Image credit: Ignatius Mokone, The Good Shepherd series.

Reflection: Shepherds piece by Sinazo Tshayana

I used to hang out with a lot of shepherds. I grew up visiting my grandparents’ subsistence farm in the rural Eastern Cape village of eGqaka over weekends and school holidays. I’d follow them around from the very early mornings as they milked the cows, tended to the sheep and led them out to pasture all before breakfast was served. As one of the oldest enduring professions, shepherds are a resilient cultural iconography. They show up in various ways, even in our ultra-modern lives. From the first line of the Lord’s prayer: “The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”, to Paulo Coelho’s New York Times bestselling novel “The Alchemist” about a shepherd on a journey of self-discovery. Locally, photographer Ignatius Mokone’s photographs document shepherds going about their duties and these photos point to a silent economic and cultural revolution happening in parts of the rural Eastern Cape.

In Mokone’s “Good Shepherds” series, the shepherds are draped in light blankets reminiscent of how the Basotho of Lesotho drape their traditional heavy blankets. It’s an unusual stylistic choice given the rural Eastern Cape villages in which the photos were taken. In order to understand the significance of the fashion choices of the shepherds, we have to understand the role shepherds and their cattle play in these communities.

Cattle have a deep cultural value that has changed but remained steadfast over time. According to historian JJ Klaas, historically, “To amaXhosa cattle were a representation of the past, present and future’. They were so revered that they were never slaughtered for food. A family could own 500 head of cattle and know each and every one by name. They formed part of the family’s inheritance and were a physical representation of each family’s lineage. King Maqoma who founded the nation of amaJinqa so named them after an ox, Jinqi, that he had been gifted after completing his circumcision ritual. The nation of amaQwati in tracing their lineage refer to themselves as inkomo zika Jojo, zika Xesibe,zika Mtshutshumbe – cattle of Jojo, of Xesibe, Mtshutshumbe. Klaas, himself a former shepherd, asserts that this reverence was commonplace,’ they built nations using the names of cattle’.

Cattle also formed part of an economic and cultural exchange. They were and still are used to negotiate lobola before a wedding. An exchange of a family’s cultural, lineage and economic wealth in the cattle for a makoti, (daughter-in-law) who will add her own culture and ability to bear children to increase the wealth of the family she’s marrying into. That is the gargantuan family possession shepherds were given dominion over. To be a shepherd in those times would have meant one was in a very noble profession.

The introduction of the British biological weapon, Cattle Lung Sickness in the 1850s completely changed the relationship amaXhosa had to their cattle and shepherds. The highly contagious and extremely lethal illness had wiped out 90% of the communities’ cattle by 1857. The shepherds would have been left without a flock to tend and families would have been left destitute without economic means and a big dent to their cultural iconography. This is how amaXhosa were conquered and colonised by the British. They never recovered the economic and cultural heights they’d enjoyed before they encountered the British. Coloniality and then Apartheid made the plight of black people even more destitute so that in the 1960s, as my mom grew up at the family farm much of the old ways were forgotten. Gone were the respectable gentlemen shepherds of old and in their place, shepherding became the chore of the older kids in the family. My mom tells of the years of early mornings tending to cattle and being exposed to the bare elements every morning before school. Shoes were only for school and church, so they’d be crunching through the frost barefoot. As a child, following in her footsteps decades later, a huge fuss was made of apparel when we left play to accompany the family shepherd, cousin Phiwe. I’d go get my play boots and fashion myself induku (a staff) & accompany the herd to their grazing land. I styled myself on Phiwe. He was always in gumboots with Induku at his side. He added a long-sleeved canvas jacket later to symbolise the completion of his circumcision ritual into manhood. This shepherd’s dress is how all the young men styled themselves. The shift to the blankets in Mokone’s images is an indication of a major change in the zeitgeist. To understand this change, we have to look at who is doing shepherding work on the contemporary Eastern Cape. As economic migration has moved life away from village life, there’s become a greater shortage of men to tend to cattle. Capitalism still values cattle as an economy but they’ve lost their cultural significance. This can be seen in how modern-day amaXhosa eat and slaughter cattle regularly. Some families, mine too, have managed to hold onto their ancestral homes but they’ve lost the family inheritance of cattle. When my grandparents passed, we sought a shepherd for the flock with no success. The herd whittled away until it was no more. There can be no cattle without a trustworthy shepherd to safeguard them. The loss of shepherdry as a profession has meant the loss of families’ ties to their ancestral ways.

There are families still fighting to keep their herds alive though. They’ve taken advantage of Lesotho’s economic woes and hired Lesotho’s economic migrants who are living and looking for jobs in South Africa. These are the emerging shepherds pictured in Mokone’s work. The draped blanket they wear is reminiscent of the home they’ve left behind.

Introducing the kaross as the contemporary shepherd’s dress might be a way to attract people to the profession. It disrupts the established power hierarchies in how Xhosa shepherds dress because the kaross doesn’t discriminate between boys, men or foreigners. You’d have to accept each person as they are. It invites its wearers to re-imagine their social identity in the landscape of manhood while also allowing space for individual adornment. It gives shepherds a uniform that differentiates them from laypeople. A way of being identified as belonging to one of the oldest professions and bringing back its nobility.

References

Moya by Ntsiki Mazwai. Moya EP 30| Dr JJ Klaas | Cultural Confusion | Nongqawuse | Xhosa Wars |Nkosi Hintsa | Cattle (2023) [online]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE5fNb8DMp4&t=853s [accessed 22 April 2024]