The religious war between my mother and a sangoma

(Pic: Flickr / Hanna Pritchett)

I was born and bred in a one-street town in Nhlangano, Swaziland. Throughout my childhood, every Sunday started the same way: with a high-speed chase for a hen. The bird would be caught and slaughtered while the water was boiling on top of Mama’s Falkirk wood stove. Anyone still asleep in the house would be woken up by the aroma from the strong bush tea brewing on the stove. Fused with the burning charcoal from wattle trees that surrounded our house, the aroma filled the kitchen and spilled to the entire house.

Enter Mama’s kitchen on a Sunday morning and you would find her cooking both breakfast and lunch at the same time. She did that religiously every Sunday to save time. Mama was always in a hurry. She may have rubbed that off on me as I am defined by those who know me as a woman who seemed to be always pressed for time – it does not matter where I am hurrying to. Mama had to feed five children, clean the house, prepare our clothes and then drive her brood to church to conduct Sunday School classes. She was the Sunday School teacher at church and a school teacher during the week.

One particular Sunday, we left the chicken slowly simmering on the wood stove while we dashed for church as usual. I sat at the back row and listened attentively to Mama as she did the best she could to preach to a young congregation. Mama loved parables more than she did verses. She had some from her personal life too. That morning, she told one of her very colourful stories that occurred donkey’s years ago. She told the story to convince us of why our God is the most high of all others. Mama related how one day in her class a pupil had refused to accept punishment for failing to submit an assignment. The girl instead decided to walk out of the school premises and go home to fetch her mother, who was a sangoma.

In a short while there was a group of people gathered around the school administration block, watching the pupil and her sangoma mother sing and beat drums as they called upon the spirits to destroy the woman responsible for the unhappiness of the child. Another child was sent from the scene to tell Mama, the teacher, to run off through the back gate and never return. Mama shocked us all at Sunday School as she reported how she stubbornly went to the scene and confronted the sangoma and her daughter.

The crowd tried to stop her and urged her to apologise to the mighty sangoma. Mama backed down. She then started to dance in front of us, her Sunday School class, as she tried to imitate the sangoma. We all burst out laughing. Mama went on to say that the sangoma had a reputation. Everyone who had ever confronted the sangoma would be cursed. People in the village were terrified of her. They even worshipped the ground on which she walked to store favours in case they wronged her one day. There was talk that some people even gave her livestock for no reason at all. Now she was in a stand-off with a woman who not only had not bought a favor but needed one soon! The crowds managed to separate the two women. Soon thereafter Mama was married and left the village.

As I sat in the back row of the Sunday school class, I envisioned Mama in the days when she was still a size 6. I envisioned her dancing around against another woman. I had never seen her go up against anyone in my life; indeed I had thought of her as a meek person. I wondered what it would be like to see the real thing. My curiosity would be satisfied very soon! In fact it was as soon as at the end of the church service when we got home from church.

There we found that our gardener, Dlamini, who had remained in his room at the back of our house while we went to church, was in trouble. Dlamini was also my mother’s cousin. Unknown to us, he had a girlfriend who was much older than him, and who had children as old as Dlamini himself. She was also a sangoma.

What we saw in our yard that day gave me my first experience of what a sangoma initiation graduation ceremony must be like. She was clad in full sangoma attire. Her hair was smeared with red earth. She had long strands. She was topless and her breasts hung far below her belly. She had red and white beads across her bosom. Wrapped around her was a red cloth. Her wrists had red and write bead bracelets which shivered as she clapped her hands together, hard. Her feet hit the concrete ground so hard I thought she would bleed out from her already cracked heels.

Her teenage children were singing their lungs out as their mother continued to shout out to Dlamini to pay the children’s maintenance as he had promised. Dlamini was epileptic. He had long collapsed in a fit. Mama started shouting at the woman who had made our front yard her dancing ground. She rebuked the devil the same way that she had done for us at Sunday School. The woman replied. She called out some clan names and instructed the ancestors to curse Mama. It was only then that Mama recognised the sangoma to be the same woman she’d had a verbal showdown with some twenty years ago at the school.

