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from CredoMutwa Website
We were there in Sumeria, we were there in India, we founded great kingdoms in Cambodia, and the first man to be saluted as emperor of China was one of us, a son of Africa, a black man. Buddha was a black man from Africa, his earliest statues confirm this. Krishna was a black warrior. The goddess Kali, is depicted as an African woman. Even the bible states that Nimrod was a great man in the eyes of the Lord and he was the father of Cush, who founded the great cushite nation. I weep even no when I see Africans slaughter each other in the streets of South Africa, now supposedly a free nation. I weep even now when my people hunger and suffer in the veld in South Africa.
I weep even now when
Euro centric education is being fed to our children. Fed in order to
make them Afrofobes, creatures that hate and despise their
motherland, which look down in contempt upon their own people,
because this is what all European educated black people do. They
despise Africa and all she stands for. And they are in contempt of
the culture of her people. They are still even now doing the
colonialists dirty work for them, because if you want to destroy the
culture of a nation, you must brainwash the youth of that nation and
make them do your dirty work for you.
I came close to losing
another son to the spears of the Inkatha freedom party, God have
mercy upon us! I have been cheated by whites who took advantage of
my ignorance and stupidity and who robbed me of millions of rands of
money I made out of my books. Even as I am talking to you now there
is a white woman, who deceived me into signing away everything that
I wrote, everything that I painted, and everything that I sculpted.
I have suffered, and am still suffering. Even now there are white
men that have set my own children, my sons against me. A born again
Christian preacher of lies brain washed my daughters mind and stole
her away from me, saying, you must not talk to your father , he is a
devil worshipper.
Nobody knows what this
device was. Nobody knows how it had got into my wife's uterus, but
before my wife passed away, I received a threatening letter warning
me not to talk to a man named David Icke or else my wife would die.
I did not take that warning seriously, and my wife died within two
weeks after I had received it. I have every reason to be angry with
the frot that is called western civilization. I have every reason to
be angry with the various foreign religions that enslave our peoples
minds and blinker their vision. I have every reason to be angry with
education systems that rob our people of their true worth, of the
truth about themselves. This is my friends is Credo Mutwa.
The villages that I built in Mafekeng, and the village and the statues that I built in the Eastern Cape, placed bread in the hands of my starving fellow South Africans. I made jobs where there are none. I made livings for my people where there had been none. I believe that a truly democratic country, is a country that uses the spiritual talents and the heritage of its people to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. But what has been my reward? I have been scorned; demonise lied about by conspirators, who delight in setting black against black, by gullible blacks that swallow any garbage white newspapers feed them. If you speak about the international conspires, that is the government behind many countries governments, people laugh at you for a fourteen carrot lunatic, but there is such a thing and it is ruining my people even now.
The Aids epidemic which
will soon wipe out great tribes, such as the Zulus, my people, is no
accident, neither is the flood of drugs that is sweeping over this
once beautiful country. The soaring crime wave is no accident. The
epidemic of political killings which are almost a daily occurrence
in some parts of South Africa is no accident either. All these
things are planned by someone and carried out by someone on behalf
of that someone.
There was a time when I wondered, why this was being done? But now I know, too late, the cold blooded satanic purpose behind all this. The black man of South Africa must be denied his identity to make it easier for people with sinister agenda’s to turn him into a puppet, spiritually and physically dependent on the west and its rapacious and exploitive ways. The black man must be made to look down upon himself and the other nations too, must be made to look down upon him in contempt. I know as a keeper of my peoples oldest traditions, that sometimes when an animal, be it a goat or an ox, is about to be sacrificed to the ancestral spirits, it must be driven into isolation, kept apart from the other animals, before it is slaughtered. And Africa today is being slaughtered.
The wars that are tearing her apart, the thing that is called Aids, that is raging like wild fire though the plains and valleys though my motherland, are all part of the arsenal of murder that is being employed by certain organizations and nations, in order to bring about Africa’s destruction as a race. When I say this, I am not paranoid; I am a man who has studied a number of terrible facts that are to be seen in Africa for some years now. Africa is being destroyed. There are those in whose interests it is that this, the Mother Continent of humankind must be depopulated though war famine and disease and sent into oblivion along with the great knowledge that it’s people possessed. I have taken an oath that even if Africa is ultimately destroyed, as the great prophets once for saw that it would be, the shiny fruits of its children’s mind would not perish.
Hundreds of books and
magazines have been written and published about Native American
people and their undeniably great cultures that they once possessed.
