The magic of ancestral calling
Extract from The Other Side with the express permission of author Sarah Bullen
Godfrey Madlalate was standing at the threshold of a small hut in Rustenburg at age 32 and he was wasting away. He was bent double with pain in most of his body. He had a crippling headache that had lasted two solid years and had been hiccupping for close to 12 months without stopping.
Wait, did you read that right?
He had been hiccupping for 12 months?
Correct.
It is hard to believe that just two years before, he had been a self-confessed
‘hotshot executive’. He was the young black man who had
risen through the ranks of one of the biggest civil engineering firms in
the new post-apartheid South Africa. He was sitting on the Exco and
had been earmarked for a directorship. He had, as he jokingly says,
‘very big brains’.
But his big brains and his stellar career were on hold and he was at
the very end of a long two-year battle for his health. He was crossing a
strange and unexpected threshold that day in 2000 into a small house
and into a journey that he hoped would save his life.
The house was that of a gobela (spiritual trainer) and he was to
undergo twasa (initiation) to train as a traditional healer.
Elise Simango had been a traditional healer since 1953, when she
was 12, and when Godfrey walked through her door in 2000 she had
trained many sangomas. She took a long, critical look at him.
‘You read too many books, my son. Welcome to healing,’ she declared.
He was about to enter a world he had no idea even existed.
I am speaking with Godfrey over 20 years later and we are standing on a lush, green lawn in KwaZulu-Natal where he has just finished
delivering a talk at a conference about the role of Traditional African
Religions.
Later, he told me that he had ‘died twice’ in the year of his twasa
and that those experiences were the ones that opened his sight and
moved him into a connection with his ancestors.
We spent more time chatting after the talks had ended and I watched
as many people in the crowd approached him with great respect. He
had been a herbalist and traditional healer (sangoma) for 23 years, and
had a large following in both the medical and the spiritual community.
He was as at home in the New Age world of spirituality as he was in
his traditional healing clinic in Soweto.
Godfrey was one of the group of healers advising the Directorate of
Traditional Medicine within the Department of Health with a view to
regulating African Traditional Medicine practice in the country between
2003 and 2007.
The word ‘sangoma’ has as many definitions as it has practitioners,
and the conversation can easily move into the political realm. Current
reports indicate that there are over 750 000 healers in the country,
counsellors, mediators and spiritual protectors.
The more general understanding is that sangomas are ‘people of the
ancestors’ who get their calling, their messages and their healing powers
from the ancestors. They can use drumming, singing and dancing to
access spiritual, emotional and physical blessings and healing from the
ancestors. The information also comes from the realm of the ancestors
in dreams and visions, and through divining, or throwing the bones.
What is often misunderstood is the concept of ancestors. The ancestors
are not gods. Rather, the understanding in African cosmology is
that God, or Divinity, stands above this realm and does not interfere
too much in the world of humans; the ancestors, who are on a lower
plane of spirit, are delegated to be the go-betweens with the world of
the living.
The ancestors are seen as being able to take messages up between
humans and God.
Godfrey explains: ‘Everything we do comes from their instructions.
The call to become a healer comes from them, the instructions in the
training come from them and ultimately the healing comes from them.’
No matter how we define it, this was not the career Godfrey had
thought he would find himself in, nor was it one he wanted. ‘Who
would have believed that I would find myself in one of the industries
serving what we call ‘the black mass market’ along with the taxi industry,
stokvel schemes and spaza shops,’ he says.
He was destined for corporate career success and flagged in primary
school as the ‘smart kid’, already possessing those big brains. He was
promoted into higher grades twice in the primary years of schooling
because the educators thought he was of ‘above-average intelligence’
and he finished a 12-year school career in just 10 years. He said he
always knew he was ‘going somewhere’.
He left school as a shining star and completed a degree in Land
Surveying at UCT. He also dived headlong into political activism. It
was the early 1990s in South Africa. He had grown up in Sharpeville
and Soweto, and dodged bullets every day.
‘I was a child of the struggle,’ he says. ‘I still carry a stray bullet from
1977 in my stomach.’
Alongside his political activism at university, he also found Jesus
Christ. Religion was a strong backbone of his upbringing and his family
had been strong followers of the Presbyterian Church. The Baptist
Students Union was run by missionaries from the US based in Oklahoma.
