Credo Mutwa

A short biography and bibliography of this KwaZulu-Natal author

Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa (1921 - ) was born in Natal. His father was a former Catholic catechist from the Embo district near Inanda. His mother was the descendant of a long line of Zulu medicine-men and custodians of tribal lore and customs. His parents parted shortly after Vusamazulu's birth, because his mother refused to convert to Christianity. Mutwa was educated by his maternal grandfather, a medicine-man, and carrying the bags for him, the boy learned some of the older man's secrets.

In 1928 Vusamazulu was taken to the Transvaal by his father. They lived on a farm near Potchefstroom, where his father was a labourer. After twenty years of different farms the father found employment in one of the Johannesburg mines as a carpenter. Mutwa himself found employment in 1954 in a curio shop in Johannesburg and has been working there ever since.

When he visited his mother and grandfather in Zululand after thirty years of absence, he renounced Christianity at their command, and underwent the ceremony of purification, in order to begin training as a medicine-man.

He also prepared himself to assume the post of custodian of tribal lore and customs in the event of his grandfather's death. Mutwa has written African tales which have their roots in oral, traditional Zulu culture. Two well known collections of these stories are Indaba My Children (1966) and My People: writings of a Zulu Witchdoctor (1969).

Part 1: Introduction

I was born in Zululand on the 21st July 1921 according to my father. When my father met my mother, he had just lost his wife and a number of children in a terrible influenza epidemic, which had spread through Southern Africa, killing thousands of people in the years 1918 and 1919. Thus my father was a widower with three surviving children.

When my parents met it was in the year 1920, and my father was a builder and a Christian, and my mother was a young Zulu girl who practiced the ancient religion of the Zulu people. I am told that my parents were deeply in love with each other and wanted to get married, but the white missionaries forbade my father from marrying my mother until she became a Christian.

My mother’s father was a crusty old warrior who had taken part in the bitter wars that the Zulus had fought against the English, and he coldly refused to allow his daughter to come under the yoke of what he called the "religion of our enemies." I cannot allow my child to become a Christian," my grandfather was said to have said," These Christians are a race of thieves, of liars, and murderers, who stole our country from us at sword point and at gunpoint. I would rather die than see a Christ worshipping Christian within the stockade of my village. Never!"

Caught between catholic missionaries on one hand, and a stubborn old Zulu warrior on the other, my mother and father had no choice but to separate. Although my father already suspected that my mother was pregnant. A great scandal broke out in my grandfather’s village when my mother’s pregnancy was discovered. My grandfather chased my mother out of his homestead and she was taken by one of her aunts to her own village and there she gave birth to me, an illegitimate child, a child of shame. In those days there was no greater shame among the Zulus than for a girl to give birth out of wedlock. A great stigma was attached to this thing. After a time however, my grandfather allowed my mother - whom he loved dearly to return, back to his village and he insisted that she was not to see my father again.

It so happened that when I was about a year old, a younger brother of my fathers, who had heard about my birth come up from the Natal South Coast to my mothers village and asked my grandfathers permission to take me away, permission that my grandfather angrily granted. "Remove this disgrace from my home, Christian fellow!" he said to my fathers brother," And tell your brother that if I ever set eyes on him, I will make him suffer bitterly for what he did to my daughter. I will seize him and kill him very slowly indeed. Tell him that. I was taken to my father’s home in the South of Natal, on the northern bank of the Umkumazi River, and there I grew up. And it was while growing up that it was discovered that I was something of a visionary and a prophet. A talent, which together with an artistic inclination, to draw and to sculpt, the woman who now brought me up, my fathers new wife, did her uttermost to suppress.

I did not attend school until I was well within my 14th year of life. And because my family now kept on travelling, as a result of my fathers building profession, which took him from town to town, we became a family of travellers, who never stayed long in one place.

