What is the cultural significance of sikolonjo (potsherds) in Luhya culture? We take journey form the times before to more recent days in the life of Babukusu and Mulogooli people of the Luhya.
Growing up, my mother had some reluctance us visiting our paternal grandmother and spending days there. Before you make conclusions, it had nothing to do with the usual mother and daughter in law issues.
You see Nakhatama, my grandmother, is this gentle, soft spoken soul who wouldn’t harm a fly. To date, her and my mother have such a great relationship that when khukhu goes down with something, she only allows my ma to take care of her. Unlike her nonagenarian self of today, growing up, kukhu still had strength in her bones tending to herself well into her sixties. When we went visiting, she would ask us to sit pretty as she did all the chores.
Mum would be exasperated whenever kukhu asked us to sit back and let the women work. On the other hand, my siblings and I enjoyed the authority our kukhu Nakhatama had over mum. As a result, needless to say, my siblings and I were the best of friends with kukhu.
Sikolonjo sialinda ekunda, the Bukusu saying
And we did bff things like picking traditional vegetables from the farm. Khukhu had planted a lot of chisaka and sarati around a big bush in the middle of the farm. As we bent over to pick vegetables, deep in talk peppered with some work, I noticed something interesting. There were a number of such bush islands through out kukhu’s tilled land.
Before that moment, I had never thought much about them. Neither had I before sought to know why there were islands of bushy land scattered through out an otherwise well tended crop field. But that late August mid-morning some decades back, my curiosity came out to play.
So I sought to find out from grandma why the bushes were not being cleared to give way for crops. Nakhatama gently told me that the bushy mounds were graveyards of her in laws. She then pointed out an area where my great grandparents main house once stood, as well as where their kitchen once was.
Signed, I was here …..
The area she had planted vegetables and bananas had previously served as their cowshed. She then led me to a bushy mound that had was littered with old pieces of broken pots. As we encountered these pieces whilst picking vegetables, she would pick a potsherd and throw it yonder. As she did this, she explained her actions with a Bukusu saying: sikolonjo sialinda ekunda.
When I asked her what the saying meant, she begun by pointing out the farm’s boundaries yonder marked with likongwe that demarcated my great grandfather’s land (kumukunda) before it got subdivided. She narrated how big the land was. All this time, I hadn’t known that my great grandfather possessed such a massive parcel of land. It was so big that despite his polygamous ways, his grandchildren, my father and his siblings, still got a handsome inheritance.
Cultural significance of sikolonjo
Kukhu continued her explanation of the Bukusu saying by offering to educate me on the cultural meaning of potsherds that we encountered. The first one we picked was from a certain pot that was traditionally used to cook obusuma. Then another for brewing busaa, so on and forth – though I can’t remember us encountering anything to do with namunwaebili for obvious reasons. Well educated on the pots and ceramics of the Bukusu and their uses, later after dinner, khukhu educated me on the cultural significance of sikolonjo in Bukusu culture.
Sikolonjo (Bukusu Language) is what in English loosely translates as a potsherd. As khukhu Nakhatama educated us all – myself, siblings, cousins and parents – on sikolonjo, I remember being amazed at how a piece of broken, otherwise useless, cookware carried so much symbolism among my people The Bukusu.
Sikolonjo the utensil
When the potsherd was large enough, the piece of sikolonjo served as a utensil for serving food. That said, it was a utensil reserved for special groups of persons. In Bukusu culture, persons like convalescing initiates, menstruating women, widows, and the very old are said to be capable of communicating/ in communication with the afterlife – the living dead and ancestors. Thus, so to say, such persons are thought to be in a state of existence between life and death; liminal beings they are, a concept somewhat similar to bardo in Tibetian culture.
Given their special, albeit culturally unclean state, such persons could eat from sikolonjo. Anyone else who attempts such would suffer a fate where their body would be drained of life leaving them frail, pale and ashen.