He busied himself in daily prayer services and at weekend
church events. These put a lot of focus on clean living and a good,
above-board lifestyle, with values in alignment with his own childhood
church – so it was a good fit for him.
Godfrey was smart, motivated and charismatic.
‘I brought so many people to Christ,’ he laughs.
He also managed to integrate the born-again movement with a bit
of liberation theology. He rose rapidly to became chairperson of the
Student Union for Christian Action under the guidance of the South
African Council of Churches – and at the same time, he was working
part time for the ANC in the Western Cape.
No wonder he was snapped up in the graduate recruitment programme
for one of the biggest consulting engineering firms in the
country. They realised the need to quickly become relevant in the new
democratic South Africa, and Godfrey was their investment.
He was a rising star. He was appointed acting municipal manager at
the consulting engineering firm in a town with a population of about
300 000 and at just 24 years old he was running an entire municipality.
He had people of retirement age reporting to him and was leading a
huge team.
Next, he was appointed to the Exco, where he was one of only three
black candidates.
‘In my late 20s I was advising a middle-aged Afrikaner board. This
was radical at the time as we had just moved into democracy.’
His star continued to rise, and Godfrey managed to take study leave
to go back to study Town and Regional Planning at Wits. Then he got
a scholarship from the Royal Town Planning Institute in the UK.
But that never came to pass. He started to feel very ill.
Headaches. Persistent headaches.
Very fast his health changed. The relentless headaches would not
stop, and brought on deepening fatigue.
Over the course of a few weeks, he rapidly became a much slower paced
individual. It was so severe he could hardly function. He was
diagnosed with yuppie flu – chronic fatigue syndrome.
Was he burned out? At 30?
Godfrey had to slow down even more, but his health just got worse
and worse. It was devastating to him.
‘I had been this very productive, highly efficient individual most of
my life, I was at the start of my career and I was stopped cold. I was
still able to give regional direction and overall leadership, but my body
was stopping me from working.’
His colleagues had to stand in for him and attend meetings on his
behalf. He could only work a few hours a day. At this point he was
just eight years into his tenure at the firm. The next two years were to
be a disaster. He would go to the office when he could get up, but by
11 a.m. he would be so fatigued he would be unable to cope with the
rest of the day. By midday, he would go to his director, request time
off, and go home via his doctor in Norwood, who would give him a
cocktail of vitamin injections.
The most persistent pain was in his head, but his entire body was in
pain. Then the hiccupping started. He would spend two days at home
regaining strength, then return to work. But just days later the cycle
would start again.
It came to a point two years later when he requested a full leave of
absence to deal with this. At that point he was taking 17 tablets a day,
most of them painkillers. Added to that, he had been given a diagnosis
of clinical depression alongside burnout. Of those tablets, one was to
control his hiccups and another two were antidepressants. The sertraline
in the antidepressant was slowing him down and at that stage
he felt like a walking zombie.
And yet the hiccups and headaches were relentless, almost continuous.
‘And there was no clinical diagnosis at this point?’ I ask.
Godfrey shakes his head. ‘I had every test imaginable, and believe
me, Sarah, there was nothing medically wrong. Nothing. That was the
mystery behind it all.’
He was 32 years old, single and thought his life had come to an
end. He didn’t know at the time that these are some of the signs of
an ancestral calling. He didn’t know that his grandmother had been
a healer herself. None of this had yet revealed itself to him. He had
not been instructed in the old ways of his people or older traditional
rituals and callings.
Next, he was diagnosed with clinical depression. He laughs at that
diagnosis 23 years later.
It was clear that his health was failing, fast. His Christian brothers
and sisters in the Baptist Union raised funds for him to go to Nigeria
to seek miracle healing from the late prophet Pastor TB Joshua.
‘They were even prepared to fund my flights and accommodation
through the church. But I was too sick even to travel at that time.’
For a full year he took partial leave and stayed at home much of the
time resting, with his older sister and his then-girlfriend (later wife)
looking after him. But he simply didn’t get any better. In a desperate
move in early 2000, he went to relax on holiday in Mozambique. He
was limping along with work, attending part-time.