In 1935, my father found a job, a major building job, in the Transvaal and he brought us all from natal to join him where he was building. I attended school on and off in different schools, and then, in 1937 I went through great shock and trauma, when I was seized and sodomized by a gang of mineworkers outside a mine compound. This caused me to be ill for a long time.

And although I was taken to white doctors, I could find no help until my fathers brother, the same one who had taken me away from my maternal grandfather decided to take me back to my mothers village in the hope that I would find help there. And I did. My grandfather, a man whom my father despised as a heathen and a demon worshipper helped me and brought me back to health, where Christian doctors had failed. I, still a Christian and a confessing catholic, had not believed at all that my grandfather would be able to help me. And I was greatly surprised when he did, and I began to wonder were not the missionaries wrong when they called people such as my grandfather ungodly heathens. If my grandfather had been a stupid heathen savage, as white missionaries loved to call people like him, how is it that he had been able to help me?

It was here that I began to question many things that I never questioned before. Where our ancestors really the savages that quiet missionaries would have us believe they were? Were we Africans really a race of primitives who possessed no knowledge at all before the white man came to Africa? These and many, many other questions began to haunt my mind. And then one day when he was sure that I was fully returned to health, my grandfather told me that the illness that had been troubling me for so long, had actually been a sacred illness which required that I had to become a shaman, a healer. And when the old man said this to me, I readily agreed to undergo initiation at the hands of one of my grandfather’s daughters, a young sangoma named Myrna.

When they heard that I had become a sangoma, both my father and my stepmother, told my maternal uncle that I was never to set foot in their home again. And so I found myself on my own, a youth without a home, without family and so I began travelling. First I went to Swaziland and then the land of the Basotho, and I developed a wanderlust that was to be with me until today. I was not travelling for enjoyment, however I was travelling for knowledge, in search of clarity of mind and in search of the truth about my people.

Sometimes I would find jobs for a few months and then move on. Sometimes I found myself travelling with missionaries, the very people in whom I no longer believed. Sometimes I found myself travelling with miners, returning home from the Johannesburg gold mines. I came into contact with men and women of countries that I had not known about before. I learned things that I had not known about before. I experienced things, which only those that walk the path of the healer in Africa experience.

If a strange thing was happening in the place that I happened to be, I became one of those who were summoned to that place to help using Africa's ancient wisdom and knowledge in that situation. I found myself amongst amazing and strange people. I found myself amongst men and women, possessing knowledge that was already ancient when the man Jesus Christ was born. I heard stories from the lips of storytellers that went back to the remotest of the remote times. Stories that very few had ever heard before.

As the years past, I became filled with a fanatical obsession; I realized how rapidly Africa was changing. I realized to my shock and sorrow that the culture of my people, a culture that I had thought immortal, was actually dying. Very, very soon the Africa that I knew would become a forgotten thing. A thing of the past and I decided to try and preserve somehow, what I could of my people’s culture. How was I to do that? Friends advised me to write books. One friend advised me to build living museums in which I would preserve the dying culture of my people, and I struggled very hard to bring these things about. I wrote books, and I tried to borrow money from banks and organizations supposedly established to help black people who wanted to establish businesses.

Again and again, I was disappointed until, after long years of struggle. In 1975 I succeeded in obtaining permission and funds to build the first living museum, for the preservation of my people’s knowledge, religion and culture, in the centre of Soweto. Many black people misunderstood the purpose of my having built this living museum. They falsely accused me of cooperating with the apartheid regime and of quote-"glamorising the Soweto ghetto"

But I did not see myself as a politician, I saw myself as a healer, whose duty it was to preserve the greatness of his people, regardless of which government happened to be in power in South Africa. I saw myself as a healer whose purpose it was to create job opportunities for my starving people in Soweto, regardless of whether we were ruled by the apartheid regime or the A.N.C government. I believed firmly that knowledge was about politics and that a race that did not know its true greatness, will never obtain full freedom. And I was saddened by the fact that out people were making huge sacrifices, fighting for freedom when they did not know their full greatness. I said to my now late wife, Cecilia, and myself that if our people gain freedom under these circumstances, that freedom would be an illusion and a fraud.