Hundreds of books have been written and published in the west about
the Hindu people of India, their religion, their sciences and their
great philosophies. But nobody ever wants to write anything
worthwhile and in depth about Africa.
They treat the ones they
talk about as if they were not part and parcel of the African
continent at all. Nowhere is this more evident than when European
scientists talk about Egypt. They deal with the Egyptians as if
Egyptians were a totally separate race from the rest of Africa, and
yet anyone that knows Africa well will tell you that Africa is
interconnected. That the various people of our Mother land are inter
connected as are the gears and flywheels of a clock, and to see the
people of Egypt apart from the rest of Africa is a fraud, a
delusion, a crime. The people of Egypt were an African people, not
at all removed from those in Nubia, in Ethiopia and in those African
regions far to the South of Egypt.
The same thing is done
when writers write about people such as the pygmies in Central
Africa, the Wat-wu. One writer even went as far as to say that the
Wat-wa were not an African race and I ask myself, where the
thundering hell this white fool thinks the Wat-wa comes from? On
which far island does he find them? Anyone that knows the culture
and the language of the Wat-wa will tell you that this culture and
language are interconnected with the cultures of other people in
that part of Africa, where the Wat-wa, or Twa are to be found. This
deliberate separation of Africa, the creation of some of the
separate races and tribes has resulted in great disaster for the
people of Africa as a whole.
I Credo Mutwa want to
expose these crimes, shameful crimes of the intellect. And as a
first step towards correcting this injustice, I want to tell you
that it was not only the Mayas, the Incas, the Aztecs and other
people of Central and South America who possessed amazing knowledge
about the mysteries of the Universe. It was not only these people
that possessed knowledge about solar as well as lunar eclipses, as
well as the Earth’s movement though space. Our people of many tribes
in Southern, Eastern and Central Africa possessed this knowledge.
And they passed it on from generation to generation in various ways,
but mostly orally.
A city with a wall of silver all around it. A city built at the huge mountain of pure crystal. The mountain of knowledge. The mountain from which all knowledge on earth comes. And a mountain to which all knowledge on earth ultimately returns. This old woman told me that her grandmother had told her this story while she was still a virgin of some fifteen years or so and under going initiation into the mysteries and the culture of the Bahutu people. The old woman went on to tell me that many generations ago, there came to the land of the Bahutu, a group of little yellow skinned men, who wore colourful robes and strange brightly coloured hats.
These men she said had come in search of the great city of knowledge which they had heard many, many years ago, stands in the earth under the Mountains of the Moon- the Ruwensory Mountains. This story remained in my mind and was one of the many, many strange stories that I had heard during my long, long travels through Africa. And then much to my amazement, in the year 1975 there arrived at my home in Soweto, a friendly bright priest from Tibet.
The priests name was Akyong Rin Poche, whom ever today I still regard as a great friend of mine, is a man who sparkles like a glass of precious champagne. He is a man, unlike most Tibetan monks whom I have met in my life, who looks at life through the mask of humour. He is a man who ever smiling. A man whose ever word is perfumed with humour. A man who laughs readily. A lovely and lively fellow human being. was honoured to talk to this man in one of the huts that formed the museum village that I had built in Soweto, and Akyong Rin Poche nearly knocked me over by asking me a question that caught me totally by surprise, and which brought back memories of bygone years in a green and half forgotten Central African country. "Do you know anything," he asked," About the city of copper, which is said to be somewhere in Central Africa?" For a few moments I was stricken Dumb by astonishment.
And the I replied," Yes, honourable Rin Poche. In the days I was travelling through the land of the Watutsi and the Bahutu, the land that was then known as Rwanda Urundi, I heard a story about this mysterious city, and I also heard that this city lies deep under ground- under the Mountains of the Moon." Akyong Rin Poche threw another surprise at my feet. He told me how in olden days a great Lama led a group of fellow monks on an expedition into Central Africa in search of this mysterious city, and that Lama and his followers were never heard from again. I was stunned, here was an African story being confirmed by a man from Tibet.
I was totally
flabbergasted, and I thanked God that many years ago I had set
myself the task of recovering that I had learned through my long
journeys through Africa. Today Rwanda and Burundi are countries in
grip of death. Tens of thousands of people have been slaughtered.
Scores of tribes have been decimated and scattered, never to be
reformed again. And great quantities of knowledge have been lost
forever. This is the agony of Africa. This is the shame of my
motherland.
