attend funerals. The emphasis in these homilies on the consolation of the living

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 137

with hope in the face of death was symbolized in the vestments of the priest.

The colour of the chasuble and other vestments follows long-standing customs

of expressing in a material way some aspect of the particular mystery of faith

being celebrated in a Mass. Thus the use of black vestments for funeral services

is indicative of sadness and mourning. The priest at Pella, however, making use

of the greater freedom of interpretation granted clerics after the wide-ranging

reforms in the Church initiated by the Second Vatican Council in the early

1960s (Flannery 1975: 198), sometimes wore vestments of white, which is the

sum of all colours, to signify the themes of joy, purity of soul and hope, in his

homilies at funerals. He was, in effect, urging a transcendent view of death as

the gateway to eternal life, in contrast with the torments of Purgatory empha-

sized by earlier missionaries at Pella.

A person who died on a Wednesday or Thursday was considered fortunate,

for there was then not a long interval before the burial. Most funerals took place

on a Saturday and not on a Sunday, as it was considered unseemly to have the

wake with its attendant activities immediately before the first of the Sunday

Masses. An informant stated that when two deaths had occurred in a short

period of time, the occasion arose that two funerals were planned for the same

day. In this event, each party concerned strove to go first. The traditional belief

was that the soul of the most recently buried person had to guard the cemetery

and had no repose until the arrival of the next. This was said to be a very old

Dutch or French belief.

Anyone was welcome to attend funerals, and people went without formal

invitation. The funeral proper always attracted a large gathering and large

numbers of mourners might be present at the funeral of even the most undis-

tinguished person, for it was understood that everyone acquainted with the

deceased should participate unless there was good reason to be absent. At the

funeral of a prominent person, there might be more than 400 or 500 people

present, for on such an occasion the ideal was for every household in the

Reserve to be represented by at least one member. In 1978, over 600 people, of

all classes and ethnic affiliations, attended the funeral of the last European

mayor of Pella. For persons of less consequence, perhaps 100 to 200 people

would be present. The funeral proper might thus be regarded as more of a total

community event than any of the preceding stages in the process of disposal,

which are mainly local and kinship activities. This was clearly evidenced in the

general use of black clothing by mourners attending a funeral. Just as the burial

clothing of the deceased expressed values of identity and incorporation, so too

did that of participants in his funeral. The dress worn by people to the funeral

was special to the occasion, not only as a mark of respect to the dead, but also

symbolic in expressing solidarity in the face of disruption. People attending

funerals in Pella were expected to be respectably dressed, if not wholly in black

(which was desirable) then wearing at least one black item, and even the poorest

people came dressed in their best dark-coloured clothes.

At the end of the Funeral Mass or prayer service, the coffin was borne out

of the cathedral and placed in a hearse or on a light truck, while the mourners

assembled outside, men and women in more or less discrete groups, conversing

and exchanging greetings in subdued tones. The funeral procession (‘lykstoet’)

then formed up and set out for the cemetery. The cathedral bell was tolled at

138 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

funerals only when this had been requested (in the past the ringing of the bell

was supposed to drive away the dead person’s ghost and evil spirits).

The cemetery was less than 200 metres north-west of the cathedral. Until

about two decades ago, it was customary for the procession to walk the entire

distance from the cathedral to the graveyard, and the coffin was carried by

bearers. By the time of fieldwork, however, the coffin was conveyed in a hearse

or on the back of a light truck. Sometimes better-off mourners travelled to the

cemetery by car or light truck, occasionally as part of the procession with the

rest following on foot or apart from the procession itself. In one case, a poor

chief mourner, knowing that some of the mourners at his father’s funeral would

go to the cemetery by car, hired a car beforehand from a local ‘taxi-driver’ to

convey himself and his immediate family, in order not to lose face. In nearly all

the funerals observed, however, the coffin was transported on a vehicle while

the mourners covered the way on foot.

A definite pattern could be discerned in the processions observed. Immedi-

ately following the coffin, walked (or drove) the chief mourner, the closest

female relative, and sometimes an official of the burial society to which the

deceased had belonged. It was not unusual for two males to walk together, for

example, two brothers behind a parent’s coffin; or a father and son might walk

behind the latter’s dead brother. That a female could accompany or even be the

chief mourner was said to have been a development of the last 10 years, for in

the past the closest female relative had always walked behind the chief mourner,

except in the case of parents following the coffin of their child. Behind the prin-

cipal grouping of mourners, the rest walked three or four deep in informal

ordering.

Apart from the precedence accorded to the chief mourner, no other differen-

tiation was made among males in the procession. It was not considered remark-

able, for example, that the school principal or a high-ranking teacher, or a

government official, or a high-status Protestant newcomer (‘inkommer’) to the

Reserve, or even an outsider, should have walked behind or at the side of an

unemployed labourer, a cousin of the deceased and a Catholic. Nor did it draw

comment if a Baster and Damara walked together. Eyebrows would have been

raised, however, if they had stood together at the graveside, as this would have

involved abandoning the tendency towards family clustering in this part of the

funeral (see below). On the other hand, females tended to group themselves

spontaneously according to nearness of kinship with the deceased, those who

were most closely related walking nearest the coffin. In this way, women were

grouped in elementary family units, for example, mother walking with daughter,

or sister with sister.

In the procession, severe solemnity was observed only in the immediate

vicinity of the coffin, among the chief mourner, bearers, close relatives, and

the first rows of women, who might pray and sing. Beyond this area, people

chatted quietly about current events, the Funeral Mass, or the weather as

they walked along. Non-participant bystanders were expected to ‘eer’ (‘honour’)

the procession by standing still and bowing their heads as it passed. Here,

again, old women and children were seen to turn their backs and cross

themselves, just as those observing the transfer of the coffin to the cathedral had

done.

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 139

When the procession arrived at the entrance to the cemetery, it broke up in

an orderly fashion. Cars and light trucks were parked at the gate and from there

the entire procession resumed on foot. At the entrance to the burial ground, the

men at the head of the procession halted, faced inward towards one another and

removed their hats. The coffin was lifted off the truck or hearse by the bearers

and the cortége then passed between the lines of men into the cemetery. The

coffin was brought to the eastern edge of the grave, around which the closest

relatives and the priest with his assistant took up positions, the former usually at

the western end. Around this group, relatives and friends tended to cluster by

families and degree of acquaintanceship. In this way, Basters and Damaras

came naturally to stand separately without any deliberate attempts to form

groups consciously apart from one another, and this also produced a tendency to

separate men from women as in the funeral procession.

