African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 358
I
IBIBIO
See Drama: Anang Ibibio Traditional Drama; Puppetry; Verbal Arts: The Ibibio of
Southeastern Nigeria; West Africa: Overview
IDENTITY AND FOLKLORE: KUNDA
The Kunda of Zambia are a polity of approximately 35,000 Bantu-speaking people in the
central Luangwa River valley. They are a group distinct from the Chikunda of the
Zambezi River valley. The Kunda of Zambia claim some ancestral relation with the
Kunda polities of the Congo basin, but they have no practical affiliation with those
peoples within historical memory.
Kunda lore, or “folk knowledge,” is best characterized by the idiomatic term,
makhalidwe wa Akunda, which translates as “Kunda ways of staying.” Makhalidwe wa
Akunda refers to the widest variety of knowledge-based practices among Kunda people
by which they survive politically, maintaining the identity and integrity of the polity, and
survive as people in a biological sense. Kunda folk teaching collapses biology and
politics so that a person who survives biologically in Kunda country, or is born of Kunda
parents, necessarily has a Kunda political identity. Many Kunda people will even say that
the real objective of knowing these “Kunda ways of staying” is mphamvu kukhoka
wanthu, or the “power to gather people”: that is, the power to increase the polity and its
family lineages. In the Kunda idiomatic universe, political power and the physical power
of bodies are constituent products of practices of knowing.
There is no noun for knowledge in Kunda language. There is only the verb “to know”
(kudziwa), and its affiliate wisdom or intelligence (nzeru). By Kunda idiomatic practice a
Kunda person cannot know an abstract thing called knowledge. Kunda knowing is always
active. Kunda people always know how to do some action (ncito, or a “job”), which is
enacted for the results it has. Kunda knowing also always is “owned” by its practitioner,
and the ones who taught it to him/her. All ways of staying that Kunda people know, they
know because those ways of staying make survival possible, and because an elder who
practiced that knowledge before told it to them. That action is told only to members of