But the wheels were about to come off totally.
Weeks after Godfrey got back to South Africa, he went into what
Western medicine may diagnose as a psychotic state. In the Born Again
Church it was understood to be a trance state.
‘I was in a trance state without knowing I was in trance.’
He started to do prophetic readings for family members, telling
them about their futures, health and lives. What he didn’t know at
the time was that the visit to Mozambique had taken him closer to his
ancestral calling.
‘I was a Born Again Christian. I didn’t have a clue about being called
or how a calling manifests.’
His family had never encountered ancestral connections or consulted
with healers. He had grown up in the system of Christian National
Education under apartheid, which had quite firmly removed African
people from their traditional belief systems.
‘I read a few books during my days at UCT where some of the missionaries
in the colonising religions that came into Africa would refer
to traditional healers in a very derogatory way as “witchdoctors”.’
His family had no connection or idea of what was going on with him.
‘It was chaos. They thought that I had totally lost it.’
He was to find that in Mozambique there is a particularly powerful
African ancestral spirit called the Ndau ancestor.
The concept of an Ndau spirit (or entity) links to the time in Southern
African history when was a massive migration and displacement
of African tribes, starting in about 1820. In the Mfecane or Difaqane
(Wars of Conquest), this wide-scale migration was caused by famine
as well as the brutal rise of Shaka Zulu and his violent military drive
through Southern Africa. Godfrey explains that in all the black tribes
in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, you will find that Shona/
Ndau warriors were left with some karmic debt.
It seemed that a particularly powerful and violent Ndau spirit was
with or inside Godfrey. Along with the predictions and visions came
other symptoms. The most marked was that his hiccups got worse
during those few days, and it came to a point where Godfrey couldn’t
be indoors. When he was indoors, he felt like he was choking.
For two consecutive nights the hiccups were so severe that he took a
sleeping bag and went to sleep outside next to the pool. On the second
night, the hiccups and choking sensation became so intense that he
battled to breathe. As he lay beside the pool, struggling to breathe, he
felt his life force leaving him.
‘I suddenly felt very helpless, and it was the first time that I was
incredibly mentally clear and I knew my soul had left my body.
‘I realised it was floating gently somewhere in space and I was literally
able to look all the way down on my lifeless body. At first, I was
confused. I thought, what is that chap doing down there next to the
pool in a sleeping bag?
‘It took a while to understand that it was me down there. There was
a floating sensation that was light, and the torment of the last few days
had lifted.’
It was then that he had a very lengthy but strange spiritual encounter.
Godfrey felt helpless, but at the same time so mellow and so relaxed
after months of torment. ‘You know at that stage if someone had said
to me, “Are you ready to die?” I would have said to them, “Oh yes, look,
it’s beautiful out there, I’m ready to go.”’
But nobody asked that question. In fact, the opposite happened.
Godfrey found himself talking to celestial beings or souls, which he calls
‘spirit guides’. They said to him, ‘You’re welcome here at any time, but
there is no way we are letting you stay on the other side yet. We want
you to go back. We are signing a pact with you, and we want you to go
back and do a lot of work.’
The vision went on for some time, and they showed him some images
and signs. Then the voices and visions drifted away and the feeling
disappeared.
Godfrey found himself back, lying by the swimming pool under the
stars. He had no sense of time but he was breathing better. He lay there
for a long time, unable to move. It was cold outside, and as the cold
got deeper, he went into his cottage to get warm. But something had
happened during the vision, and he started to recognise that his mind
was ‘at another level’. It was running at superspeed.
‘My mind started downloading millions of megabits of information
from the spiritual world,’ he said. He was seeing prophecies and visions,
he was seeing into his family’s lives but also connecting with the broader
world. He tried to record it, but the volume was so immense that it
was impossible. So, he called his cousin on the phone and asked him
to write down the information as he dictated it.
What happened?
In New Age-speak, Godfrey says it may be called a ‘mass activation of
the third eye’, associated with clairvoyance and out-of-body experiences.
Buddhists view the third eye as the symbol of spiritual awakening, of
knowledge and wisdom; Hindus refer to this place in the centre of the
forehead as the ‘Ajña chakra’ (आज्ञा चक्र), which is said to be connected
to the pineal gland and a channel to inner and hidden power.
