Reclaiming ilitye lika Gompo: connecting to a hidden heritage through the design of an Indigenous Knowledge Centre in East London

Abstract

Through historical racial and colonial displacement, people have lost touch with their sacred sites now surrounded by privately owned land. How do we reveal these sites of significance? How do we reconnect people with their sacred sites connecting them to their heritage? Spirituality is an important and integral part in the lives of indigenous people of various cultures, as seen throughout the world. It is how they express themselves, how history is preserved, passed on, and used in everyday life and spheres such as politics and agriculture. Spirituality is practised in life’s rites of passage such as birth, marriage, and death. This spiritual heritage, through different rituals and ceremonies forms a cultural cord, weaving together the past with future generations. Defining indigenous people has proved to be problematic historically, for the sake of this study, we will use the definition given by (Corntassel, 2003). Corntassel states that indigenous peoples “are ancestrally related and identify themselves, based on oral/ written histories, as the descendants of the original ancestral homelands” (p. 92). I chose to use this definition with the intention to situate the understanding of indigenous people. In indigenous Xhosa culture, spirituality is seen as a naturing relationship that exists, connecting a person, to other people whether or not they are related by blood and connecting them to nature. Generally, indigenous people are described as people who partake in traditional cultural norms and rituals with strong links to territories and surrounding natural resources. They trace their ancestry to land which before the arrival of the setters was autonomous. During this post-colonial era, they continue to fight for individuality and self-determination. Integral to the spirituality of indigenous people, its experience and practice, are living aspects such as God, land, nature, animals as well as the non-living aspects. Among indigenous communities, spirituality is viewed as the interconnectedness and relationship one has with these aspects and the ability to live in harmony with them (Ohajunwa, 2019).