In many western
countries, when an old person dies it is simply the death of an old
human being who has gone through life and whose days on earth now
come to an end. But in Africa, the death of an elder- an old man or
an old woman, becomes a supreme disaster because in the mind of that
elder often carries knowledge passed down from parent to child.
Knowledge that is not only valuable to Africa and her children, but
to human kind as a whole. No matter where you go in Africa, no
matter how deep into the interior of the dark continent you tread,
you will find very ancient stories which are incredibly similar.
Some say that these
creatures were like crocodiles, with crocodile like teeth and jaws,
but with very large round heads. Some say that these creatures are
very tall beings with snake like heads, set on long thin necks, very
long arms and very long legs. There are those that tell us that
these gods who came from the skies travelled through the lend in
magical boats made of bright metal, silver, copper or gold. Boats
which had the ability to sail over water or even to fly through the
sky like birds.
Tonga as you know means God, but the word Ila also means god, thus the Tongaila people are called the people of the God Ila- the wise old god, who according to some stories created the earth and everything in it. The Tonga and the Tongaila used to tell me that not only are the chosen people sent by God to guard the Kariba Gorge, but they are also in yearly touch with the great gods who come from the stars, whom they call the Bananaila, the children of Ila. Now let us go to West Africa for a while, in the land of the Dogon, there, one is told that when the Nommo arrived from the sky in their fantastic sky ship, there were several of them, thirteen or fourteen of them.
And they created a lake
around their sky ship and every morning they used to swim from their
sky ship to the shores of the lake and there preach to the people
who assembled in large numbers around the lake. It is said that
before the Nommo departed, returning with a great noise back to
their home star, they first chose one of their number, killed it and
cut its body up into little pieces and then gave these pieces to the
assembled people to eat in the first sacrificial ritual of its kind
on earth. When the people had eaten the sacred flesh of the star
creature and drunk its blood mixed with water, the Nommo took the
lower jaw of their creature and by some incredible fact of magic
brought the whole creature back to life again. We are told that this
is the way that the Nommo taught our people that there is no death
and that behind every death there shall be a resurrection.
It is said hat Gabato
arrived on earth in the mouth of a great serpent with all the
colours of the rainbow, And this serpent, crawled all over the
earth, and such was its size and so great was its weight that
wherever it went it created gorges and valleys and canyons. What I
found was very astonishing, was that in many countries of the world,
amongst the aborigines of Australia, and amongst the native people
of the Americas, as in Africa, you find belief in the rainbow
serpent. And you also find belief in the feathered serpent.
It was already known to the mystics of Africa long, long before the Christian religion was established in Europe, and further more, the various types of cross were used by African healers and mystics for either good purposes, or evil ones. Africans believed that the cross, either made of wood, ivory or metal was a powerful object, possessed of great magic, capable of unleashing powers of healing, or renewing or powers of destruction and killing.
There were three types
of cross that Africans used for healing, there was the T-shaped
cross known in Western mysticism as the tau cross, then there was
the proper cross of the kind we are told Jesus was crucified upon. A
cross with a long stem and short arms. Then there was the unsaid
cross, known to white people as the Ankh, which many western
thinkers wrongly assume to have been only known to the ancient
Egyptians. This ankh was actually known by our people as the knot of
eternity, or the knot of eternal life, and it was used even by Khoi
San people, for purposes of healing.
They believed that this beautiful son of God the Father and God the Mother whom they knew by various names, had lost his left leg in a savage fight against a terrible dragon, some say a gigantic crocodile which walked on its hind legs, its rear legs much, much longer than its fore legs. The symbol of this handsome God of the sun, this hero God and bringer of peace, was also the unsaid cross, Which the Zulus called Mlenze-munye. The Swazis knew him as Mlente-munye. The name Mlenze-munye or Mlente-mmunye mean the on legged one.
The one with one leg.
And incidentally, when Africans saw the cross which missionaries
often hung around their necks, they immediately recognized it as the
symbol of the eternal God with one leg who dies and is born again
forever and ever. And they respected missionaries as messengers from
this God. Which is why in some part of Africa missionaries were
called a name which is also one of the many names of the African sun
god, namely Muruti, which means the great teacher, a name by which
Twana speaking, Owambo speaking and Sotho speaking people still call
missionaries to this day.
Before a person was treated for cancer, the herbs, the powdered herbs which were to be used in this treatment, were first laid out on a piece of clean springbok skin on the likeness of the perfect cross, then spoon after spoon, they were taken and poured into a clay pot which had been blessed several times. There were forms of the cross, which unlike these which I have briefly described which were used for healing, were used for extremely destructive purposes and one of these is what the white people call the Saint Andrews cross.