The most extreme case of differentiation among mourners at the graveside

seen by the researcher occurred at the funeral of the last European mayor of

Pella in 1978. Those who attended included his relatives both from Pella and

further afield, the Bishop of Keimoes, clerics and religious from the diocese,

dignitaries from Pofadder and farmers from various parts of Bushmanland, as

well as about 600 local inhabitants. The burial was at the family plot in an area

of the cemetery that had been fenced and set aside for the exclusive use of Euro-

peans in 1962 (see p. 145) and, with the exception of the cathedral choir and old

family servants, only people recognized as ‘White’ entered the fenced area; the

rest lined the fence to observe the proceedings, a position that emphasized the

distinction that had come into being between the ‘White’ and ‘Coloured’ inhabi-

tants of Pella as a result of government policy.

After the priest had read the prayers for the dead and sprinkled holy water

on the coffin, other speakers might say a few fitting words emphasizing the need

for all to prepare for death, or indeed launch into lengthy eulogies, punctuated

at intervals by the singing of hymns by the mourners or a choir. Eulogies and

obituaries comprised brief life histories and accounts of how the person had

died, including how he had prepared for death, details of illnesses suffered (if

any), prayers offered and intercessions requested, how he had made peace with

his relatives and friends, how he had made his final confession, and an uplifting

peroration on his last words.

When the time for actual committal came, two male bearers descended into

the grave to receive the coffin as the other bearers lowered it into the grave with

its head to the west. After crossing themselves, they guided the coffin down

until it reached the floor of the grave and then so positioned it that it rested equi-

distant on all sides from the walls. The bearers standing above gave directions

in this regard to those in the grave. The bearers were then helped out with a

hand offered from someone along the margin of the grave so as to avoid step-

ping on the coffin. Only at the funeral of the European mayor, for which the

arrangements had been made by a professional undertaker, was a mechanical lift

used for the committal. At this point, after a final sprinkling of holy water and

the completion of the absolution prayers, it was usual for the priest and his

assistant to depart precipitately, leaving the people to complete the burial.

After further eulogies and farewells, male and female relatives within the

first and second degrees of kinship started filling in the grave by throwing either

140 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

handfuls or spadefuls of earth into the grave as a mark of respect for the

deceased (cf. Hoernlé 1923: 517; Botha 1925: 549), after which the bearers and

male relatives shovelled in the remainder of the earth. At two of the funerals

observed, hymns were sung while the grave was being filled. It was at this point

that expressions of grief, equal to or surpassing those shown at the closing of

the coffin, were always forthcoming. It was expected that female relatives

should weep, but males should not. In instances noted where male relatives

were unable to control their emotions, they were assisted away from the grave

to the fringes of the group.

When the grave had been filled in, a mound was built over it with the sur-

plus ground and the wreaths and other items were placed on it. Before each

wreath was placed on the grave, the accompanying tribute was read, an often

time-consuming activity when lengthy biblical citations had to be quoted in full.

The time taken up by the actual burial could be considerable, varying from one

to three hours or even longer in the case of a prominent person, mainly owing

to the drawn-out process of eulogizing and reading of tributes.

When the last wreath or tribute had been put in place, the grave was con-

sidered closed. A temporary marker, in the form of a wooden cross, was placed

on the grave only at the end of the period of full mourning, after which it

remained until the permanent tombstone or cross could be mounted and conse-

crated later. Before leaving the graveside, it was usual for each person to pass

by and throw one or three handfuls of ground or a few pebbles on the grave

with the words ‘Rus in vrede’ (Rest in peace) as a final farewell. With Damara

and Nama people, this ‘grondgooi’ (casting of earth) was regarded as a special

custom, but many Basters were for the most part content to say a final silent

prayer or a requiem aeternam on leaving the grave and did it only if attending

the burial of a Damara or Nama person. When the burial was completed, the

mourners dispersed quietly but, before leaving the cemetery, most people

walked about viewing the graves of members of their families, sometimes

kneeling in prayer before a fresh grave but more frequently sprinkling a handful

of earth in greeting.

After visiting their relatives’ graves, the mourners returned, either walking

or by vehicle, to their homes. The immediate family and closest relatives of the

deceased were joined at home by more distant relatives and perhaps some close

friends. Those who had dug the grave were also included in this visit. It was

usual for all kin up to the third degree to pay this short ‘comfort’ visit (‘troos-

besoek’) after the funeral proper. The visitors were given refreshments, tea and

liquor with biscuits and perhaps bread or cakes supplied by the immediate fam-

ily (cf. Botha 1925: 549) but, before partaking, everybody first washed their

hands ‘to get the dust off’, using basins of water and towels placed ready for

this purpose. This occasion formally ended the funeral proceedings, and there-

after all dispersed to their normal occupations. Afterwards, when all the rela-

tives had gone home, the members of the immediate family began to discuss the

division of inheritance that would take place after the legal formalities had been

concluded, unless previous arrangements had been made.

During this visit, mementoes of the deceased were usually distributed among

the relatives present. Some of these items had considerable material value, e.g.

watches, jewellery and tools. Their passage generally followed the same lines as

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 141

would be followed in the inheritance of livestock, house and household goods,

that is, they were kept within the family of procreation of the deceased. Articles

such as photographs, sacred medals, prayer books, etc., were distributed more

widely, however, to relatives outside the elementary family, such as cousins,

nephews and nieces. In some of the European families, a few articles of the

dead person’s clothing were washed and stored in a drawer or chest kept in the

front room. These garments would never be worn again but were put away,

along with other souvenirs, and would be brought out only on rare occasions to

be shown to those who had been close to the deceased or to his descendants.

AFTER THE FUNERAL

Ritual actions to commemorate the dead in the period after the funeral

varied considerably, both in intensity and duration. Mourning, in the more pro-

longed sense, serves to stress the relationship between the living and the dead,

but it also marks a transitional period during which the mourners are partially

separated from society. As already noted, death was regarded as a normal event

and mourning was mostly restrained. Considerable grief was shown when the

deceased had been a vigorous person or an older child who had not yet fulfilled

his potential, whereas less was shown for an old person who, having begun to

lose his vigour, was often spoken of as ‘half-dood’ (‘half dead’), or for infants

and young children who, owing to their age, were regarded as not yet fully alive

in the sense of having reason and a conscious awareness of themselves as social

beings in the world. For persons not regarded as fully part of the community of

the living, no great emotional response to their deaths could be expected, and

the mourning observances differed accordingly.