I was left in a state of confusion as I tried to understand whether the revelation had angered or excited Mama. She erupted in chorus and tried to outdo the choir of teenage sangomas standing in front of her yard. As the sangoma danced moving closer to our house, Mama did the same and danced towards the sangoma. The war of words between the two women turned personal. It was no longer about Mama protecting her employee and cousin. It was a resurrection of an old animosity. Coincidentally the enemy Mama had evaded for so long and forgotten to tell us about was right at her doorstep.

Soon it was not very easy to tell the sangoma apart from the Sunday School teacher. Both women were dancing and singing and shouting profanities at each other. After two decades, it was a rendezvous. The women the gods had kept separate for so long had met again. Mama was once again face to face with the devil incarnate. And the devil was her cousin’s lover, who could become her family too if she had her way!

Cece Celestina is a lawyer based in Johannesburg. She was born, raised and educated in Swaziland.

10 years ago

WHO declares Liberia Ebola-free

A man walks past an Ebola campaign banner in Monrovia. (Pic: AFP)

The UN health agency on Saturday declared Liberia Ebola-free, hailing the “monumental” achievement in the west African country where the virus has killed more than 4 700 people.

“The outbreak of Ebola virus disease in Liberia is over,” the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a statement, adding that 42 days had passed since the last confirmed case was buried.

That period is double the number of days the virus requires to incubate, and WHO hailed its eradication as an enormous development in the long crisis.

“Interruption of transmission is a monumental achievement for a country that reported the highest number of deaths in the largest, longest, and most complex outbreak since Ebola first emerged in 1976,” it said.

The declaration was a source of both great pride to Liberians who had been stalked by the deadly virus they simultaneously sought to battle.

“We are out of the woods. We are Ebola free. Thanks to our partners for standing with us in the fight against Ebola. We are Liberians,” tweeted Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown.

The news was also cheered by international organisations like the Red Cross, Unicef and Doctors Without Borders (MSF), as well as officials from the US and European Union.

However whailing the “important marker” White House spokesman Josh Earnest, in a statement, said: “The world must not forget that the Ebola outbreak still persists in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Guinea.

“We must not let down our guard until the entire region reaches and stays at zero Ebola cases.”

Relief and sorrow

The WHO warned that because the Ebola outbreaks were continuing in neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone, the risk remained high that infected people could re-enter the country.

Because of that risk, MSF also tempered its applause of the declaration with reminders that the crisis will not be over for any one nation until the virus has been eradicated everywhere.

For average Liberians, the development was a source of both relief and sorrow.

“I lost a brother in the Ebola crisis so I am happy and sad,” said 40 year-old Monrovia taxi driver Nyaningo Kollie.

During the two months of peak transmission last August and September the capital Monrovia was the setting for “some of the most tragic scenes from West Africa’s outbreak: gates locked at overflowing treatment centres, patients dying on the hospital grounds, and bodies that were sometimes not collected for day,” noted WHO official Alex Gasasira, who read the organisation’s statement Saturday.

At the height of the crisis in late September Liberia was suffering more than 400 new cases a week, with uncollected and highly infectious bodies piling up in the streets of Monrovia, a sprawling, chaotic city at the best of times.

The health system – embryonic before the crisis, with some 50 doctors and 1 000 nurses for 4.3 million people – was devastated, losing 189 health workers out of 275 infected.

“At one point, virtually no treatment beds for Ebola patients were available anywhere in the country,” Gasasira recalled.

Schools remained shut after the summer holidays, unemployment soared as the formal and black-market economies collapsed and clinics closed as staff died and non-emergency healthcare ground to a halt.

And then, as suddenly as it had spread, Ebola retreated.

‘Thank all Liberians’

Liberia, which had recorded 389 deaths in one week in October alone, saw fatality counts dropping below 100 within weeks, and into single figures by the start of 2015.

During a WHO-hosted ceremony Saturday in the Ebola crisis cell in Monrovia, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf saluted her fellow citizens and health workers for rising to the crisis.

“I thank all Liberians for the effort. When Ebola came, we were confused. We called on our professionals. They put their best in the fight, this is the result I have sent a message to the international community to thank them,” she said.