The X-shaped cross which even today we find teachers in mission schools using to mark a wrong answer written by a pupil in his or her exercise book. Africans believed that the X-shaped cross possessed great powers of evil, and they used it to put curses upon people. It may be of interest to you to learn that when a Xhosa person from the Eastern Cape, says that you are crazy, you are mad he says, "Uphameene."
And the literal meaning
of this word is, "You have a cross put upon you," across which has
made you cross witted, mad. In ancient times and even modern times,
when a African artist, woodcarver or decorator of any kind draws a
cross, he or she must take great care to only draw one of those
crosses that heal and not to dare to draw, carve or render in beads,
one of the evil crosses, because Africans say that the first person
that gets affected by a negative engraving or a negative drawing is
the artist himself. And the first person to be affected by a
positive drawing or a positive engraving is the artist himself or
herself.
I wanted to meet these wise people, and when I came to the home stead, a collection of grass and wooden huts, protected by a wooden fence, I saw a number of women and children standing inside the fence near the gate. These people were smiling at me and their smiles grew even wider as I drew near the gate, the woman standing nearest to the gate, moved slightly to her left, coming to stand right in the centre of the open gate.
My eyes went to her feet, and all courage left me, and like the coward that I often am, I turned around and ran away, followed by loud peals of feminine laughter. I had dropped all my property, my bag and my walking stick upon the dusty path that led to the gate, and there I was running away like a fat ape seeking the safety of the green bush. The women laughed and laughed again, and when I threw a glance over my shoulder, I saw them come out and pick up my property and take it into the village. I had never seen anything like what I saw on that day, the thing that caused me to run away like an idiot fleeing a bush fire.
The woman who had stood
in the centre of the gate facing me had only two large toes on
either of her feet. It was as if I was staring at the feet of not a
human being, but of a monstrous bird from the valleys of folklore
and legend.
This is how I met a
tribe of people know as the Bantwana, which means children. A tribe
of people who claim that their remote ancestors were bird like
people who came from the stars and who mated with earthly woman and
produced these two toed human beings. The Bantwana people welcomed
me into their small village and for three months at the feet of two
of their elders, I learned about things that left me numb with
amazement. The Bantwana are shy people who in ancient times suffered
persecution at the hands of people of other tribes, but when they
like you and trust you, and feel pity for you, they tell you things
that fill you with great amazement. They tell you that there are
twenty four inhabited planets within the area of space in …
It is one of the most shameful truths in our country that those who live within our country's borders know little or nothing about the country in which they live. There may be those who resent my words but this is a fact and I want to state again that the tourist potential of the Republic of South Africa is grossly under-utilized by those whose duty is to tap into it and to activate it for the benefit of the peoples of this land. If those in authority could know more about South Africa's tourist potential, unemployment in our country would be cut down by a large percent and we would find hundreds of black people, especially, successfully involved in the tourist industry of our country.
I speak as someone who has travelled to many parts of the world, when I say that in some countries you find thousands of people gainfully engaged in their particularly country's tourist industry whereas in South Africa only a small percentage of people are engaged in this. What is utterly shameful is that, in South Africa, tourism is mostly a white-owned and white-run business and black people, even now, are left out in the cold or if they are engaged in the tourist industry at all, they are engaged simply as employees and paid servants. I have been to countries such as Japan where that country's tourist industry involves thousands of people. I have been to countries such as South America, especially, where you find hundreds of native Americans gainfully involved in their country's huge tourist industry.
Furthermore, when tourists arrive in South Africa they are shown many things only from the perspective of the European people and not from the African perspective. For example, they are shown South Africa's wild life and they are shown this wild life from the viewpoint of white scientists only - from the viewpoint of white settlers only and they are denied the rich folklore that black people - Koi Koi and Koi San people - knew and still know about wild animals. Tourists are shown, for example the South African wildebeest but they are not told what Africans think about this animal and thought about it - that the wildebeest was one of the holiest animals in Africa.
It was believed by the various tribes to possess powers of expelling negative spirits and other evil influences from the land and the tail of the wildebeest is used even now by shamans and sangomas as an instrument for exorcising evil spirits from people and from places. Tourists are shown the zebra, they are told that this is a Burchells Zebra or whoever's zebra and then they are given the Latin name for this African animal.
