Lobola on Radio Metro FM
By Mocholoko (Dr), Zulumathabo Zulu © 2019

Podcast of this broadcast is available at the end of this page.

Please tune in to Metro FM Radio station on Thursday August 29, 2019 at 8:30am. I will be addressing the question of Lobola (the genesis; the purpose and the meaning of Lobola) and whether the Makoti (instead of Mkhwenyana) can pay Lobola or negotiate lobola for her would be husband?

Culture controls the mind and empowers the mind by providing a sense of identity and context and a link to the past. It is the culture that equips a human mind with a metaphysical template that gives yena a sense of personal stability; authenticity of reality and the cultural compass for direction.

When you destroy culture, you destroy the intellectual template that allows the mind to interprete reality in a contextualised sense. Destroying the culture also destroys the ability of the African to vibrate as yena was intended to vibrate. The destruction of culture places an African in a privated state. A privated state is a consequence of an antecedent of deprivation that makes it harder if not impossible for the African to form an attachment with respect to the culture. Lobola maintains a vibrational link to the culture.

Lobola is an extremely important cultural institution of African cosmic genesis that traces its origins to the convergence of the Aggrarian (matrilineal) society and the Pastoralist (patriarchal) society thousands of years long ago as described in my article The Organic Roots of the African Matrilineal Society. It is not just an affair between the two people or the two families, Lobola is a socio-cultural contract among the members of the clan and the gods of the cosmos.

Before the Greek Civilization (800 BCE to 146 BCE); before the Roman Civilization (27 BCE to 1453 AD); before the mighty Assyrian Civilization (2025 BCE to 626 BCE), the Africans practiced sophisticated discrete mathematics as confirmed by the Ishango bone of Congo (more than 20,000 years old); Lebombo bone of Swaziland (more than 35,000 years old) and Blombos Letsoku (ochre rock) of Azania (South Africa) – (more than 70,000 years old). The principles of these ancient mathematical systems, as is the case with the prime number system, form the basis of the modern computer science discipline of cryptography. Cryptography does not work without prime numbers! These are the derivative works based on the intellectual achievements of the African ancestors who have gone before us!

At the time when Europeans were still drinking from the skulls of their ancestors in the caves of the glaciers during the ice age (I experienced the Arctic glaciers in Canada), Africans had already established the intellectual tradition of sophisticated mathematics as archeologically confirmed by the mathematical artifacts that range between 20,000 and 75,000 years of age. The civilizations mentioned above fall outside this African timeline by great margins!

It was the robust tradition of this mathematical knowledge that informed the praxis of the mathematics of Lobola as described in my books Sesotho Dictionary of Mathematics; African Origin of Mathematics, among others. In other words, Lobola is the continuation and the encapsulation of this ancient mathematical knowledge for the survival benefit of the future generations.

Tune in tomorrow as I describe the genesis; the mathematics and the cosmology of the Lobola institution of the African origin. Raboka Badimo! Thokoza Makhosi! Mocholoko (Dr), Zulumathabo Zulu.

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