Years of careful investigation had taught me the European powers that had colonized Africa had done more than just beat our people into submission with artillery and rifles. They had done more than simply sown confusion amongst our people by introducing many conflicting versions of the Christian religion amongst the people. They had deliberately so brain washed our people, that Africans had lost all self-knowledge, self-love, self-respect, self-pride and self-dependency. If you rob a people of all these things you turn them into a race of robots, forever dependent upon you. And even if you stood up and walked away from these people, and said tot them that you were giving them back their freedom, they would stand up and follow you wherever you are going for their minds were still your slaves even though their bodies were now free of your chains.

I believed then as I believe now, that the African has never really gained freedom and independence. Which is why our people have not been able to achieve what nations such as India and the tiger Nations of South East Asia, which were once also colonized by the white people as we were, have today achieved. For example today India is a nuclear power feared and respected by all nations on earth. India is admired for its great culture and its ancient religious philosophies as well as its other philosophies. While Africa is a downtrodden casualty of history forever dependent like a whipped slave upon her former oppressors.

This breaks my heart as a black man, I who, over many years of travelling through my motherland, have discovered that there was a time when we, the black people now held in contempt by many races were once masters of the world. When we, now derided as a nation of savages incapable of ruling itself were once the tutors of the early world, I feel great bitterness, when I see how far we have been made to fall. We whose sons and daughters once walked tall in the Americas, not as slaves but rather as civilizes and rulers. I wept when I found out that we were once the founders of some of the world’s oldest civilizations.

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.

There is not a single university in Africa, even now which teaches our people the truth about themselves. There is not a single school in South Africa even now which teaches our people about what it means to be an African. Our children who will stone a Sangoma to death, who will burn an Inyanga to death with a petrol soaked car tire even now, do not know, and were never taught that Africans were once kings of the Americas. They were founders of the amazing Olmec Civilization, whose breath taking relics craved in eternal stone still amaze visitors in museums to this day.

Our children who would gladly spit at the face of a sangoma, who hate the traditional dress of their people, would gladly put on a highland kilt, not knowing that amongst the founders of the Scottish nation were black men and woman and that the surnames of some of these Scotsmen, confirm this. Sholto-Douglas, what does this word mean? What does this Surname mean? Sholto-Douglas. It means Behold the black man. Black knights once fought for the kings of Scotland, and the Danish people who are fraudulently represented in the history books as blond and pink skinned Nordics, had large numbers of black men in their ranks. When Alfred slaughtered the Danes, in England so many years ago, amongst the warriors that he slew were dark skinned men, whose ancestors had come to Denmark from Africa thousands of years before. All these truths are hidden from our children.

Our political leaders, fail to create United Nations in Africa. Our political leaders live on a razors edge in Africa everywhere. They sit on shaky thrones from which they can get kicked off by any armed thug carrying the rank of colonel or general. Why? Because you can never build a viable nation on the cesspit of self-ignorance and self-despite. I have seen many African leaders at first sight, I have spoken to some of these men and all of them have one thing in common, they are simply white men in black skins. And this is why they fail again and again to create a peaceful, progressing and prosperous Africa. They are still slaves of their long departed colonial masters. Look at what is happening in South Africa now. Look at the confusion and the crime, the disunity and the epidemic political killings. What do all these things tell you? That our people lack self-pride and self-knowledge and therefore can never be politically united ever.

I have suffered in the cause of my battle against shadows. When you are fighting against ignorance you suffer just as much as you if you were on a battlefield under gun fire. I have lost people I love; I have lost a woman I love years ago in 1960 to the guns of the white man. To the guns of the oppressive regime In was falsely accused of being a supporter of. I lost a son, my first-born son, Innocent, to the knives of black activists, murdering people under the banner of the mass democratic movement.

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.