Whichever modality was kicking in, he was feeling it.
His family were frantic. He was medically sedated and finally went
into a long sleep for two days. When he woke up he seemed normal
again and could function, but the visions kept coming back and the
dreams started heightening. Every night he dreamt of the ocean, rushing
into his property, until the water was up to the roof.
Finally, he took a full leave of absence.
‘I want to find myself,’ he told them.
It was simply as a last resort that, later in that year, his family took
him to a traditional healer for a divination and a bone reading. It was
there that, for the first time in 24 months, any answers were given to
him. He was quickly and clearly told his sickness was an ‘ancestral
calling’. It was said like it was the most obvious thing but was a total
mystery to him.
‘I was an urban yuppie,’ he confesses. ‘More at home with a psychologist
than an African healer.’
But this reading made some sense to him. In the weeks that followed,
he saw three other traditional healers to verify the reading. All their
readings were unanimous – he had a spiritual gift and it was extremely
urgent for him to go and train in the African traditional way as a healer.
‘I was told my ancestors were now very upset with me for all the
delays. It was a shock. I came from a Christian background, so healing?
Sangomaship? No, not me!’
Godfrey and his family had no clue about any of this, yet they started
to make some preparations. They got a list and started buying some
beads and a traditional uniform.
And so it was that on the last weekend in October 2000, Godfrey
found himself in Rustenburg walking into that hut and across that
threshold.
‘It was quite an anxiety-provoking experience for me, to put it mildly.
I had gone from running a company board and executive committee
to wearing beads, having my hair covered in red ochre and undergoing
traditional rituals.’
However, from the moment he entered the hut, one clear thing
happened: the headaches stopped.
They had not stopped once in the previous two years except when
he was on pain injections and the persistent pain had worn him down.
But as soon as he entered the house where he was to train and live,
they were instantly gone. He fell to his knees with relief.
As he was so weak, his initiation training started gently, with a few
herbs and rituals as he built his strength. This twasa process is part
of a particular form of healing unique to Africa. There are many indigenous
African healing traditions. One of the oldest is perhaps that of
the San of the Kalahari. In that modality, the healer goes into a trance
and their spirit travels up to the spirit worlds to consult with the gods.
These gods are not necessarily ancestors. In the sangoma tradition, an
ancestral spirit of the sangoma or nyanga comes down and enters the
body of the healer. It is in this way that the sangoma can communicate
with the realm of spirit.
The twasa process is the initiation in which the healer makes friends
with the possessing spirit, and trains it how and when to visit.
Within weeks, Godfrey connected with his Shona spirit, Gogo Makepula
(ancestral name), who bombarded him with visions. Godfrey shakes
his head at that memory, even 20 years later. ‘The journey of healing is
sacred and secret and I won’t reveal its secrets. This is the golden rule
for healers,’ he tells me. ‘But I will tell you it was quite an inexplicable
connection I made with this spirit world.’
It was also a dangerous one. As the possession progressed, he couldn’t
eat, he couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t wash. After five days he felt as if he was just clinging to life, again. His already weak body was depleted even further.
On the fifth day, his gobela realised that he had been losing body
temperature and his feet were freezing cold. He had lost all sensation
in his limbs.
‘You could basically prick me with a needle, and I wouldn’t respond.’
That was when his second NDE happened.
Godfrey was rushed to the local clinic in Rustenburg where he was
resuscitated. The medical staff had to raise his body temperature using
medical means to keep him alive. When he regained full consciousness,
he was speaking an Eastern European language that nobody in the
small town could understand. He was alive, but just like earlier that
year in the event by the swimming pool, the spirit world opened up to
him and started what he calls ‘a massive spiritual download’. He could
see things and know things outside of normal realms.
His gobela had a pain in her foot, and without even knowing that,
Godfrey took hold of her foot and told her what was wrong. Weeks later
a diagnosis proved it to be 100 per cent accurate.
‘So what was going on?’ I ask.
‘I had just come back from another life-threatening trance. I would
say the common factor between the two near-death experiences was
that my healing powers came in very dramatically both times.
