I have yet to attend a kurova guva ceremony. Researching and writing this reminded me of my first visit to my grandmother’s village after my grandfather’s death. I was home for my wedding. My soon to be husband and I were driven to the village by my aunt. Soon after arriving, my aunt went into the house and my grandmother, temporarily out of view of her very Christian daughter, pulled me from admiring her lemon tree to the graves which were at the other end of the garden.
I had never paid much attention to the graves, I knew I was related to the people buried there, but most of them had died before I was born. My grandmother gave me some pebbles and made me kneel at the head of one of the newer graves; I knew it was my grandfather’s. She instructed me to throw one pebble on his grave. I did.
Now, tell him who you are she said, annoyed as if I should know what I was doing.
I was quiet not wanting to say the wrong thing and also feeling a bit silly talking to a grave. She hissed at me and pointed at the grave,
“Say, Sekuru, it’s your granddaughter here, Mavhu. I came to see where you were buried and I have also brought my new husband.”
She nodded for me to throw the second pebble and try again. As soon as I said his name, Sekuru, everything that he was came back to me. His grey knitted vests under his jacket, the small black feather with white spots tucked into the band of his hat, the way his laughter went breathy and noiseless when he was really amused. Right then the word ancestor was not distant or even separate from me. The five minute ritual prescribed by my grandmother gave him back to me. He was my grandfather, my mother’s father. For the first time I think I really understood the importance of Shona people’s relationships to their ancestors. Because he was, I am. Our family was central to all that we did and were not divided by death.
The struggle between our own cosmology and a foreign religion began long before I was born. Like other Africans on the continent and in those taken into the Diaspora, we found ways to hide some of our most important rituals in Christianity. A goat is always slaughtered at a wedding but we say it is to feed those gathered; there is supposedly no spiritual significance. The Mbende dance performed by young men and women at the full moon celebrating fertility and family was renamed Jerusarema (Jerusalem) so it could continue to be performed in the open. The kurova guva ritual performed a year after death became the unveiling of the tombstone or memorial ceremony. Some Zimbabwean families celebrate the Christian version of our ceremonies; some still practice the traditional. We don’t seem to disagree that we should somehow honor or acknowledge our own customs but I suspect most families, like mine, are constantly divided over what should be done and how.
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