In the coming years there will be a reckoning on the response to the greatest ever Ebola outbreak, which left 11 000 dead.

The West was initially accused of ignoring the crisis and then treating Liberia and its neighbours as pariahs, blocking flights and quarantining returning health workers after the first-ever domestic infections outside of Africa, in the US and Spain.

The WHO, at times seen as overly bureaucratic and politicised, was berated for waiting until August – almost five months after the outbreak was identified – to declare it a “public health emergency of international concern.”

“Quite simply, we were all too late. The world – including MSF – was slow to start the response from the beginning,” said MSF’s head of Ebola operations in Brussels, Henry Gray, in a statement.

10 years ago

Namibia: Government to name and shame irresponsible fathers

(Pic: Flickr / Matt)

Namibian fathers who fail to pay maintenance for their children could soon have their photos published in the media.

The Namibian reports that the country’s justice minister Albert Kawana announced the decision as a “desperate and last resort” to shame “dodgy” fathers into meeting their parental responsibilities.

There are plans to begin publishing the photos in the next three months, but the rules for implementation are still to be finalised and maintenance officers will have to obtain a court order before photos of the men can be published.

“Everyone should know who that person is. It is also undermining the efforts by the government to alleviate poverty and it puts the responsibility on the state when fathers don’t play their role,” Kawana told The Namibian.

Liberia emerges from the nightmare of Ebola

Staff and volunteers at the ELWA hospital in the Liberian capital Monrovia wearing protective gear. (Pic: AFP)

Heavily pregnant when she died, Fatimah Jakemah was bagged, bleached and carted off for cremation, one of dozens of new cases in the capital that week as Ebola tightened its grip on Liberia.

It was early September and the outbreak was about to mushroom into an emergency of historic proportions that would eventually see 4 700 deaths throughout the country.

Across town, Olivia Clark found herself handing another collection team her 18-month-old son, Aaron, who had slipped away a few hours earlier, too young to fight the deadly virus amplifying inside his tiny body.

Her husband was already dead and Red Cross trucks piled with bodies were becoming a familiar sight as Ebola stalked the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods, terrorising families crammed into squalid slum housing.

Amid the horror, one case stood out as uniquely cruel.

In the quarantined hamlet of Ballajah, 150 kilometres away, 12-year-old Fatu Sherrif was locked into her home with her dead mother as panicked neighbours fled to the forest.

Her cries could be heard for several days by the few who had stayed in the abandoned village before she died alone, without food or water.

By October the situation was so bad that besieged Red Cross disposal teams had given up trying to separate Ebola victims from those who might have met other ends, following a government directive to “burn them all”.

As Ebola set out on its murderous path through Liberia and its neighbours Guinea and Sierra Leone, credible medical experts were predicting worst case scenarios of more than a million cases and tens of thousands dead.

‘Ebola-free’

Yet treatment units are now lying empty and life is returning to normal as Liberians emerge from the nightmare which enveloped them in the summer and autumn of 2014.

If there are no new infections in the next 48 hours, the World Health Organisation (WHO) will declare Liberia “Ebola-free” on Saturday, 42 days – or twice the incubation period of the virus – after the last case.

At the height of the crisis in late September it was seeing more than 400 new cases a week, with uncollected and highly infectious bodies piling up in the streets of Monrovia, a sprawling, chaotic city at the best of times.

The health system – embryonic before the crisis, with some 50 doctors and 1 000 nurses for 4.3 million people – was devastated, losing 189 health workers out of 275 infected.

Schools remained shut after the summer holidays, unemployment soared as the formal and black-market economies collapsed and clinics closed as staff died and non-emergency healthcare ground to a halt.

And then, as suddenly as it had crept in, Ebola retreated.

Liberia, which had recorded 389 deaths one week in October, found the tally dropping below 100 within weeks and into single figures by the start of 2015.

The last person to die was Ruth Tugbah, a 44-year old fruit seller who contracted the virus in mid-March, probably through having sex with her boyfriend, an Ebola survivor.