This can be seen most directly expressed in the differences in the funeral

practices for children and adults. In the case of a deceased child, the godparents

provided the burial clothing and it was usual for them to assist the mother’s sis-

ters in laying out the body. The godparents took no part in the funeral arrange-

ments of a person over about 14 years of age. There was no formal wake,

except in the case of youngsters past the age of puberty, but parents, relatives

and godparents kept vigil by the body on the eve of the funeral. In some cases,

the parents bore all the costs of the funeral, in others they were assisted by

relatives or drew on their policy with a burial society. There was no service in

the cathedral for children. The coffin was raised in the usual way and taken to

the graveyard on the afternoon of the burial. Three or four male relatives pre-

pared the grave, and there were often only close relatives present for the inter-

ment which was, however, conducted by the priest. The relatives filled the

grave with earth. Sometimes some of the women sprinkled a handful of earth on

the coffin in the form of a cross. There were no prayers or other ceremonies

and the burial party left immediately after the grave had been filled. The sim-

plicity of these rituals can be ascribed to the different beliefs regarding the after-

life of the two age groups referred to above in our consideration of the period of

preparation for death.

The period of full mourning in the immediate family varied from seven to

nine days, though in the case of a spouse, it could last several months, in the

course of which both widows and widowers were expected to retreat from social

142 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

intercourse. During this time, members of the family of the deceased would

commonly visit the cathedral from time to time to pray for the dead, but the

practice of burning a candle at the same time had fallen away at the time of

fieldwork. Purificatory rites were slight and appeared to be restricted to the

dwelling. Some informants said that in times past, certain rites were performed

among Damara and Nama people, but no specific particulars of these could be

obtained. On the morning after the funeral, there was a general cleaning of the

house and its surroundings (‘uitskudding en skoonmaak van die werf’). Furnish-

ings, mats, clothing and all household goods, including pictures and ornaments,

were taken out and the floors thoroughly swept, especially in the corners, and

the walls and ceilings (if any) dusted off. All items touched and used by the

deceased were thoroughly cleaned. Afterwards all the rubbish on the ‘werf’

(yard) was taken away and dumped on the ash heap or buried and the ground

carefully swept, particularly where the furnishings from the house had been

piled, and lastly the surrounding border of fencing or stones was repaired.

According to informants, this was done so that all might see that outwardly life

had begun to return to normal.

On the final day of mourning, the immediate family usually offered a Mass

in the cathedral, and those families who could afford it invited relatives and

friends to a farewell meal for the soul of the dead, so that it would not bring

illnesses or bad dreams to those still living. The timing of this meal to coincide

with the service was not a strict requirement, but it was considered necessary to

have it within a few months of the funeral. For Baster informants, this occasion

would appear to have lost its significance in recent years and among many was

no longer considered a requirement for a proper conclusion to the mourning

period. Among Damara and Nama people, however, failure to hold the meal

was believed likely to bring misfortune—livestock might be lost or cultivated

lands might dry out. At this time, too, a simple unpainted wooden cross was

placed on the grave, though with little ceremony. In instances where, after the

mourning period, the closest survivors—the parents or the surviving

spouse—might remain unusually depressed, relatives would visit them

frequently and speak of things that they thought might give consolation. If this

did not improve their condition, the priest or nuns would be approached for

counselling, or a herbalist (‘bossiedokter’) who was known to have suitable

medicines against prolonged depression would be consulted.

Among Damara and Nama people, there was usually a minor occasion a few

weeks after the funeral, when the skins of the livestock slaughtered for the wake

were sold. Relatives and neighbours who had attended the funeral were invited

to ‘drink out’ (‘uitdrink’) the proceeds of the sale and any money left after the

funeral expenses had been met. This took the form of a simple meal consisting

of tinned food and bread with tea or coffee, but no liquor. The intention was that

there should be no gain to the family from the communal activity of the funeral.

‘Roudiens’ (mourning service, a term that should not be confused with the

similar colloquial term for a Mass for the Dead) was performed by those rela-

tives and friends who for some reason or another could not attend the funeral

and who might come to Pella only some months afterwards. The bereaved

family slaughtered a goat for a meal, to which neighbours and relatives in the

Reserve were invited. Before the meal, the visitors were taken by the chief

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 143

mourner to the grave, so that they could greet the deceased. This was done by

casting a handful of ground on the grave, accompanied by a verbal greeting and

a requiem aeternam. Among Damara and Nama families, on returning to the

house, the visitor had to stop at the edge of the ‘werf’ and be sprinkled with

water to ‘cool’ him before he could enter the precinct of the dwelling, and he

had to wash his hands before eating.

At the time of fieldwork, there were few long-term mourning customs.

There was no avoidance of the dead person’s name, but whenever it was men-

tioned, it was almost always qualified by ‘oorlede’ (late, e.g. late Piet Visagie,

or my late mother). There were no rules on the use of mourning symbols, a

custom that has practically disappeared, and the length of mourning periods.

Among the former European inhabitants of Pella, grown offspring of the

deceased are said not to have attended dances and other public entertainment for

some months to a year after the death. Upon the death of a close relative, the

whole household wore black clothes as a sign of full mourning. For a few weeks

after the funeral, first-degree male adult relatives usually wore a black tie, and

some continued to wear the black tie or a black band on the jacket-sleeve for up

to a year of half-mourning after the death. Some widows wore black or dark

garments for the rest of their lives (‘like Queen Victoria’, according to one

informant), but most laid aside mourning clothes a few months after their

spouse’s death. These customs no longer applied among the inhabitants of Pella

at the time of fieldwork, though some widows deliberately avoided wearing

brightly coloured headwear.

The slightness of long-term mourning customs does not imply that the dead

were quickly forgotten or that they no longer occupied a ritual status in the

structure of the community. Apart from the annual general commemoration on

All Souls’ Day, first-degree relatives of a dead person usually offered a Mass on

his behalf on the anniversaries of his death. Each Sunday, the priest announced

the names of deceased members of the community on whose behalf Masses

were to be offered during the coming week, or gave the names of the families

who had offered the Masses. Even if not mentioned by name, a dead person was

included in the general category of ‘the faithful departed’ for whom prayers

were Said at every service. In these prayers, God was asked to have mercy on

those souls still in Purgatory and to raise them into Heaven. In private prayers,

the deceased might be asked to intercede on behalf of the living. Although it

was considered that the souls of some people were condemned to Hell and

would thus be unable to make an intercession, the soul of a particular person

was not automatically assumed to be in Hell, regardless of the conditions under

which the individual lived and died. It was believed that any given individual

would eventually be received into the highest of the sacred spheres, the most

remote from earth, at which point the cycle that began with birth would be

completed.

COMMEMORATION OF THE DEAD

Long-term commemoration of the dead was focused on the cemetery. As a

detailed examination of the form of the cemetery, types of graves and grave

markers has been reserved for a future publication, only those features essential

for this account will be given here.