I am not seeking anybodies sympathy when I am telling you this; I just want you all to know who and what Credo Mutwa is. I am one of the scums of this earth, a creature dejected and ridiculed by university professors. Professors who later came sneaking into my home seeking the very information that they ridiculed me for revealing. I am a black man who has every reason to be bitter and angry. But somehow I cannot get myself to be angry. You cannot be angry at the ignorant. You cannot but pity the self-destructive.

Many years ago I was fortunate enough to find a woman who loved me, a woman who became my wife and the mother of my seven children. This woman was a strong and godly woman whose quietness, hid a person of steel, this woman gave up drinking, gave up dependence on alcohol out of the love of her children, and of love of fool and the cretin that she married. Today I stand alone, a man rejected by the world. A widower who lost his wife a few months ago under extremely sinister circumstances. My wife went to hospital supposedly suffering from cancer of the uterus, while I was away, and x-rays showed a strange metal device inside her womb.

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.

I am a sculptor, who has created large sculptures in various parts of south Africa. I am a painter who has painted pictures that were afterwards stolen from him, by exploiters. I am the writer of books, whose books fill the pockets of others with money, and nit his own. That is Credo Mutwa. I have used the knowledge that I acquired over many years of investigation and travel, I have used that knowledge to create job opportunities for my starving people. The villages that I built in Soweto, and which were destroyed by misguided youths.

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.

They tell us that the high incidence of rape in South Africa is a macho thing. Rubbish! It is deliberate, it is planned, and most of the woman that is raped in South Africa is raped for black magical purposes. Children who disappear; where do they disappear to? In South Africa today, criminals have got more rights than law-abiding citizens. A criminal will kill your father, in the morning, be arrested in the afternoon and be released on bail on the following morning to come back and kill you who helped the police to put him behind bars. Today in South Africa, as in Prohibition era, America, the distinction between the police and the criminals is getting dimmer and dimmer by the day. And all this is no accident.

Back to Contents

Biography Part 2: Africa My People

There are many shameful things that are being done to Africa and her people by Western nations these days. These shameful things are also being done to African people by Western researchers as well as ordinary writers, who deliberately by pass my Motherland, driving her into isolation, and treating her as though she was not part and parcel of humankind. These writers and these researchers deliberately over look many important facts about our people, and some time go out of their way to deliberately merely skim the surface of African knowledge, over looking the rest, and passing on to nations and races which they favour.

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.

For example it is a well-known fact that Native American people in Central and South America possessed deep knowledge about the universe, about the constellations, about solar as well as lunar eclipses. It is also well known that these people possessed great calendars of great sophistication and great accuracy. But the fact that African people of various tribes of Eastern, Central, Western, and Southern Africa possess the same knowledge has been overlooked. One particularly atrocious crime for which I cannot forgive people of Europe is that whenever they write about the people of Africa they deliberately separate them.

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.

For example anyone that knows Africa well will tell you that the many half-human, and half-animal gods that the Egyptians worshipped had their origins deep in Central as well as Southern Africa and that these gods are still being worshipped by the people of Africa even now. Here is yet another example of how the western investigator deliberately distort facts about Africa. There are writer that write about the khoi San people in Southern Africa- the Bushman people. These writers deliberately view the Khoi san as if they were an entity completely isolated from the rest of the African people, and yet I can tell you, I who have Khoi san blood in me, that the cultures of many black nations in Southern Africa were intimately interconnected with the Khoi san cultures.

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.

For example, for many years, the Belgium’s committed the crime of dividing up the people of the Burundi and Rwanda into two separate races. The Watutsi were believed to belong to the Nileotics, and the Bahutu were seen to be Bantu. But anyone who knows the history of these people will tell you that the Watutsi and the Bahutu are not so separate a people, they are simply two divisions of exactly the same people, and these two divisions had lived in peace for hundreds of years until animosity was stirred up between them by the Belgium colonists to suit their own sinister agenda. Before Africa vanishes under the clouds of endemic civil wars, before my motherland disappears under the fog of Aids and other man made diseases, designed for the extermination of my people, I Credo Mutwa, want to correct these blatant injustices.

