Excerpts

From Volume 5: Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa: Zulu High Sanusi

Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa: High Sanusi

African Journeys

When I became a sangoma, I came into a mysterious world. I was obsessed with knowledge. I wanted to know more and still more. But, I faced a potential problem: I wanted to go to other healers to learn more. When I spoke to my teachers, they said I was now an independent sangoma, and if I wanted, I was free to go elsewhere to learn. However, you can't just go to any person who you choose. First, you must dream about the person who will be your teacher. Also, that teacher, who does not know you, must have a dream about you. No one can just walk into a home of a sangoma and ask to be taught. In fact, no true sangoma ever wanted to become a sangoma. You become a sangoma because of the illness, the strange illness that attacks you. During that illness you must dream of the person who is to be your teacher and exactly where to find this person.

Now that I wanted more knowledge, I was no longer under the protection of my relatives. I was a free person. And one day I had a dream, a dream that told me to go to the land of the Swazis to learn about the stars. I was shown a mountainous place, a place of green valleys and towering mountains. In my dream I saw a village where one of the huts was strangely askew under a tree. I called this "the village of the misshapen hut." In the dream I was told that here I would find someone who would teach me more about stargazing. I needed money to go to Swaziland so I had to find a job. I found a job on the outskirts of the town of Ladysmith, in Natal, as a housecleaner and garden boy. I worked for about six months for a white gentleman who was Irish. One day he told me that he was selling his house and going back to Ireland. He ordered me to clean out the attic of his rambling old house. I had walked right into the web of destiny, a calabash of fate. Cleaning out an attic is an ordinary job, a job that many people do hundreds of times throughout the world. But this attic changed my life forever.

When I went up into the attic, I found all kinds of rubbish. There were old trunks and suitcases, which contained heaven only knows what. But amazingly, there were heaps and heaps of books: books that were old and dusty, worm eaten, and rat chewed. After I brought down all the dusty rubbish, I swept the attic and scrubbed the floor. I then asked my employer what to do with all the books I found in the attic. My employer, who was always half-drunk, very rudely said he didn't want to see a single piece of rubbish in his yard and that I had to get rid of the books.

Among the books, I found huge volumes of history books, leather-bound volumes probably printed at the time of Queen Victoria. I found whole sets of encyclopedias and dictionaries and books on history, philosophy, and architecture, among other literary treasures. Some of the books crumbled in my hands but many were intact. It was a real treasure trove of knowledge. It took three days to take every book from that house to my shack on the edge of Ladysmith town.

Each night, I read and read. Among these books a medium-sized book shattered my life once and for all. This book, written by a man called Reed, was entitled The Old Faith and the New. When I began reading, I assumed that it was a religious book. But it was not. The book attacked Christianity in a way I had never seen a book attack the religion before. According to the book, Christianity was a conglomeration of ancient faiths welded together by some cunning people. The Gospels, which I was brought up to believe in without a question, were not even written until some 300 years after the death of the man known as Jesus Christ. My friends, you must imagine the shock I felt. Since early childhood, I was raised to believe that Christianity was the only true religion and that the Bible was the undoubted word of God. Now I saw Christianity as a giant with feet of wet clay.

This book spared no effort to expose Christianity as a forgery. Toward the end of the book, the author called for Christianity's end and its replacement by another religion. It was shocking to find that everything I was brought up to fear, believe in, and revere might be nothing more than an illusion. This book reinforced what my teachers had been telling me: Christianity was a false religion, given by the white people in order to deceive, divide, and dominate black people. Suddenly, I was no longer afraid of the devil because I now saw him as an imaginary being concocted by a group of people who stole my country and frightened, blackmailed, and dominated my people.