144 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

The cemetery is situated to the north of the mission and is surrounded by a

low concrete wall supporting a wire fence, through which access is obtained by

a single gateway ornamented with an arch topped by a cross and bearing the

inscription ‘Rus in Vrede’ (Rest in Peace). As with any form of territory, the

cemetery has borders, an entrance, paths and markers, including a large com-

munal cross flanked by trees (a combination of the symbols of the Christian

cross standing on Calvary, the midpoint of the earth that is also believed to have

been occupied by the fatal tree of Eden, and the pagan European image of the

tree at the centre of the world) that establish significant angles and middle-points

similar to those found in houses and yards and in the broader pattern of settle-

ment in the village and Reserve. There are relatively few identifiable old graves

in the cemetery, the oldest dated 1876 being that of a pioneer European colon-

ist, though the form of a number of unmarked graves indicates that they date

back to the period of effective Rhenish mission work at Pella (1840-1868). An

examination of the death registers kept by the Catholic missionaries has also

indicated that not all burials took place there for, as noted elsewhere above,

only in the twentieth century were the dead brought over long distances to be

buried in the only Christian burial place in the area and thus laid to rest in

consecrated ground.

As a feature of the cultural landscape, the cemetery is itself a type of land-

scape that can be examined for its utilitarian, religious and aesthetic qualities

(Tuan 1979: 94). It is essentially an assemblage of personal memorials that

through time takes on a particular historical effect, evoked by the form and

ornamentation of the graves and the nature of the grave markers (Lowenthal

1979: 123). The forms of graves in the cemetery range from those that are little

more than an unmarked mound of earth, sometimes covered with limestone

pebbles, to those that are carefully constructed masonry tombs. Grave markers

range from a variety of forms of crosses, posts, foot-posts and tablets to tomb-

stones in contemporary urban styles, along with a wide range of supplementary

signs and decorations in the form of artificial flower tributes, ornaments and

everyday items familiar to the deceased. Many graves are ornamented with

religious objects such as old crucifixes and Rosary beads, or with other objects

that were used by the person while still alive, including crockery and, on the

graves of infants, babies’ bottles. Nama and Damara people sometimes decor-

ated the graves of their dead with Patella shells; the reason for this was

unknown, but one informant suggested that the shells symbolically held people

down—from the grip of the limpet on the rock (cf. Carstens 1966: 178).

Although not intended either by those who designed the cemetery or those who

buried their dead there, through the combination of all these features, the

cemetery has ultimately become both a relic and a landscape of the past and in

this way adds to a general awareness of the past among the living.

This process can be perceived most clearly in the spatial layout of the

cemetery created by the distribution of the graves which, despite changes

through time, has been primarily shaped according to given patterns of social

differentiation in Pella. The graves of former missionaries occupy a dominant

position in the centre of the cemetery, constructed according to a uniform style

and orientated along the line of the cathedral in relation to the protective crosses

on the surrounding mountains, and are thus surrounded by the graves of their

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 145

converts and parishioners. Among the latter, however, death has never been

seen as the great leveller. Originally the faithful departed were buried in

chronological order within defined areas in the cemetery and, although this

ordering has been distorted subsequently by the filling in of spaces among the

earlier graves, two significant separations remain visible. The first is that the

graves of European colonists were always kept separate from those of other

local people in the cemetery, even in the nineteenth century, and the second,

less obvious to a casual observer, is that whereas Protestants have always been

buried beside Catholics as good Christians, the nineteenth-century graves of

people called ‘Bushmen’, who were said by informants to have been regarded as

irredeemable heathens and vermin by the other inhabitants of Pella, were sited

outside the boundaries of the cemetery.

Most of the European graves were clustered on the eastern side of the

cemetery, the side that is conceptually closest to the Holy Land, whereas the

common people lay in the west with the graves of missionaries between the two

groups. This clustering occurred owing to the fact that it was considered that

each conjugal or elementary European family should have its own plot and be

situated near other kin, and friends, if possible. Ideally, parents and unmarried

offspring were buried together, but each one’s grave would have its own head-

stone or cross, however modest. A husband and wife should be laid to rest side

by side. Their married sons should be buried in their own plots; their married

daughters in the plots of their husbands. This arrangement has not always been

realized in practice. There was a tendency among some families, said by

informants to have been a survival from what were called the ‘patriarchal’ days,

to gather deceased relatives into a patrilineal plot. At the time of fieldwork,

however, allowing for a few exceptions of this nature, it was still the ideal that

the elementary or conjugal family of parents and unmarried offspring should

share a group of graves segregated from other elementary families, just as it is

the ideal today among the living for household membership to be based on

elementary family relationships.

A formal division of the cemetery into ‘White’ and ‘Coloured’ areas through

the erection of walls and fences took place during renovations in 1962, largely

on the initiative of the European residents who themselves bore the costs and

did much of the work. The irony of this acceptance of an officially imposed

racial classification with all its implications of residential separation is that,

according to a member of one of the European families who had been living in

Pella at that time, it was carried out with the aim of winning the sympathy of the

central government for the claims of the European inhabitants to the right to live

in Pella, whereas, as already noted above, it was the European inhabitants them-

selves who were eventually to suffer the most under the application of the

‘apartheid’ policy to Pella in 1974. By 1989, the division had been abandoned

and recent burials of local people have been steadily using up the available

space in the ‘White’ area since that time, for although the area of the cemetery

was doubled in size in 1988, the local authority has decreed that all the existing

spaces have to be filled before the new section can be taken into use. The fences

that divided the cemetery have not been removed, however, and thus, long after

the departure of the last European residents, the visible separation between the

graves of those classified ‘White’ and those classified ‘Coloured’ remains as a

146 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

reminder to the present inhabitants of the historical basis of their currently

uncontested occupation of the Reserve.

Owing to a widespread belief in ghosts, most people were reluctant to visit

the cemetery, especially after dark, and they seldom visited graves once they

had been constructed. Some aspects of beliefs about the dead have already been

mentioned. The souls of the dead were believed to be dwelling, roaming, or

wandering in and around the cemetery, where people walking alone at night

might see them, though occasionally ghosts could be seen even in daylight. The

appearance and actions of a ghost might terrify passersby and domestic animals,

but sometimes it was not identified as an apparition as such until later

(especially in the case of children before they had spoken to adults about what

they had seen). Only over a period of several days before All Saints’ and All

Souls’ days, would volunteers from among the church cleaners and school

children clear away weeds and windborne litter from the entire graveyard, and

then some people would tidy the graves they were planning to visit during the

ceremony marking All Souls’ Day.

