Shona Ethnoaesthetics: Beauty and the Shona Proverb

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine how the Shona traditional society conceptualised beauty; drawing from the meaning and content of the Shona proverb, suggesting that traditional society emphasised beauty as holistic to include such elements as moral uprightness and humility as the markers of inner beauty. While physical or outer beauty was appreciated, looking for it as the sole desirable quality as done in the modern beauty pageants misses the core of the way the traditional Shona society conceptualised it. Relying on philosophical debate between the universalist and particularistic schools on the nature and content of African philosophy, and the analyses of the influence of Platonism and Cartesianism on discourses on beauty, we seek to argue for an ethnoaesthetic philosophy through which value systems can be evaluated to enhance cross-cultural understanding. Furthermore, this paper is motivated by the contention that the aesthetic sense of the Shona people was tied to the wider network of their social, economic, political and spiritual realms that defined their self-understanding. In this sense, beauty and its conceptualisation remain tied to a system of values that continues to inform the Shona people's identity. Hence, by quarrying into the Shona language (particularly the proverb), we call for the decolonisation of the way Africa conceptualises reality, a theme which runs across the vast array of African Studies.