My soul was suddenly empty, but my heart was immediately relieved. I remembered that in one pile I had found a small, old Bible. I read it with contemptuous eyes. I laughed at some of its statements. I placed the little Bible on a sawed log, and with an ax I chopped the Bible to pieces with demonic glee. And to think that I nearly became mad out of fear of this fraudulent book. But wait, after burning the Bible and then urinating on its ashes, I suddenly became afraid. Why? I no longer feared the Christian God. I laughed at him as a bearded fool. I no longer feared Satan because he was imaginary. Or so I thought. But the very foundation of my belief system was shaken. I asked myself, if Christianity is a lie, then is the traditional African belief system not also a lie? A strange mental attitude began developing in me. I had become a skeptic.

When Chikerema finished speaking, I noticed that sangomas had gathered around us. They were in full regalia of feathers, animal skins, and some in shoes or in traditional sandals. Chikerema told me that I was to go with these sangomas. They took me under a very big tree in the bush and sat me on a stool and danced in a great circle around me. As they danced, they must have passed a force from the earth to where I was seated because something seemed to be leaving my body. Suddenly I found myself floating on my back, close to the branches of the great tree, while a figure I recognized to be myself sat against the great tree trunk below.

Strange sounds, like whispers of people far away, filled my ears. Knowledge of some kind was being given to me. When I came back down, so to speak, the sangomas, who had stopped dancing, were sitting in a circle around the tree, as if waiting for something to happen. I then saw people walking towards us through the dusty bush from far away. At first I did not see anything special about them, but as they drew closer, I noticed that something was very, very strange. As they came through the circle of sangomas, cowardice swelled in my heart. I got up and ran away. Chikerema reached me before I could jump over the circle of sangomas.

C

"Listen. It is wrong to break through the circle of the sun. Don't! You must come back!"

Credo

"Great One, those people are strange, and they fill me with fear."

C

"But, stupid, haven't you seen these people before?"

Credo

"No. Never!"

Chikerema smiled and took me firmly by the wrist and led me back under the tree. I could see many sangomas smiling. "Stupid, cowardly foreigner," their eyes said. But tell me, please, if you had seen what I saw, would you not have run away? It was the most amazing spectacle I had seen in my life. Traveling outside South Africa, deeper and deeper into the center of Africa for the first time, I was beginning to encounter Africa's miracles, and I lost my courage. I am a man who doesn't fear wild animals, and during my travels I had seen many elephants, lions, and leopards. But what I saw on that day made me weak with terror.

A tribe of very strange people called the Bantwana, which means "children of the stars," lives near the Zambezi River. From far away, they look like normal human beings. When you approach them, though you may be as brave as the Sun God, you will run away. Why? Although they have ten fingers, their feet are very unusual. Most people have ten toes, but the Bantwana only have two large toes, like a claw of a prehistoric creature. Other tribes in the area say that the Bantwana people came from a star in the Orion constellation; they did not originate from earth. These were the people I was to study under, but they filled me with great terror.

Babayena, the healer of the Bantwana people, was one of the most amazing people I met in southern Africa. She was incredibly ugly, with flat breasts and slightly squinted eyes. However, Babayena was a shining being whose lack of physical beauty was more than offset by her deep spirituality. Her faith in the great gods was intense, and she could perform miracles.

One day when we were traveling by donkey cart through the bush, Babayena jumped off the cart, leaving her two daughters, who always accompanied her. She called me down from the wagon. I asked myself what this incredible woman was up to now. Babayena walked ahead of me, and as she walked, I saw that she was in a trance-like state. She made a strange whistling sound through her pursed lips. It was not sharp pitched but a hollow whistle. She snapped her fingers as she walked off the road into the deep bush. All of a sudden, something appeared above the stunted trees, which took me some moments to realize what I was seeing. It was a giraffe moving towards Babayena, and the creature was not alone. There were also four impala approaching the lone woman on the footpath. Babayena walked up to the giraffe which towered over her, tall and unmoving. The creature bent its neck down to the ebony woman, and she walked past the giraffe towards the impala, one of which panicked and ran away but not far. Then, after a toothless smile, she whistled again, and the giraffe and the impala faded into the bush. I was thunder-struck.

Credo

"Great Mother, may I ask a question?" I asked foolishly. She turned and looked at me. She looked tired. Her mouth drooped.

B

"What do you want to know?"