The major annual communal mourning ceremony was on All Souls’ Day,

the 2nd of November, following the festival of All Saints’ Day on the Ist of

November. The marking of All Souls’ Day is based on the doctrine that souls,

which at death are not sufficiently purified to be fit for the Beatific Vision, may

be helped by the prayers of the faithful here on earth. Though known colloqui-

ally as ‘Voorvadersdag’ (‘Forefathers’ Day’) and regarded as a day for the com-

memoration of all deceased, in reality the faithful departed, whom the living

named in their prayers on this day in the cathedral and in the cemetery, were

limited to dead relatives within the second and third ascending generations. It

was considered a sacred time, when the living claimed to feel the presence of

the deceased, though this was not expressed through material offerings or pro-

pitiations to the dead either in the cathedral or in the cemetery, practices which

among Europeans embody beliefs of pagan origin that are of great antiquity

(Matousek 1990). In the period of the novena carried out by the religious before

All Saints’ Day, people might go to the cathedral to pray for the dead and to say

the Rosary. According to Catholic doctrine, devout recitation of the Rosary

could obtain a remission, in whole or in part, of the temporal punishment due to

sin. Such an indulgence, plenary or partial, was a means of lessening the satis-

faction that must be made for sins, even after they have been forgiven, in the

state of Purgatory. At this time in the liturgical calendar in particular, some of

the indulgences gained in this way could be offered up for the souls in Purga-

tory, asking God to relieve their sufferings.

On All Souls’ Eve (1 November), a Mass for the Dead was celebrated in the

cathedral, and another Mass was held in the morning of the 2nd, after which, at

about 11 a.m., the priest, attended by assistants bearing a crucifix and holy

water, led an organized procession to the graveyard. If this was a weekday,

only women, pensioners and children attended. After leading all in prayers and

five decades of the Rosary dedicated to the dead at the large communal cross

(‘doodskruis’) in the cemetery, the priest proceeded around the graveyard and,

with one assistant, sprinkled graves at random with holy water, while the people

remained grouped at the cross. After completing his circuit he left and the

people moved apart to visit the graves of their dead. In most cases the graves

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 147

were greeted with the casting of earth and a requiem aeternam. After this the

family might sit or stand around and chat, with little evidence of sorrow, though

the day was said to be ‘sad’. After perhaps an hour of visiting the various

graves of family and friends, the people left informally; it was considered that

with the Mass and this ceremony, they had completed their annual obligation to

the deceased.

This annual visit to the cemetery can also, however, be seen to be important

in reinforcing a sense of continuity among the living. For them, the inscriptions

on the tombstones evoked a meaningful chronology, for many of the things that

had happened during the years, marked on the gravestones and representing

lifetimes, would be known to the viewers who might have heard others talk of

them or have experienced some of them themselves. Similar feelings were

aroused even among those whose relatives lay in unmarked graves, for knowl-

edge of the identities of those buried without inscribed grave markers was

passed on through the generations. Although graves, especially those of parents,

might awake in the viewers an awareness of being alone, they were also

strongly reminded there that, surrounded by the hills of home, they were both

victors and victims of the past in the graves around them.

DISCUSSION

In analysing funerals and mourning practices, two important aspects of the

relation between ritual and social organization have always been emphasized by

anthropologists: the contribution of ritual activities to the maintenance of social

relations; and the expression and regeneration of social relations and values in

symbolic form. Both of these aspects will be treated here, and some attention

will also be given to the part played by beliefs and practices associated with

death in facilitating personal adjustment to the crisis of death, though the inten-

tion here is to pursue the cultural significance, rather than the purely psycho-

logical implications, of beliefs and practices associated with death for people

living at Pella.

In discussions with informants, it was clear that they did not regard death as

simply a sudden, seemingly arbitrary banishment into a void, but rather as a

major turning-point in the human cycle. This view of death was also implied in

the ways in which the series of activities associated with a death were both

enacted and phased. As already noted, the passage of a person from this world

into the next began even before death itself happened. Except in cases where

death was sudden and unexpected, an individual would have anticipated and pre-

pared for his departure, drawing on the support of the priest, other religious,

relatives, neighbours, and fellow-members of the congregation. The moment

of death itself was not considered to indicate the complete separation of the

deceased person from his earthly milieu, for other well-defined stages had to be

passed through before there was a final and complete fusion with the other

world. In this aspect, mourning ritual at Pella can be seen to conform to the

ideal type of rites de passage as formulated by Van Gennep (1909).

Three separate ritual stages can be distinguished. Firstly, there was the

period of separation, between the time of death and the end of the wake while

the body was at home and on display; then followed the period of liminality or

148 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

transition, initiated by the closing of the coffin, during which the body lay

unattended in the cathedral; and this was followed by the phase of reincor-

poration, after the funeral proper, during which the recently deceased person,

now below the ground, was commemorated, principally through being men-

tioned in Masses. At the completion of each stage, the dead person was

removed a further step from this world, though a tenuous connection with the

living was maintained, perhaps for generations, through prayer, the keeping of

mementoes, and visits by descendants to graves. Furthermore, in the course of

the rites of transition, the dead person was transformed from an ‘actor’ into an

‘object’—the soul, symbolized in material terms by the grave mound—that

enabled him to continue to occupy a ritual status in the social system of Pella.

Thus, in contemplating his own demise, a person was assured of ritual support

both in preparation for death and in his passage from Purgatory into Heaven,

and he was furthermore assured of an indefinite extension of his social identity

on earth.

The stage of closing and raising the coffin, and then placing it as a kind of

‘lesser altar’ in front of the high altar in the cathedral, may be seen as a critical

point in the liminal transformation of a deceased individual into a ritual object.

Not only was the individual person lost to sight for ever on the closing of the

coffin, but it was at this point that the coffin became the focal point of formal

religious rituals performed on a series of profoundly significant spatial

localities, first in the home, then inside the cathedral, and lastly in the cemetery.

The ritual process of completing the removal of the individual from the profane

to the sacred sphere was structured by the Ordinary of the Funeral Mass, of

which the central feature was the contrasting of the immortality of God with the

mortality that lay before the high altar. This containment of the temporal and

worldly within the eternal was symbolized by the temporary placing of the

coffin on the sacred axis of the cathedral at the sanctuary steps.

This axial point is the centre of the cruciform plan of the cathedral: a line

runs from north to south from the high altar down the line of the nave to the

door, whereas another runs from east to west between the altars in the two side

chapels, dedicated respectively to the Blessed Virgin and St Joseph. Dictated by

the positions of the high altar and the minor altars and marked at their

extremities by stars of red and white stained glass set in round windows, these

lines intersect on a spot directly in front of the sanctuary steps where the priest

comes to recite prayers or to read the Gospels; this is also where the living

receive communion, where the bride and bridegroom stand during the marriage

ceremony, where children are confirmed, and where the banners of church-

related lay groups are blessed. In the days when the Church controlled the secu-

lar administration of Pella, this was where the Bishop or the priest stood to

make announcements about the affairs of the Mission Farm and the village. In

the past, before the installation of fluorescent lights on the walls, the importance

of this point was emphasized by a lamp that hung suspended from the ceiling

above it. This point is, furthermore, flanked by tombs. Three prelates and a

priest are buried in the side chapels: the graves of the first, third and fourth

bishops lie orientated from west to east on the right of the high altar in the

chapel of the Blessed Virgin, whereas the grave of the founding priest who built

the cathedral is on the left of the high altar, and orientated from east to west in

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 149

the chapel of St Joseph. Thus buried in a holy place, they can participate in all

the services celebrated in the cathedral.

