Reconciliation

Babemba mask

From Storycatcher, by Christina Baldwin:

I have read the story of a tribe in southern Africa called the Babemba in which a person doing something wrong, something that destroys the delicate social net, brings all the work in the village to a halt. The people gather around the “offender” and one by one they begin to recite everything he has done right in his life: every good deed, thoughtful behavior, act of social responsibility. These things have to be true about the person, and spoken honestly, but the time-honored consequence of misbehavior is to appreciate the person back into the better part of himself. The person is given the chance to remember who he is and why he is important to the village.

I want to live under such a practice of compassion. When I forget my place, when I lash out with some private wounding in a public way, I want to be remembered back into alignment with my self and my purpose. I want to live with the possibility for reconciliation. When someone around me is thoughtless or cruel, I want to be given the chance to respond with a ritual that creates the possibility of reconciliation.

I think that what I most regret in my life is the lack of reconciliation with the three friends who stopped speaking to me. As I’ve said before, the cruelest thing one can do to me is to cut off communication, and this is why. When there is no communication, there is no chance for reconciliation. These were all people I had a long history of friendship with, I could recite pages and pages of all the good things they had done for me, and I still love them dearly. To have lost them from my life was cruel, needless and hurtful in ways they will never understand or appreciate. “To lose a friend is to lose worlds” I once read, and it is true for me. I lost their worlds, their viewpoints that so often straightened out my own, their perceptions and perspectives on life that I respected and needed so much.

The name Babemba means “the people of the lake.” The 60,000 Bemba settled mostly in northeast of Zambia, but also in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They share a number of traits with their neighbors on the shores of Lake Tanganyika: the Lega, the Buyu, and the Binji. The territory surrounding them is covered with forests, plateaus, and wooden savannas traversed by rivers. The Bemba have the reputation of being a proud, hard people who learned the art of the hunt and the harvesting of honey. The ibulu iya alunga (“the protector of honey”) mask, used in the male alunga (kalunga) society, is unique in form. It is worn on the head like a helmet and sometimes ends at the top in a huge crest of feathers and porcupine quills. It represents a powerful bush spirit. Kept in a sacred cave, the mask is taken into the bush during the secret initiation of new members. The alunga association was in charge of the cult of the hunt, as well as social order and public dances. The wearer of the mask, hidden completely under a fiber costume, would be a member of high rank who knew the dances and the manner of speaking and singing in a guttural voice.