They are never told that to African people the zebra was an animal sacred to the great Earth Mother, an animal whose spoor possessed a power to take away infertility and other female illnesses from black women. I can say, bluntly, that a tourist gets cheated in South Africa in that he or she is denied the great beauty of the fold-lore that our people held and still hold regarding animals. I believe that this gross injustice must be remedied and remedied at once. Zoologist and other scientists have been in Africa for just over four hundred years but Africans have lived side by side with wild animals, birds and insects for millennia and over the years they built mythologies around these creatures, mythologies that should not be denied to those who visit our country's shores.
There are even places in
South Africa, places of great interest about which tourists know
nothing because those who live within our country's shores know
nothing and care to know nothing about those things. I say again
that South Africa is a paradise, a potential paradise for overseas
visitors if only those in authority could allow traditional Africans
to have their say and to talk to overseas visitors openly just as
trained tour-guides do. South Africa does not consist only of
scientists. South Africa does not consist only of white settlers.
She consists of ancient tribes and communities, which were here long
before the first Portuguese ship sailed around the Cape of Good
Hope.
It is a piece of wild bush and grassland. It is a piece of snarling rocks and a steep mountain slope. It is a piece of land on which there still grow some of the ancient flora, which one finds or used to find in this place. There will be accommodation at Vulindaba for young people to spend the night under the South African stars, to listen to stories and to listen to dancing and drum beating - to be one with the spirit of the wilderness and to be one with the spirit of the ancient Mountains of Magadi. This was a land once ruled by matriarchs - a land of hard-working people who were engaged in trade with seafarers far to the east of South Africa. There are many stories in this land.
There are many songs, which one can still hear being sung by old men and old women in this area. It is here that one must, once more, reconnect oneself with the bygone days of this country. There is mystery among the Megaliesberg Mountains. There are ancient things that you find here which have never been written about in any tourist brochure. There are historical structures, which still stand on farms in this area. There are ancient mines, which go deep into the entrails of the mountains. Mines, which were dug by people we do not know.
People who were mining for something we do not know. There are places amongst the Megaliesberg Mountains, which have been regarded as sacred by black people for hundreds if not thousands of years. Let me tell you about one such place. There is a farm along the Lazy River Road and on the edge of this farm there is a spring of pure water. Water that bubbles out of the earth, travels for a few yards or so and then disappears back into the earth again.
Our people called this spring the Spring of Marutwani, who is said to have been a great female healer and prophetess who lived nearly two hundred years ago. For many generations now sick black people, as well as traditional healers, have been coming to the Spring of Marutwani to get its pure healing water and in these two or three decades most the people who have been coming to this place have been members of the powerful Zion Catholic Church, the most powerful free church in South Africa, who have been coming here with plastic containers to get the water of Marutwani's spring. Now let me show you a blatant injustice - an injustice born of ignorance.
There are in England a number of sacred wells and springs whose waters are said to possess healing powers and in my travels to the far away British Isles I came across several such sacred wells and springs and one of them is called Chalice Well. The rusty coloured water that comes out of Chalice Well has been believed by the English people to possess healing powers for thousands of years and the waters of this spring are bottled and exported to distant parts of the world by the English people. But here is South Africa we have got springs like the Spring of Marutwani about which the world knows nothing and the water of Marutwani has got just as powerful healing powers as Chalice Well, Lourdes and other famous places like that in Europe and in England possess.
Everybody knows about Chalice Well but nobody knows about the Sacred Spring of Marutwani and the powers - real powers of healing that it possesses. Another thing. In the same area that Vulindaba is, about a few miles away from it, there stands a little hill, a small mountain, which for thousands of years has been viewed by black people as a mountain just as sacred as Mount Zion is to the people of Israel. This mountain is called Intaba kaNgwenya. This mountain stands out above the landscape and is visible from almost anywhere.
Black people, especially the Mandebele people, have held the belief that gods from the stars descend upon this mountain on a regular basis and ascend up this mountain also on a regular basis for reasons that we human beings do not know. Hundreds of Ndebele men and women over the decades have claimed to have seen strange creatures whose skins are chalk-white. Creatures with the heads of crocodiles and the bodies of human beings, descending out of the sky and then returning back to the sky from the top of this mountain. Many years ago, when I was a sangoma novice, I heard stories about these strange crocodile gods near the cooking fires of wise men and wise women who had their homes around this amazing little mountain.
The farmers upon whose
land this mountain stands do not realize what a sacred or an
important thing it is and they do not realize how it can be used to
attract visitors from far away across the wide belly of Mother
Earth. We have got treasures that the gods gave us, but these
treasures are unknown to us. This is the tragedy of South Africa.