The axis of the cathedral is in turn the axial point for a series of crosses,

clearly recognized and articulated by the missionaries and their parishioners,

that guard the integrity of the mission, the cemetery, the village and the Reserve

against evil deriving from the Devil and sorcery. Constituted a sacred place in

terms of Canon Law (Catholic Church 1983: 213), the cathedral is a central

place within the pattern of settlement in the village, itself practically in the

centre of the Reserve territory, whereas the village and the Reserve are com-

ponents of a wider landscape infused with symbolic significances represented on

the ground by both visible and invisible boundaries that shape social relations.

Boundaries are central to this idea of spatial integrity. The concept of territory

involved here includes several elements: the village (a group of people who

consider themselves related, established in a single living situation, and making

use of a communal territory, i.e. the Reserve), the household (which includes

the same elements) and the Reserve itself. The material expression of the

spiritual unit formed by each is symbolized by the Cross. In the home, this is

represented by the crucifix, which is present in all Catholic homes to defend the

domestic group, its livestock and property. For the village, it is the position of

the cathedral, edified and consecrated on a chosen site, which is at the centre of

a conceptual cross, formed by three iron and wood crosses (symbolizing the

crosses of Jesus and the two thieves) mounted on the summits of the surround-

ing mountains, and rooted in the Annakop hill 15 kilometres to the south of the

mission. The cemetery shares this centrality with the cathedral in the broad

figure of the cross in the landscape. These crosses installed on the mountain-

tops protect the integrity of the territory, just as beacons raised on high points

mark out the physical boundaries, and guard the various sources of water,

especially the springs of running water, from ill-disposed spirits so that the

living can obtain water. Another similar cross, also rooted at Annakop and

centred on the cathedral, reaches north through the mission to the now-

abandoned Pella-Orange Chapel at Rooipad (the irrigation farm belonging to the

mission situated on the south bank of the Orange River), and its east-west axis

links the T’Kouroes and Brakkie hamlets with the T’Nougab and Eenriet/Lelik-

pad complex of hamlets, all places in the Reserve that had formerly had sub-

stantial populations and at which the missionaries had regularly celebrated

Masses.

Pella itself is also conceived to be at the centre of an integral part of greater

crosses outside the Reserve territory. Pella is seen as the middle point of a cross

rooted in St Mary’s Cathedral in Cape Town (from where the Namaqualand

mission originated), with the south-north axis running from Cape Town to Heir-

achabis (the first Roman Catholic mission in Great Namaqualand) and west-east

from Matjieskloof (the first site of Catholic missionary activity in Namaqualand)

to Keimoes (the residence of the Bishop of the Diocese of Keimoes-Upington,

formerly the Orange River), in this way linking clusterings of settlements sig-

nificant in the history of Pella. The Cape is also seen as the root of a greater

cross that runs through Rome to Aachen in Germany (marking the association

with the Holy Roman Empire) and east-west from Troyes (the headquarters of

the Oblates of St Francis de Sales) in France to Jerusalem (the Holy City).

150 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

Lastly, this is part of a global cross which links the four great continents, Africa

and Europe, the Americas and Asia, and which is centred on Jerusalem.

Thus, by being placed on the axis of the cathedral, the coffin of the deceased

was for a time at the centre of the symbolic universe of Pella and, on being

buried in the cemetery at the end of the liminal stage, could be assured of

protection until the Day of Judgement.

For the bereaved relatives, the process of mourning constituted a ritual that

served to channel the emotions of all concerned into a pattern that enabled them

to come to terms with the fact of death by passing through a clearly defined

series of public and semi-public rites that provided socially accepted ways of

adjusting to a difficult situation. Writing in the fifth century AD, St Augustine

(1984: 21) reminded his readers that ‘. . . such things as a decent funeral and a

proper burial, with its procession of mourners, are a consolation to the living

rather than a help to the departed’. As Firth (1951: 63) expressed it, ‘. . . the

funeral ritual gives a social backing to their [i.e. the relatives’] attempts at

adjustment, provides them with a cathartic mechanism for a public display of

grief, and sets a period to their mourning. In essence, the community says to the

relatives: “. . . Wail for him in one final outburst, before us all. We expect it of

you, and we demand it of you. Then tomorrow you will return to a normal

social existence”’. This was expressed most clearly in the material and ritual

support of a wide range of community members at the crucial time between the

death and the funeral, and was symbolized most obviously in the wearing of

black or dark clothing by all the mourners at the funeral service itself, even

though not all people in the community suffered the same degree of grief. There

was no suggestion of hypocrisy in this display, for by wearing black they were

emphasizing their respect for the dead and showing their sympathy with the

sufferings of the bereaved and their desire to share in their sorrow as fellow

community members.

Mourning and burial rituals were among the most frequent occasions when

members of the community were drawn together in a common forum where

expression could be given to their sense of unity and a re-affirmation of the

values upon which that unity is based could be made publicly. An adult resident

of Pella might participate in 10 to 15 or more wakes and funerals in a year, and

this undoubtedly contributed greatly to the attitude towards death as a familiar

and inherent part of the whole round of life in Pella. This view of death as a

‘normal’ event is evident in the way sacred and secular elements were merged

in the series of rituals. Mourning and burial comprised a sequence of ‘religious’

events: the priest was present and performed specific tasks during the dying

moments; he might be present at the closing of the coffin; he received the body

at the door of the cathedral, officiated at the Funeral Mass and at the burial

itself; the arrangements of the room where the body lay in the house of death

were rich in religious connotations, and the mourners present spontaneously

offered prayers and made other religious gestures. Amid these forms and acts of

sanctity, however, the mourners spoke freely about everyday topics such as

mining and sheep, gossiped and took care to ensure that there was an adequate

supply of liquor and food. The incongruity of this is only superficial, for the

rites that accompany a death are not intended simply to mirror inward emotions;

they exist to express proper attitudes and to conduct the bereaved through a

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 151

difficult time. Frequent attendance at these rites not only created a familiarity

with death, but also strengthened an individual awareness of being part of the

community through the medium of a shared emotional experience of a commu-

nal ritual and thus reinforced feelings of group loyalty. The fact that people

were willing to contribute and participate uninvited (no invitations were

expected or sent out to visit the bereaved, or to attend wakes or funerals) in

mourning activities, that relatives, neighbours and fellow-residents in the

Reserve were prepared to give of their time and material goods and to abandon

certain forms of work and play when one of their number died, takes for

granted the existence of strong sentiments of unity and solidarity. Most signifi-

cantly, however, as shown above, this participation transcended factional

divisions and friction in the community to produce a cultural unity despite the

perceived persistence of seemingly unchanging ethnic and class differences.