Cultural significance of sikolonjo in Bukusu traditional circumcision
Decades after they had been discarded, the potsherds that we picked with khukhu remained as tough as an indigenous rock. I found their hardness quite interesting; and even attempted to cast doubt if those potsherds were indeed remnants of my great grandmother’s pots. As khukhu Nakhatama spoke that night in the shadows of her humble hut lit by etaya ye echimuni, my father expounded on her words.
He explained that sikolonjo are rock hard because of the seasoning, firing in a kiln and subsequent glazing the clay, basically the earth, undergoes when making pots the traditional Bukusu way. In the symbolism laden Bukusu traditional circumcision, the phallus of basinde are thought to face a similar process of preparation, in a manner of speaking. By making men out of boys through circumcision, the community is assured of propagation and thus continuity to eternity.
And so, at the point of circumcision, the boy child is likened to sikolonjo. By going through fire by facing the knife of omukhebi, he epitomizes continuity of the lineage. And just like sikolonjo that lasts through decades, the omusinde is a symbol of permanence of family. Thus, among the Bukusu, sikolonjo is a masculine metaphor for the boy child. In turn, sikolonjo are masculine markers of Bukusu nationalism or identity.
The seed of the boy becoming a man became the hope of a community threatened by extinction. That said, the seed comparisons do not end there.
Sikolonjo, circumcision and the shedding of blood on the soil mutiang’i
When a son gets circumcised, the shedding of blood on the soil mutiang’i in his father’s luuya is symbolizes the planting a seed. The blood that has been soaked in the soil will bring forth new generations, promising continuity of the lineage. My father explained further.
Sikolonjo use during the healing of bafulu
During convalescence, nalulwe, a herb of cultural value among the Bukusu for its medicinal properties was applied on the cut phallus of a convalescing initiate, omufulu, to aid with healing. To hold its ashes as the caregiver applied it, sikolonjo was the traditional vessel of choice.
Sikolonjo and belonging
Sikolonjo is a critical material in archaeology. It’s presence says somebody lived here, and thus the land has it’s found on had its owners. Sikolonjo is a mark of belonging (home/place) but is considered masculine because girls are “namakanda kutuma engila”; meaning, frogs that cross the road. This is said in reference to Bukusu marriage customs which have it that girls are married ‘outside’ while boys ‘marry in’, inherit land and remain rooted among their people to eternity.
Because sikolonjo does not rot, it is a sure confirmation of existence of life before the present generation but more importantly it is a mark of our home. It is claimed that some custodians of Bukusu culture, just by a look at sikolonjo, can tell the period.
Cultural significance of sikolonjo in the kitchen – part of mahiga and more
This one I saw way back when I visited a friend in Maragoli-land. Pieces of potsherd are used to support cooking pots when cooking with the traditional three stone cooking fire, mahiga in Maragoli language. The potsherd is placed in between the pot and any of the three stones. The purpose of the potsherd is to fill the gap, if any, between the cooking pot and the stone enabling it to ‘sit’ firmly making cooking easier.
Further, the potsherd, if sizable, was used to scoop out hot ash from the cooking fire. This ash was spread on the walls and around the pit of a pit latrine acting as a larvicide for houseflies and to kill odors. When cooking with masagoro, dry maize cobs in Maragoli language, the potsherd was used to scoop the ash when cool in preparation of making munyu mushereka – munyu gwa masogoro.
Fixing a lustrous blow out with sikolonjo
I kid you not. You read that right. My senje talks of days when blow dryers and hot combs were things that were not only found in the city, but also were a preserve of the most sophisticated, coolest girls. But lack never stopped a determined her and peers from being all glam. So my senje – and this was as ‘recent’ as the mid nineties – would pick a piece sikolonjo and throw it into the fire as they cooked.
Using a clutch of leaves as some glove, they would pick the hot piece of potsherd and smoother it over their heavily petroleum jelly oiled crop of hair, just long enough to hear a sizzle and a waft of burning hair. The result?
Needless to say, a few burnt fingers, tender scalps and dull headaches; but most importantly, a glistening crown of something close to a blow out. Just the lift in spirits and glow from the resultant self confidence to believe our future uncles when they waylaid them on the way to mill a gorogoro and insisted: “Baby, it’s good to me.”
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