When people visit Vulindaba they shall hear about all this and much
more.
This mountain is a huge, massive thing and seen from a certain angle it looks like a gigantic, sleeping leopard with its head resting upon its paws and what is amazing is that there is a visible feature on the slope of this mountain which looks like the open, snarling mouth of the leopard. There are two semi-circular features, which look like the mouth of a beast. The Sleeping Leopard Mountain is joined by a smaller mountain with a sharp point which the old women who used to have their kraals in this place many years ago used to call the Iswele, the Woman's Breast Mountain, and between the Leopard Mountain and the Woman's Breast Mountain there is a gap and from behind this gap rises the sun and it goes over the farm to set in the West.
We are told that ancient tribal astrologers used to observe the sun and the moon rising from behind these two mountains and they could tell which season it was by which part of the gap between the two mountains was the sun rising at any given time. This farm that I am talking about is now owned by the London based, Women for Peace, the brave women who go into places such as Bosnia and Sarajevo to comfort traumatized refugees and to care for the injured and upon this farm it is our intention to create unique attractions, which visitors will see.
One of these attractions will be a healing village where actual healing of people will take place. Traditional healers will be available here to tend to those who require their skills. Also in this place there will be a place for visitors to spend nights and days and there will also be a Garden of Mysteries, with standing stones erected according to traditional African ways. There will also be statues of various African gods, which will be seen in this place. This place, which did not have a name before, has been given the beautiful African name Naledi that means a star or the giver of enlightenment.
Here visitors will take
part in traditional astronomy and astrology and here stories will be
told and visitors will also be shown healing herbs grown in the
Garden of Mysteries. They will be shown that and much, much more.
Works of art and other beautiful traditional artifacts will be here
for sale for those who wish to buy them. It will be a place of Life,
a place of Light and a place of Beauty.
I know that this thing is as real as you and I. There is an African saying that says the poor woman who refuses to see the rapist, and who shut her eyes to his ugly presents will not however escape his presents and we can not fight AIDS by saying it is not there. It is there. We cannot, we dare not, the reality of this disease, which has such a serious impact on our society, which has a disastrous impact on our families. Although this disease is so evil it can be defeated. Just as other diseases in the past was eventually defeated.
May people who do not
realize that what we are seeing is actually a repercussion of
history. In my younger days diseases such as gonerea/syfeler and TB
were as terrible and incurable as AIDS is today and they were
eventually defeated. People today complain about anti-aids drugs and
in the past I heard people complaining about anti-venereal diseases
medicines in the 1930.
When things happen we
tend to forget them and because of our having forgotten them we tend
to make mistakes - mistakes that cost us our lives mistakes that
cost us our happiness, mistakes that even threaten the existence of
the very earth, which has nurtured and cherished us for so many
millions of years.
For some reason Aids, which was said to be a slow killer has become even more vicious than before and is killing our people with amazing speed. Today every person who dies of an illness is immediately suspected of having died of an Aids related illness. But that is not all. The name Aids carries with it a stigma a brand of shame so dark and terrible and intense I can only liken it to the kind of stigma that societies in Africa and in ancient Israel placed upon the shoulders of those unfortunate people that suffered from leprosy.
A lot of empty lip service is being paid in Sa today to the fact that everybody should fight to remove the stigma that is attached to Aids. But actually very little is being done to bring this about and the entities that caused this terrible stigma namely the newspapers and other news media are doing next to nothing to de-stigmatise Aids. They started it all and they should put it right. When Aids first appeared it was said to be a disease of drug-takers and homosexuals. People who are looked down upon by holier-than-thou sections of our society.
Suddenly we were told that Aids was a heterosexual disease, apart from being a homosexual one, and that it attacked even those people who thought that they were leading clean and God-fearing lives. It is the news media that should correct this dreadful mistake for they were the instruments of it spreading when this disease first came to existence. It is spoken by our people in this proverb that he who has farted inside the chieftain's great house should find perfumed herbs to burn in the fireplace and take away the smell - and this proverb I throw at the feet of newspapers, not only in this South Africa, but in other parts of the world as well.
You started this rot, you farted in the chief's house - now please find perfumed herbs and burn them to take away your stench. I am an old man, closely approaching my eightieth year and over my head the angry years have passed like water over the wall of a dam. I have seen many things and I can tell you from my e as well. You started this rot, you farted in the chief's house - now please find perfumed herbs and burn them to take away your stench. I am an old man, closely approaching my eightieth year and over my head the angry years have passed like water over the wall of a dam. I have seen many things and I can tell you from my experience that what we are seeing in South Africa is really something new but rather a repetition of history brought about by people who have failed to learn history's lessons.