There is further evidence of communal solidarity in the smooth running and

spontaneity with which the series of ritual and practical activities were executed,

some of which involved at times several hundred people and needed a degree of

co-ordination that could only be achieved through an ongoing consensus and

shared understanding. Apart from the need for drawing on the financial support

available from burial societies, there was no great dependence on a formal

organization of individuals ‘acting in office’ to deal with death as there is in

most of urban society in South Africa; only in the case of the funeral of the last

European mayor (whose remains had had to be brought to Pella after his death

in 1979 in an urban area near Cape Town to which he had moved five years

previously) was a professional undertaker hired to make the various arrange-

ments and supply a high-quality coffin, a fashionable hearse and other equip-

ment unavailable locally. With the exception of the priest, who acted in a formal

sacred office, the process in the majority of cases was handled by individuals

performing roles in the informal system of kinship and community relations.

While the contribution of mourning practices to the unity of the community

is readily discernible, the ways in which the series of events connected with

death described above reveal the basic alignments and patterns of differentiation

within the community are less obvious. As already shown, not all members of

the community were involved to the same extent in the activities associated with

any given death. The ‘specialized’ roles performed by individuals—such as the

priest and his assistant, those who laid out bodies, grave-diggers, etc.—will not

be considered here, but only the observances expected of different groupings in

the community.

The most intense involvement was expected of the members of those

elementary families most closely related to the deceased: spouse, children and

their families; parents, own siblings, grandparents, parents’ siblings and their

families; spouse’s parents and siblings and the families of the latter. These rela-

tives were always the first to be notified of a death and the first to offer aid and

be in constant attendance. Relatives descended from the siblings of grandparents

and close friends of the deceased were also committed to more than just visiting

the deceased and the bereaved family, and adult males from these categories

were expected to take an active part in the wake. More remote relatives were

regarded as more or less equivalent to neighbours: it was considered appropri-

ate for them to visit during the ‘bo-grond’ period between the death and the

152 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

funeral proper, and to take part in the closing of the coffin and perhaps also the

transfer of the body to the cathedral. Finally, all adults who were not indisposed

and who were in the village at the time were considered to be under a social

obligation to take part in the funeral, even though they might have had no

special links with the deceased. It was this expectation, in which religious ties

and macro-community obligations overrode factionalism, that made it possible

for Basters and Damaras to attend one another’s funerals, though they

infrequently attended one another’s wakes as this would have reflected a degree

of familiarity not achieved, or desired, in everyday life.

These varying degrees of commitment to render support and to active par-

ticipation in the process of coping with a death, taking in all from the closest

relatives to other Reserve-dwellers, were similar to the priority of commitment

to mutual aid and sociability in other spheres of Reserve and village life. Care

of the old and infirm, for example, rested first upon the family of procreation

(offspring) and then upon that of orientation (siblings), but if an arrangement

involving these was impossible, third-degree relatives were expected to take on

this responsibility. If an old person lived alone without kin of these degrees, it

was expected that neighbours and relatives even more remote than those men-

tioned should give assistance. It was only when none of these arrangements

worked satisfactorily, that the ‘community’, represented by the priest, a local

government officer, members of the local authority, or the district surgeon,

would take steps to arrange for the old person to receive the required care, if

necessary through removal to an old-age home. Similar patterns of commitment

to mutual aid and sociability were also observed in farmwork, in attending and

contributing to weddings, and in exchanges of visits at the New Year or Easter.

A further important aspect of Reserve society revealed in the mourning

ritual is a clear differentiation according to sex, such as in the performance of

tasks, the positions taken up by participants in the funeral procession and at the

graveside, and so on. Of these, the aspect with the most far-reaching impli-

cations is the apparently random distribution of men in the funeral procession

compared with the distribution of women, which tended to follow kinship align-

ments. This indicates that men had a wider range of interaction than women,

and that the sexes orientated themselves differently towards patterns of kinship.

This is confirmed by examinations of other areas of interaction. In the case of

women, it was noted that their daily interaction was limited to their kinsfolk and

immediate neighbours to a greater extent than among men. Informal visiting

exchanges tended to occur most frequently between adult sisters, owing to

proximities in residence created by selective marriage patterns among the rela-

tively few large families of similar class and cultural backgrounds located in

particular neighbourhoods in the village. Visiting among men, on the other

hand, was undertaken on a broader scale and included both kinsfolk and those

with whom they worked, though interaction with the latter was more strongly

marked among those involved in the mines than among farmers. It was noted

that women tended to have a narrower circle of acquaintances than men, who

had grown up together in neighbourhood gangs, whereas girls would have

remained around the home under the control of their parents. Evidence from

studies (pers. obs.) of domestic disputes and patterns of sociability in selected

families also indicated that solidarity among sisters was stronger than among

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 153

brothers. On the other hand, male solidarity in the community as a whole was

stronger than female solidarity, as shown in the fact that it was not uncommon

for men to associate with the husbands and brothers of women whom their own

wives and sisters deliberately avoided.

Among other forms of differentiation expressed in mourning procedures is

that based on religious affiliation. Catholics and Protestants paid respect to one

another’s dead by visiting and attending wakes and funerals, thus confirming the

friendly nature of relations between the two groups but there was some evidence

of a social barrier between them; this was to be found in the mutual avoidance

of attending one another’s religious services and in differing patterns of behav-

iour when praying in common at wakes and funerals. This barrier was not trans-

ferred into everyday life except in regard to marriage, where it was expected

either that one or other of the partners would join the faith of the spouse or that

their children would be brought up in the faith selected by agreement between

their parents until they were of an age to decide on their religious affiliation for

themselves.

Social status, as a principle ordering social relations in the community,

played a comparatively minor part in the patterns of behaviour observed at

funerals in Pella. There were distinctions in the community according to which

social rank and standards were evaluated, such as those of teachers and well-off

stock-farmers, and these can be regarded as signs of an internal positioning of

all in the community within the structure of broader classes in relation to the

population of Namaqualand, but there was no distinct structure of social status

groups. For this reason, social status was unimportant in determining

positioning in events and in the allocation of roles for the various ritual

activities, though at funerals the type and cost of the coffin and its fittings, the

supply of food and drink, the use of cars, etc., and afterwards the type of grave

markers, would be remarked on as being ‘typical’ of this or that class of person.

Most Pella men espoused egalitarian attitudes towards community relations,

though among women this was less often the case owing to the differences in

upbringing and interaction in everyday life; the fact that a teacher or official of

the highest rank could be placed together with a labourer in bearing or

following a coffin was often cited to support their view that their community

was ‘democratic’, or was so as long as the accepted rules of exclusion of people

defined as outsiders were followed, socially in the case of those living in the

Reserve, and legally in the case of strangers from outside the Reserve.