‘I think that for some reason the spirit world thought that maybe I
wouldn’t accept the calling, so they had to use very harsh methods to
get me to accept who I am spiritually.’
We sit back in our chairs in KwaZulu-Natal and let the sun warm us
for a moment. This talk of near death can give you the shivers. I have to
glance around at the green lawn and blue sky to remember that we are
far away from this time, and from hospital beds and a thin thread to life.
‘How was that big brain coping with this process?’ I ask.
Godfrey admits he battled with it. ‘I was a scientist. I had studied the
land. I had studied the relationship between the moon and the sun,
and the gravitational effect of the attraction of the Earth. I knew what
causes tides, and had also studied astronomy. It made things worse
because I was trying to interpret these experiences from the science
that I knew, and it was all getting so complicated.’
Godfrey reflects on how he had trusted his own early diagnosis from
his GP. Yuppie flu and depression. He laughs.
‘I’ve got a nephew who’s got a PhD in clinical psychology and has
his own practice at Donald Gordon Medical Centre. We share notes
now and you know that the seven clinical signs of depression are the
same seven signs and symptoms of someone with a calling.’ These
are listed as poor concentration, feelings of excessive guilt or low selfworth,
hopelessness about the future, thoughts about dying or suicide,
disrupted sleep, changes in appetite or weight and lethargy – feeling
very tired or low in energy.
‘The American world of medicine is confused because we have
patients who are walking around with ailments that are caused by
paranormal activities and the doctors are trying to solve them in hospitals
and are registering no progress. What does that tell you? Be
careful the next time you go and see your psychologist! No offence to
psychiatrists, but what is depression might just be a spiritual condition.’
He explains that in the African healing tradition there are three
kinds of illnesses – clinical, psychosomatic and paranormal illness.
The funny things is, Godfrey was African, but had been schooled in
the structures of the west under apartheid. All of this was falling away.
‘So did you have to put that technological and scientific mind somewhere
else and jump into this otherworldly experience in a way?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘I felt very unsafe to be venturing into a space where I
couldn’t use my normal rational and scientific thinking to explain what
was happening around me, and to me. But I could not, because this
was a spiritual experience. It was extraordinary. It was unstoppable.
It was massive.’
Hearing these words was an echo of so many other stories I have
heard over the years that speak of an experience that goes beyond all
realms of the rational mind.
It was extraordinary.
It was unstoppable.
It was massive.
It makes no sense.
And so, after that second NDE and once the trance state had lifted,
Godfrey was finally stable enough to be released from the hospital
and taken back to his initiation school, where he continued the twasa
process. He had lost so much weight that he was not physically robust
enough to endure the full training that the other initiates were doing
and had to take longer. The initiate has to follow a series of dreams,
visions and ancestral orders to realise their calling. Godfrey used to
have a dream diary and every night there was a different dream in
which he was given instructions to follow.
The twasa process is demanding on every level. The initiate is learning
to integrate his ancestral spirit. For that to happen, the body and
spirit are put under extreme conditions.
There are also a number of different spirits. The first are ancestral
spirits, which are your direct family ancestors. There are also terrestrial
spirits, cosmic spirits (called ‘ndzau’) and water sprits (‘nzumzu’).
Each of these spirits has a role and once work starts as a traditional
healer, some may interact only during divination, others during herbal
consultations. Each of them has to be integrated.
Later that year, he graduated as a fully trained healer.
‘People that had seen me battle since 1998 couldn’t believe how I
looked when I came back fully healed. A lot of them actually told me
that they thought that I wouldn’t make it and that I was going to die.’
In fact, he did die – twice.
‘I know in those moments that I could have died forever, but there
was a bigger force at play I believe. I had to come back to fulfil that.’
The final ritual closure of the training was to have the red ochre
washed out of his hair. As part of the twasa rules, he had been unable
to cut his hair and it was thick with red ochre that looked like dreadlocks.
He had three months before it could be washed off, then another
three months of abstinence, sleeping on the floor and observing all the
laws of twasa.
So, towards the end of the year Godfrey took another journey to
Rustenburg to get his hair washed off in the ritual way. That night, his
grandmother came to him in a vision. She had died in 1977 when he
was nine, and he hadn’t known she too was a healer, until that night.