Today in South Africa we talk about the disease called Aids, which we are told there, is no cure for. We are further told about how expensive are the medicines for combating Aids are and lastly, we are told about Aids orphans - Oh, I have seen them - the pathetic little waifs, the scatterlings left upon the cruel road of history by a disease that knows no pity. I have seen children already marked by the claws of Aids -children who will not see their fifty years of life.
Children who will be torn away from the arms of our motherland by Aids and hurled into the dark night of death without every having known what life really is and what life is about. I have seen wasted little children, many of them hardly more than skeletons - children whose mothers and fathers have already died of Aids. I have seen this and much more. I have seen the horrible impact that Aids is having on our people's family life. I have seen how Aids is separating men from wives, child from parent. I have seen that and much, much more, but within my swollen heart bloated with old age a voice, a grave voice from yesterday keeps on saying to me. "Mutwa, you have seen all this before.
Your country and your
people have gone through much of this before. Much of what we see
happening in South Africa today is not new but has happened before
and the people of our country failed miserably to learn from that."
There was once a time in my country's history when diseases such Gonorrhoea, Syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, which had been brought into Africa by people from Europe, were as deadly and incurable as Aids is today. If Aids today has created thousands of Aids orphans then, my friends, so did Gonorrhoea, Syphilis and Tuberculosis. Those people who are complaining about how expensive anti-Aids drugs are should listen to what I have to tell them now. In olden days there were crude medicines, which were used against Syphilis, Gonorrhoea and such like diseases. Most of these medicines were in the form of pills - ugly, round black coloured things, which were made of mercury. I remember them well.
These pills were priced right out of the lives of grass-route level Africans. I remember that some unscrupulous white doctors of those times used to demand two cows for a tinful of these mercury pills. Pills, which eventually drove the user mad - pills which tanned the teeth of those who used them over a time as black as those of goats. Very few of our people could afford these mercury tablets.
Even more expensive, were much later preparations created for the combating of venereal disease. I remember one such preparation known as 606 or Salvasan. These tablets were out of reach of our people and many, many people died horrible deaths, hideously disfigured by Syphilis, hideously mutilated by Gonorrhoea because they could not afford those silver bullets of those times. In those days, as is the case today, people were filled with a massive hysteria regarding diseases such as Tuberculosis and sexually transmitted diseases.
It is one of the most brutal facts of our country's history that in those days, if a farmer learned that one of his black labourers had contracted either Gonorrhoea, Syphilis or even Tuberculosis that while farmer became frightened that these diseases would, somehow be transmitted to members of his own family and he used to take the black man or woman away from his farm on the pretext of taking him or her to "a good doctor" in a nearby town and when the farmer and his worker reached an isolated spot the farmer used to order the worker to get off the wagon and to walk the rest of the distance - giving him a meaningless letter supposedly to be taken to the great doctor in the town and the farmer would stop his wagon and let the black person climb off and then he would wait for him or her to walk some distance away towards the imaginary source of help and when the person was still within rifle range the farmer used to draw his gun and shoot the worker dead, drag him or her into a clump of bushes and return home.
On so many occasions was this thing done almost all over South Africa, especially in Natal and in the Eastern Cape and the Northern Transvaal that our people began to develop a cold distrust of going to seek the help of doctors when they found themselves the victim or either Tuberculosis or venereal disease. It became a tradition for our people to believe and, rightly so, that if he or she sought the help of a doctor, he or she would not return alive but would be finished off somewhere along the road.
Today, there are still thousands of Zulu people, Xhosa people and people of other tribes who firmly believe that if they go to a clinic or seek the help of a doctor when they have got either Tuberculosis or venereal disease that they will be finished off. I have met hundred of such people and this belief which is still as strong now as it was over sixty years ago or more is one of the things that are making our battle against Aids a hundred times more difficult than it otherwise would have been. In the olden days, there was something, which our people used to call ingane kaNodndwa, which means the child of a prostitute. This child of a prostitute was often the offspring of a woman who had suffered for years from Gonorrhoea and who then died after giving birth to this child. Usually such children were born blind, which was a strange characteristic I observed of children whose mothers suffered from this scourge.