Where these rules of exclusion could be seen in operation was in relations

between members of the various ethnic groupings in Pella. The differentiation

between Basters and Damaras on the grounds of origin and race (Klinghardt

1978, 1982) was particularly manifested in the formation of separate groups

when they attended one another’s funerals and came to stand around the grave.

As noted above (see p. 123), this came about in that the barrier between

members of the different groups in the social structure of the Reserve has been

maintained through the discouragement of intermarriage, thus preventing the

potential development of kinship bonds between them, and this was reflected

unconsciously when the participants grouped themselves by families. The most

striking example of ethnic exclusivity, however, was that afforded by the pattern

of differentiation that occurred at the funeral of the last European mayor of

154 ANNALS OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM

Pella. A multiplicity of historical factors (alluded to in various places above)

was at work in shaping the way the people responded to the tension created by

the funeral of this “White’, high-status, former resident of Pella (whose power

in the community had been based on both his official role—outranked only by

the Bishop and resident priests—and his position as a merchant able to control

the lives of his clients in the Reserve through credit facilities). These responses

were channelled, however, according to mutually accepted rules of separation,

rules through which all, directly and indirectly, were forced to give legitimacy

to the official status and racial structure of South African society, which had

been intensified and legally sanctioned after 1948.

Although the analysis of mortuary rituals practised in the community of

Pella has provided enough material to enable the setting out of the major charac-

teristics of social structure and organization in Pella, the different types of soli-

darity to be found there, and the main foci of differentiation such as kinship, age

and sex, religious and ethnic affiliations, it has given no indications as to politi-

cal affiliations in the community, nor has it been possible to spell out in

symbolic form the structures of clique alliances and of informal associations.

Although it may be argued in theoretical terms that any series of rituals will

provide an outside observer with insight into the sentiments and social organiz-

ation of the group performing them through time, this study has shown that not

all facets of social organization will necessarily be symbolically represented in

any given ritual. This implies that Carstens’ theory of ‘information through

symbolism’ may provide only partial insights into the codes of culture and

behaviour through time as well as at a particular period of time (1975: 93).

This study has further revealed some points of considerable interest in the

cultural formation of the community at Pella, on the basis of which Barnard’s

suggestion that the religious beliefs of ‘Cape Coloured’ people in Namaqualand

reflect the culture of their ‘Khoekhoe’ forebears (Barnard 1992: 198) can be

tested. Perhaps the most striking of these is the essentially European origin of

most of the cultural traits and forms observed in connection with formal religion

and mortuary rites, and the extremely small number of traits of indigenous

Nama provenance, the expression of the latter taking the form merely of details

within a larger framework, as can be seen for example in the ‘striping’ of the

participants in Damara wakes. A parallel situation exists regarding the material

expression of culture (Klinghardt 1990); clothing, tools, most forms of dwell-

ings, political and ceremonial organization all reflect European patterns, and

this is also true of farming techniques, some of which may be based on indigen-

ous patterns but which are known to have been formalized by Baster and

European farmers who were reliant on the skills of Nama shepherds. Despite

the European origins of these cultural elements, the cultural pattern is obviously

different if compared with the contemporary European-orientated cultural

patterns that predominate among the majority of people in South Africa who

were formerly classified as ‘Coloured’, but it should not be taken to represent a

‘survival’ of nineteenth-century conditions and practices in Namaqualand any

more than Pella should be regarded as representative of similarly sized village

communities in the region. The uniqueness of the cultural pattern lies in the

reworking of its European ideas and materials together with those of indigenous

origin. Despite the obvious influence of missionaries and European colonists,

MORTUARY RITUALS IN PELLA 155

this reworking may be due as much to the patterning influence of indigenous

ideas as a spontaneous evolution in the partial isolation of the late nineteenth

century, but this is a matter for further investigation. A comparison of the

cultural patterns of Pella with those of Steinkopf, even allowing for the con-

siderable elapse of time separating the two sets of ethnographic data, would

show that the two communities share some common customs and rites, particu-

larly in respect of the process of preparation for death and of practices connec-

ted with wakes and relating to graves (cf. Carstens 1966), but there are also

many differences, including the greater formality and apparent uniformity in

beliefs and practices connected with death and the performance of funerary rites

in Pella as opposed to Steinkopf. This aspect, which probably reflects differ-

ences between Catholic and Protestant beliefs and structures of church govern-

ment, requires further comparative research in Steinkopf, however, and will be

treated in a future publication on forms of cemeteries in Namaqualand. The

examination of cultural patterns has shown, however, that hegemonic processes

of acculturation and assimilation through internalization of the values and

practices of the dominant social ideology have proceeded so far that in cultural

terms the community, in common with those formed by Reserve-dwellers

elsewhere in Namaqualand, can be recognized as being part of a wider synthetic

cultural system brought into being by the historical processes that have given

form to the current shape of South African society.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The financial assistance of the Institute for Research Development of the

Human Sciences Research Council and of the South African Museum towards

this research is gratefully acknowledged. Opinions expressed or conclusions

reached are those of the author and should not be regarded as representative of

those of the Institute for Research Development, the Human Sciences Research

Council, or the Council of the South African Museum.

The author is indebted to the inhabitants of Pella for their co-operation and

hospitality during his numerous visits to their community, but it is impossible to

single out individual informants in the interests of their anonymity.

The generous hospitality and assistance of the personnel of the Roman

Catholic Mission at Pella are gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks are due to

Fr. M. Malery, Sr. Léonie de Gonzaque and the late Sr. Theresé-Bernard

Thinemann.

Numerous people outside the Pella Reserve also contributed to this research,

but particular thanks are due to the Bishop of Keimoes-Upington, the Right

Revd J. Minder, Dr O. van Schalkwyk, Dr P. Davison, Ms L. Hooper and

Mr J. Herridge.

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: Eon

ea Pye

\

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Family Nuculanidae

Nuculana (Lembulus) bicuspidata (Gould, 1845)

Figs 14-15A

Nucula (Leda) bicuspidata Gould, 1845: 37.

Leda plicifera A. Adams, 1856: 50.

Laeda bicuspidata Hanley, 1859: 118, pl. 228 (fig. 73). Sowerby, 1871: pl. 2 (fig. 8a—b).

Nucula largillierti Philippi, 1861: 87.

Leda bicuspidata: Nicklés, 1950: 163, fig. 301; 1955: 110. Barnard, 1964: 234, figs 8-9.

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"TANNIN

3 9088 01206 7146

G. P. KLINGHARDT

DEATH IN PELLA:

MORTUARY RITUALS IN

A NAMAQUALAND RESERVE,

1978-1989