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.

Back to Contents

Part 3: Mysteries of Africa

Before human beings were created on this planet, there had existed a very wise race of people known as the Imanyukela. These people had come from the constellation known to white people as Orion, and they had inhabited our earth for thousands and thousands of years. And that before they had left our earth to return once more to the sacred Spider constellation, they made a great evacuation under the earth, beneath the Ruwensory Mountains- the Mountains of the Moon. and deep in the bowels of Mother Earth, the Imanyukela built a city of copper buildings.

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.

Back to Contents

Part 4: The Origins of the Gods

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.

You will find African tribes and races who will tell you that they are descendants from gods who came out of the skies thousands of years ago. Some however say that theses gods came to them from the sea in magical boats made out of reeds or wood or copper or even gold. In some cases these gods and goddesses are described as beautiful human beings whose skins were either bright blue or green or even silver. But most of the time you will find it being said these great gods, especially the ones that came out of the sky were non human, scaly creatures, which lived most of the time in mud or in water. Creatures of an extremely frightening and hideously ugly appearance.

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.

It is further said that some of these sky gods carried their souls in little bags which hung from their belts. These souls being in the form spheres of crystals clear material. Spheres which could float about in the air, and which emitted a dazzling light. A light which could illuminate an entire village at night. We are told that some very brave African chiefs used to hold these great gods hostage simply by snatching their little shiny soul globes away from them and hiding them in holes deep in the ground.

Throughout Africa we are told that these mysterious beings taught human beings many things. They taught human beings how to have laws, knowledge of herbal medicine, knowledge of arts and knowledge of the mysteries of creation and the cosmos as a whole. We are told that some of these gods had the ability to change their shapes at will. They had the ability to assume the shape and the appearance of any creature that there is on earth whenever they had good reason to do so. A sky god could even turn itself into a rhinoceros and elephant or even a stork, a sky god could even turn turn itself into a rock or even a tree.

We are told that some of the gods used to travel through the sky in swings made out of brightly coloured lengths of rope. The Wutwa people of the forests of the Congo told me about one such god, who swung through the sky on a swing whose ends were attached to the clouds in the sky and who could go anywhere, no matter how far away, and come back before sunset on his magical swing.

In Africa these mysterious gods are known by various names, in West Africa, in the land of the Bumbara people these amphibian or reptilian sky gods are known as Zishwezi. The word zishwezi means either the swimmers or the divers or the gliders. It was said that these sky gods could dive from above the clouds down to the top of a mountain whenever they felt like it, they could also take deep dives into the bottom of the ocean and from there fetch magical objects and then bring them to the shore, placing them at the feet of the astonished black people.

In West Africa again, these creatures are called the Asa, which means the mighty ones of magic. It is from this word asa, a word that speaks great magical power that comes the name Asanti, which means a king, but literally means, the child of asaand as you know Asanti gave birth to the word, Ashanti.

In the land of the Dogon people we find the famous Nommo, a race of reptilian or amphibian beings who were said to have come from the Sirius star to give knowledge and religion to the black people of Dogon. Incidentally, scientists have never explained the meaning of Dogon; it means God Almighty and the Dogon people know themselves as the children of the God Almighty.

There are tribes in various parts of Africa which regard themselves as God's chosen people. These tribes call themselves by a name which means god. In South Africa there is a tribe that calls itself the Tonga, and another very large group which calls itself the Tsonga. And in Zimbabwe there are two tribes ,one of which is called the Batonga, and another that is called the Tongaila. The name Tonga, Tsonga or Donga means people of god and you will find these people living in some of the holiest and most spiritual places in Africa. For example, the Matonga people of Northern Zululand live in the area of the sacred St Lucia Lake which is believed by the Zulu people and other tribes in Natal to be the place where, hundreds of years ago, the great earth mother arrived in a boat of reeds, accompanied by her son and his two wives.

