| INTRODUCTION
The domba dance is well known to visitors and tourists, and photographs of it appear regularly in newspapers and magazines. But the culture of its dancers, and sometimes even the fact that they are Venda, is appreciated by only a few people. What attracts most attention is the girls' dancing, which is in fact choreographically dull and monotonous. Spectators are unaware that the soloist sings an astonishing variety of words, and they are usually deaf to what is some of the most remarkable music to be heard in the Republic of South Africa. The sounds produced by the drums and the voices are in themselves unique and arresting, and in the context of sunrise or moonlight in a sub-tropical environment they can be intensely moving. The way in which the sounds are produced is no less exciting. The technique of African polyrhythm is employed at an unusually slow tempo, to produce a pattern in which three different pitched drums divide twelve basic units into groups of 3, 2, and 1 + 2. Similarly, individual girls each sing one, two, or three tones, which in polyrhythmic combination produce a 'harmonic' pattern that is repeated once to every two repeats of the drum pattern. At a point in every fourth repeat of the drum pattern, the master of initiation, or whoever is soloist, sings a new pattern of words, which is usually of nine syllables contained within thirteen basic, or four grouped, units of the drum pattern. Further sounds may be added, especially if graduates of the school are present, and these emphasise the over-all tonal structure: one tonic persists throughout, but two tonal and four 'harmonic' shifts coincide with every four repeats of the drum pattern. An analysis of the music is given at the end of this section in 'The Music of Domba'. This brief summary should be enough to show that even if the Venda are not to be credited with conscious intellectual effort in creating domba, it cannot be denied that at a deeper, unconscious level their brains operate as efficiently and as systematically as those of any other human beings. The firm breasts and smooth black skin of the naked girls are indeed a beautiful sight, as the Venda themselves agree (lines 454 and 455 of the song); but the purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the human and intellectual achievements of the domba dance, and particularly of the words of the soloist. Although their content is often sexual, it must not be thought that the minds of their creators always operate at the same level as the minds of tourists, when they come to photograph and gaze at the girls. Sex is seen not simply as a gratification of animal passions, nor even as a means to the end of biological reproduction: it is regarded also as a way of uniting man with the cosmic forces which animate both his own body and the world in which he finds himself. The domba dance is not meant to be sexy: it is intended to symbolise both the mystical act of sexual communion, conception, the growth of the foetus, and child-birth. I had many discussions with masters of domba, and they were all adamant that it does not, as several writers have suggested, portray the movements of a python and should not be called the 'python dance', as Stayt (1932:115) has done: "pythons don't move in circles, ... and if they coil up, they reduce the size of the circle, which the dancers do not;" "because the circumference of the dancing circle is called the body and tracks of a python (milayo Nos. 37 and 38, below), this does not mean that the chain of dancers represents a python;" "the leading dancer is not 'the head of the python':" "the references to the python are in the milayo and not in the dance."
Each performance of the domba song, then, symbolises an act of sexual communion. Similarly, successive performances during the months that the school is in progress, symbolise the building up of the foetus. Traditionally, the Venda believed that conception could be achieved only be frequent sexual intercourse, and that a regular flow of semen was necessary to develop the foetus. This was not an unreasonable theory, since girls married shortly after puberty, and often had to wait some years before falling pregnant. The theory was still held in 1956-58 even by schoolgirls who, at a later stage of physical development, could not understand how they could have fallen pregnant after making love only once or twice.
The milayo are not conclusive about the symbolism of the alto and tenor drums, but it seems likely that one or both of them represent the heartbeats of the mother and the foetus, or both. The alto beat may even represent the male, because the drum is phallic both in shape and expressed symbolism. There is an interesting rite which seems to symbolise the early growth of the foetus, and perhaps even its first movements. At the beginning of domba, the bass drum rests on the ground during performance. Then, two or three months later, it is 'cooked'. Red ochre, castor oil seeds and groundnuts are mixed with fat and rubbed on the drum, to cover a layer of cattle dung. The drum is left in the sun for the whole day. Then, for the rest of domba, it is hung from a cross-bar (muthambi) between two poles (mikavhala) (milayo 64-66).
I hesitate to go further in my description of the symbolism than is warranted by the ethnographic evidence. Moreover, the symbolism of the domba dance and its music, like the symbolism of the milayo, is consciously understood by only a few Venda, and even masters of initiation are sometimes more sensual than mystical in their attitudes. However, they clearly recognise the difference between sexual intercourse as an act of having and as an act of being. As if to make this point clear, one man told me that when tourists were around, he did not waste effort on singing different words, but attended to the girls' dancing and encouraged them to be more overtly suggestive in their movements. |
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tshi ima
) 
nga musevhe:
pfula hani? How will the marksmen shoot it? (How are boys going to make love to her?)
si na khulo? What kind of a domba is it without khulo?
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.
yayo.
tshi ima
halwa 
pwashea
no lala no ima vhusiku 
uri arali vhakegulu vho u tanga u tshi yo beba, zwi a vhavha
ya 
ya muloi
ya muthu
tsha muthu
hone Where it has been worn by drumming:
ya mukalaha 
a sa athu u naka mulomoni: a sa athu u bva mano mulomoni
hune ra rwa hone there where we strike (the drum-skin):
bva nga henefho bulini
dza vhathu the elbows of human beings.
underneath the drum where there is a hole:
ya vhasadzi