Credo

"Great Mother, what have you just done?" Babayena looked at me as if I was the biggest fool in Africa.

B

"Listen, I was told to teach you, to open doors for you. I am teaching you. Listen from far away, you are one with every living thing that exists in this world. You are one with the birds and the animals. You are one with the fish in the Zambezi River. You are one with the stars. You are one with the mountains. Animals are you and you are the animals." When we arrived back at her home, she taught me a song that I still remember to this day. The song went, "I see an animal, I see an animal, the animal is me and I am the animal."

B

"Remember this song from far away. Remember that you are life and life is you and simply because you are a human being does not mean that you are important. Animals are more important than you are. Do you swear that you shall remember my ways?"

Credo

"Great Mother, I will."

African Healing

All the great healers of Africa use the wisdom of their ancestors to heal the suffering. Any time an African sangoma heals, they voice the wisdom of their ancestors. I will now provide some examples of how we accomplish this.

There was a man in Soweto who was about 30 years old and truly deserved to be called a mama's boy. He was a car mechanic and a taximan who wanted to live a normal life. His mother worried that she would die without seeing her son married. He had never formed a healthy relationship with a woman his age. If he found a woman who wanted to marry him, he would stay with her for a while and then run back to his mother. Incredibly, when he lived with his mother, he behaved in a very odd way. He would urinate in bed like a baby, although he was a man in his 30s. We discovered that he had an obsessive love for his mother. He saw his mother as something more precious than any wife could ever be. His mother worried, "My son must get married, but he won't marry anyone we find for him."

When I met the young man, I decided that he was being haunted by a vision of his mother. He had grown up close to his mother and they lived alone in a hostile world surrounded by murderers, pickpockets, and other criminals. They had found safety with each other.

For me, it was an easy problem to solve. I advised the young man that he must find a woman about five years older than him. Furthermore, she had to look like his mother in face and in figure, as much as possible. We were lucky. His mother found him such a woman. She even proposed to the woman on her son's behalf. We told this woman that she must behave towards this young man exactly as his mother had always done. When I last heard from these people, the mother had passed away and the son and his wife were living a happy life.

This type of treatment heals a person by using another person. We substituted another woman for his mother. This is called "moving the mask." It's found in almost all the tribes.

Sometimes you find a person who is a terrible thief who simply cannot stop stealing. What you must first do is bring her to the home of a sangoma. When you bring her home, you must let her live in your house, but you must encourage her, without her knowledge, to steal things in the house. You can take a piece of cow dung, cut it nicely with a sharp knife, and wrap it up in a chocolate wrapper. Then you must place it where she will find and steal it. When she steals it, you must openly accuse her of theft and scold her. This cannot be done in public, where she would lose face in front of other people. You must scold her gently, like a child who has been caught in an act of wrongdoing. Then you must order her to bring back the thing she stole. When she does, unwrap it and show her what she has stolen is a fresh piece of dung, not a piece of chocolate.

What a person like this really needs is parental love. They steal because they are lonely in their hearts. They grew up without receiving the attention they needed. Therefore, you must create a situation that gives them the attention they missed as a child.

Although there are sicknesses of the spirit that just require love, there are others that require more drastic treatments. For example, if a man, a homicidal maniac, kills people like rubbish, you must do something very unique. You must take him far away to a place where a woman is about to give birth. There, have him wash his hands seven times with ashes, soap, and water. As the child is about to be born, blindfold him and bring him into the house where the birthing is taking place. He must have no idea what's going on. When the woman, about to give birth, is screaming, two men should hold him tightly by the shoulders and the arms. They should hold out his hands as if he's asking for something. The moment the child is born, have him feel the baby, placenta, and everything, still warm and wet. Then take the baby away from him. He will immediately become very sick, and he will puke his heart out. Afterwards, he will never kill another human being.

In Africa, we are aware that there is a time when some human beings reject life and become killers. To shock this person back into life, you must expose him to life in its most primitive form, like making him play midwife to a goat being born. In some dramatic way, you must reacquaint him with life again.