And she came to give laws, culture, religion as well as healing arts, and other mysteries to human beings. It is said that the great earth mother was a huge woman, very, very fat with bright green skin and so was her son and his two wives. There once existed in Zimbabwe a very sacred place called Kariba Gorge, which is now covered by a huge lake as a result of the damming of the Zambizi River at this place. In Kariba Gorge there lived two remarkable tribes, the Batonga, which means people of God, and the more remarkable tribe whose name is the Tongaila.

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.

And also that an individual must sometimes sacrifice himself or herself for the good of the community. It is the Nommo, we are told that taught the people of Africa about the mysteries of reincarnation, about the belief that, that which goes away, gone off on the wings of death, will always come back again on the fragrant wings of life. In the land of Nigeria, we hear of how the great mother goddess, Mawi gave birth to human beings after having created the world, and that after a number of centuries, people on earth became filled with selfishness and other forms of negative behaviour and the great mother who was now in the land of the gods, sent down her daughter, Gabato, to earth to once more place human beings upon the path of righteous.

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.

In the Americas, in South and Central America mostly, the feathered serpent is called Quetzalcoatl, and amongst my people, the Zulus, we find belief in a serpent called Yndlondlo. The Yndlondlo is said to be a huge mamba or a huge python, whose neck is covered in greyish blue feathers, like the feathers of a blue crane, and at the top of the serpents head grow three feathers. One green one, one red one and a white one which look like huge ostrich tail feathers. The Yndlondlo, like the (South) American Quetzalcoatl, is associated with God the Son.

Back to Contents

Part 5: Mysterious Africa the History of the Cross

A mystery that has fascinated African's for thousands of years. Seen in cross section, this rather dull looking crystal shows a cross like pattern in it. It shows a pattern of the kind that our people of olden days used to call the perfect cross, or the cross of the sun. Before I tell you more, I wish you to know that the thing known as a cross was not brought to Africa by missionaries, knowledge of the cross in its many forms, was here in South Africa from the remotest of remote times.

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.

The greatest users of the ankh, were the almost extinct Khoi Khoi or Hottentot people. The Khoi Khoi said that the unsaid cross represented their great sun god, Heitsie-Ibib. The zulus, Xhosas and the Swazis and other Ngoni speaking peoples of South Africa also believed in a sun god, who died each evening to be reborn again each morning. Who died each winter and was reborn again each spring.

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.

Our people believed also in what they called the perfect cross, the most powerful cross of all. This was a cross that had all its four wings of exactly equal length. The cross of the kind that white people call the Celtic cross. A cross which is often imprisoned within a circle, with all its wings of exactly equal length, our people used this cross, drawing it in its many forms, healing some of the most horribly diseases to which the body is prone.

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.

Back to Contents

Part 6: Children of Mars

Africa is a land full of surprises, and they who travel through her forests and upon the banks of her great rivers, and over her eternal plains must always be prepared to meet surprises. One day I was travelling along the Zambezi river, when I came to a home stead which people in villages that I had passed had told me about. I had been told that in this small village I would find some of the wisest people in the land, people who claim ancestry from creatures who are said to have come from the red star know as Liitolafisi, the red star whose name means the eye of the brown hyena is the star, or rather the planet that white people call Mars.

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.

Shame faced I walked towards a tree and stood under it trembling with fear and as I stood there a group of men came out of the village and walked laughing and smiling towards me. Nearly all of them had only two toes on each foot. They wore no shoes, and in the African dust their feet really looked frightening. They came around me and surrounded me and said, Do not be afraid of us, we are people just like you. What is it about us that frightens you? Unable to answer, my face hot with shame and embarrassment, I glanced toward their feet and then they roared with laughter.