She looked at him in that dream and said, ‘Who said you must wash
off that hair? I expected you to stay longer with it. Don’t you know that
you are a full-time healer?’
Godfrey did not want to hear that message. He would finally be able
to go back to work. The shining star was back and the company directors
were hoping to have him back in the office as soon as possible.
But the ancestors had other plans for him.
‘The youth in me thought at the time, “My granny is being a bit nasty
to me, but it will pass. She’s not serious.”’
But guess what? No work came. The job fell through. He tried other
companies, applied for countless other jobs and was the top candidate.
He went to all the interviews. But nobody called him back to say he
had the job.
‘She kept on interfering.’
After three years of this, it finally became clear to him that his grandmother’s
visit had been serious. He knew that she would make sure he
didn’t go back to work in that way.
‘I had to accept that my Gogo was not joking and that my income
was in the healing arts.’
We sit quietly looking at the estuary over two decades later. On
Monday he will be back in Soweto, back at work running his busy and
full traditional African clinic. He starts work every day at 4 a.m.
‘Those are the healing hours,’ he tells me. ‘We follow the natural
laws and the morning hours are when we want to be working and active
with the ancestors.’
He will then see clients for divination (bone readings) and treatments
until 4 p.m. After that, he attends to those who come after work for
evening sessions, washes or rituals. All in, he has capacity to treat over
50 outpatients a month in his clinic. He is so busy he has an app on
which clients book. On weekends and after hours, he is often called out
for longer rituals and space cleanings, which can mean interprovincial
travel. One of his niches in healing is as a traditional gynaecologist,
and that means he is available all hours for these patients.
He has used the past 20 years to educate himself about African
Traditional Religion. His mission now is to educate others about it.
He is trying to reverse the bad rap that this ancient African wisdom
has got. He says that ‘demonisation’ and the idea that these practices
are ‘primitive’ started with the advent of colonialism and the conquest
of Africa.
‘Between the colonisers and the missionaries, they managed to take
over the ancient healing paradigm and convert it into what we in South
Africa now call ‘conventional Western medicine’.’
‘What a journey you’ve walked,’ I say. ‘How does it relate to the Godfrey
who grew up in the Presbyterian Church, the Born Again Christian?’
‘Our practice is fully based on belief in God and belief in the Trinity,’
he tells me.
According to the Traditional Healers Association, over 70 per cent
of traditional healers are also Christian, and many are also prophets
in the Churches of the Spirit. African Traditional Religion accepts
a duality where we live in harmony with God and in good standing
with our ancestors. This is a position held by the African Indigenous
Churches. These have well over 11 million people who attend their
church services regularly, but practise indigenous belief systems as well.
‘Many of us have this “double gift” and we use the medium of water
and use the Bible and prayer to heal our patients,’ he says.
‘Are you going to be a prophet too?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘That calling has also come my way and it was made very
clear that I have to be leading a church. I’ve had to find myself spiritually
in this space,’ he says. ‘I accepted the full calling in all its glory. It is
23 years from that fateful day in 2001 when I died by that swimming
pool. I have found so much inner peace.’
I have seen Godfrey on a stage and seen him lead a clinic and a community.
I have no doubt he will do it. I nod down at the twinkling sea at
the end of the estuary in the South Coast town we are visiting. People
are moving down there for a yoga class, and to dip in the warm ocean.
‘Should we join and go down to the beach for a swim?’
He almost visibly leaps backwards and shakes his head.
‘That Ndau sea spirit is too strong for me,’ he says.
After 23 years he still has a healthy fear of that ancestor.
Extract from The Other Side
By Sarah Bullen
All rights reserved and CONFIDENTIAL
Sarah Bullen is a multi-published author and writing coach, leading international writing retreats and adventures in Europe and Africa. Sarah had a life-altering near-death experience herself where she was in a coma for three weeks. Her story has become the book Love & Above: A journey into shamanism, coma and joy. She is a former financial and magazine journalist; writing for titles such as Marie Claire, The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, and Psychologies UK. Her latest book The Other Side: Journeys into Mysticism, Magic and Near Death gathers riveting and radical stories of people from Africa, who have crossed to the ‘other side’ or those who can contact it.