The child was born weak in body and in mind and was sometimes covered with sores and when having reached the ago of walking, unable to walk properly. In those days it was quite common for a woman, while walking along the street to be approached by a strange woman, a prostitute, and given a child wrapped in blankets, "here" would say the prostitute, "I give you this child, please bring it up in memory of me". In those days our people still believed very firmly in their sacred traditions and their belief in the traditional black religion had not yet been destroyed by the foreign creed known as Christianity. In those days our people regarded children as very sacred beings indeed - so much so that in no African tribe or community did you find an orphan.
All orphaned children were immediately adopted, handed over to relatives and brought up with dignity and love by people who still believed that the greatest duty of all human beings was to cherish, protect and nurture children. In those days things such as sexual abuse of children were totally unknown. In those days were believed that there was no greater luck that could befall a person but for that person to be given a living breathing child by a total stranger. I know many sangomas who, in their younger days, had been given children by prostitutes in Johannesburg and who brought up these children as their very own. One of the greatest sangomas, who once lived in Johannesburg, was a Sangoma known as Dorcas Danisa.
Dorcas Danisa was a true psychic like Mr. Uri Geller she could bend spoons and other metal objects and one day when she was still a young woman way back in the 1940's Dorcas had been approached by a destitute woman who had made a living out of selling her body and who was now riddled with syphilis and no longer able to earn a living. This woman approached Dorcas Danisa which a boy child who was deformed.
The boy was crippled, paralyzed from the waist down and Dorcas brought up this boy as her own child - saw to it that he had proper schooling and when Dorcas died, this boy now grown into full manhood inherited Dorcas's estate. Very, very few people knew that he was not her natural son, but a son by adoption - given to Dorcas by a strange a woman well over thirty years before. When a child was born deformed, when a child was born blind, the offspring of a prostitute our people used to cherish that child, bring it up as their own, and see to it that it grew into a mature, happy and respected human being.
But today, with our traditions destroyed and our religion shattered, black people have become utterly cruel and selfish and vicious towards those they should be assisting. Today our people run away from those of their countrymen and women who have been traumatized by Aids and Tuberculosis.
Children orphaned by Aids are treated worse than beasts. In Westernized and Christianized communities of today children suffering from Aids, weakened by HIV are beaten, ostracized, ill treated and forced to scavenge for scraps of food in dirty dustbins. I have seen it many times and I have wondered why our people have changed so much within one man's lifetime. We have become a nation of extremely cruel people towards our own kith and kin and the reason for this is that we have thrown away our culture and our religion like so much rubbish and accepted falsehoods shouted at us from the pulpits of deceivers and the altars of liars.
Today, if you want to adopt a suffering child, you have got to go through a whole hell of bureaucracy - you got to answer a thousand questions - you have got to travel many miles from this office to than one. Things are not being made at all easy for us African people to do what we feel is our godly duty towards those of us who are suffering. Sometimes in the darkness of the night when I lie unsleeping, lost in thought, I despair for the future of the black people. I despair for he future of my country. But at the same time, man is a winged creature, a creature given spiritual wings by the gods and these wings have one name and that name is Hope.
No matter how dark the night or how angry the storm a human being must keep his wings of Hope unfurled and strong otherwise he shall fall out of the skies as id Icarus and perish upon the rocks far below. It is true that there is darkness over South Africa, it is true that there is despair in the land at this moment but what we are facing is a disease like any other - a disease made worse by the high rate of unemployment in our country. A disease made worse by the fact that our people are starving. You can never fight a deadly disease like Aids if you are torn apart by hunger - if you are torn apart by unemployment, but there is hope, a very faint hope for the people of South Africa.
We must believe in that Hope otherwise we are a nation of dead things. There is a Hope that Aids can be defeated - there is a hope that the economic situation of our country can get better. One of the most amazing things that I have found in my long and bitter life is this - that it appears as if God prepared this world for the coming of animals and human beings and for the meeting of any emergency that may arise - that there isn't a disease on this planet that has a cure and man has but to look around carefully and find it. There is a plant growing in the veld in South Africa, especially in the Cape.
This is a plant with
rather a strong smell - a beautiful plant that looks like a delicate
fern - a plant with bright red, strange looking flowers, flowers
that taste almost like honey when you eat them. This plants name is
Sutherlandia Fructesence - a plant that was known for thousands of
years for its healing powers by Bushmen, Koi San and Koi Koi,
Hottentots as well as Bantu people. This medicine was one of seven
medicines that our traditional healers called xxxxxxx, the final
medicines, medicines which must only be used when the entire nation
is in danger as it is now. This medicine, Sutherlandia, is safe to
take and has been used by our people for thousands of years.
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