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 …

Back to Contents

Part 7: More info on Credo Mutwa

Although South Africa possesses a huge, highly organized tourist industry, that tourist industry, however, has not scratched the surface let alone dented it of the colossal potential as a tourist Mecca and destination that our country possesses. South Africa could attract four or five times the number of tourists that she is at this moment attracting if only those, whose duty it is to attract those tourists, knew more about their country - about South Africa and knew just how huge is the potential that this country possesses as a Mecca for tourists.

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.

I am going to talk to you about two places. Two places whose potential as tourist destinations we are going to unveil. The first of these two places is a piece of land called Vulindaba, whose name means open the story or start the story. Vulindaba is at the foot of a range of mountains of the Megaliesberg Mountain system. It lies along a road named Lazy River Road. Vulindaba is going to be opened as a wilderness trail to young people, overseas visitors as well as school children. Vulindaba is a piece of unspoilt countryside.

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.

Not far away from Vulindaba, across the tarred road that leads to Hartebeespoort, you shall find another place, another farm which, like Vulindaba sits at the feet of the mighty Megaliesberg Mountains, but this farm is unique in that there is a river, the mighty Crocodile River, which flows through the land at the foot of a huge mountain, which old people used to call Nkwe Mountain.

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.

Back to Contents

Part 8: HOPE for South Africa

Hope for South Africa. No matter how dark the night may seem to be, No matter how angry the thunder storm, there is always a ray of light that can pierce those thunder clouds and that can make the night turn into day. No one can deny there is AIDS devouring our people like a dragon in this land. There are the people who say that AIDS does not exist and that it is not the fearful thing that we take it to be. I would like to ask these people most respectfully what? is that what is killing our people out there in the countryside; I have held many AIDS victims in my arms some of them have died in my hands. I know that there is some thing out there killing our people.

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.

There was a time when an African with TB all he had to do is go home and die exactly as the case with AIDS today. But people must never forget that the greatest disease people have is there minds and that if we put our minds together we can defeat this ailment. In the darkness today that is South Africa, in the darkness, as death and misery there is however a faint green ray of Hope in a plant called Suterlandia Furtencens. This plant was known for hundred's of years by the Khoi-Khoi and Khoi Sun as well as African people. It was the plant in older days was the weapon against diseases such as cancer to TB and other diseases. It was also a sedative and a tonic amongst the untold story of Africa.

Back to Contents

Part 9: AIDS in South Africa
There was someone whose name, if I remember correctly, was Santana or Santanaya (George Santayana) - a person of great wisdom indeed. This Santana or Santanaya spoke the following words: "If people fail to learn from history they will always repeat history's mistakes."

Upon this planet all living entities - be they birds or animals or even human beings - are given an important ability by the Creator, which is to learn from experience and on learning, to survive the angry night and the roaring storms of existence upon this world. But many of us, supposedly civilized human beings, appear to be losing this very important God-given talent. We no longer appear to have the capacity to learn. We take it for granted that we are intelligent beings. We take it for granted that we know many things - but the fact is that we know nothing or next to nothing and that we seldom learn, we human beings, from experience.

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.

Today a hideous pandemic known as Aids is sweeping through South Africa today we are told that four million people, our brothers and sisters, our neighbours, our fellow tribesmen and tribeswomen are already contaminated by Aids and are living with it. Hundreds of people have died since Aids appeared in South Africa some 20 or 21 years ago. The bony hand of Aids has snuffed out hundreds of our brightest stars, our young intellectuals, our young leaders, and the number of deaths is increasing fast.

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."

What am I talking about? There was once a time in the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's when Tuberculosis was just as deadly a killer of our people as Aids is today - in those days Tuberculosis was known as Consumption and any black person who was told by doctors that he or she had Consumption reacted exactly as black people who are told that they have got Aids do today. The person knew in those days before streptomycin and other magic anti-Tuberculosis drugs that a sentence of death had been passed by some angry god over him or her and that he or she must silently and with as much courage as possible await the dark Angel of Death's coming.

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.