In the coming years there will be a reckoning on the response to the greatest ever Ebola outbreak, which has left 11,000 dead and is still simmering in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

The West was accused of ignoring the crisis early on and then treating Liberia and its neighbours as pariahs, blocking flights and quarantining returning health workers after the first-ever domestic infections outside of Africa, in the US and Spain.

‘Morale transformed’

With the outbreak nearing its peak and facing criticism over US inertia, President Barack Obama ordered the largest ever US deployment to the region in September, sending 2,800 troops to build 11 Ebola treatment units across Liberia.

Critics pointed out that cases had already begun to fall before they were set up and most remained empty.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has pointed out, however, that the military activity was just a small proportion of the full American response which included – among numerous projects – funding 10 000 civilian responders and 70 safe burial teams.

An official told AFP that clinics it funded had treated 943 patients, 190 of whom had Ebola.

In any case, David Nabarro, the UN’s special envoy on Ebola, argues that the appearance of the Americans and their military clinics gave people hope.

“I watched in September and October as the arrival of the Americans in Liberia completely transformed the morale of people and the government and, I believe, contributed to a much more widespread change in behaviour than any of us imagined would be possible,” he told reporters this week in Dakar.

“Virtually the whole country in the space of a couple of weeks in the beginning of October adopted different ways of living and reduced their risk of infection.”

When – if – the WHO declares Liberia “Ebola-free” on Saturday there will be no bunting, no ticker tape parades, just the repeated reminder on the airwaves to guard against complacency.

Liberia will remain alert to two threats – the possibility that someone with Ebola might get into the country under the radar, and that “small flare-ups” seen in other outbreaks are a possibility over the coming months.

“My colleagues in Liberia told me that they expect to be keeping extensive surveillance and practising precautions for probably as long as one year,” Nabarro said.

10 years ago

On African unity

A man holds a placard as he and others attend a silent vigil against xenophobia, held at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg on April 21 2015. (Pic: AFP)

Much has been said already about the xenophobic attacks in South Africa and I fear falling into repetitiveness by merely echoing the sentiments others have already expressed. However, it is an issue close to my heart and I couldn’t completely exempt myself from this conversation.

I and fellow Africans stood united under the banner of “Je suis kwerekwere” and this highly influenced my philosophy of African unity. But instead of discussing South African discrimination, permit me to say a few words on the politics of African togetherness.

There is little co-operation between Africans and a lack of encouragement towards discovering ourselves and exploring, accepting and celebrating our diversity. I see Africans from various countries insisting on cultural individuality and lack of familiarity, sometimes with people from neighboring countries, reducing them to mere “foreigners”.

Due to South African influences, I have a certain agility in associating and communicating with southerners from Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana and Namibia.

I can switch quickly from greetings in Oshiwambo to Sotho to Zulu. We can talk about pap and vleis and connect through food, music, customs, parlance, and many other components of culture that bring us together yet when I say we are one, denial is common. I am not from South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia or Botswana but I have learned the things these peoples have in common and I can co-exist with them through my understanding of who they are as a people.

In my circle I also have West Africans, and they too deny their proximity. Classic examples are Nigerians and Ghanaians. They too speak of extreme differences yet my knowledge of one catapulted me into the world of the other with swiftness.

I am not denying individuality or stating by any means that African culture is uniform or perpetuating the myth that Africa is a country. What I am saying is that Africans have many similarities they refuse to accept. And although our distinctiveness varies from region to region there is something about being African that connects us all.

I blissfully switch from “jambo” to “mbote” depending on who I am addressing, and my articulacy and ‘chameleon’ personality always leads to this one question: “Clênia, where are you from?”

I have learned a couple of things with this frequent question. One is how we expect each other to not know each other’s culture and how much we have pledged to our countries but have not pledged to our identity. I say this because if we really knew and understood roots, we would be able to identify fruits. Our diversity is expressed through various forms but if we know origins we can understand that fufu, funje and pap are essentially the same concept translated in different ways. This realisation will aid us towards engaging with each other and stop seeing ourselves as mere “others” because we are under different flags.

Xenophobia is not only a South African concern, it’s a general African problem because we all have prejudices against each other, are ignorant of each other’s struggles and existence, and threatened by one another more than we would like to admit.

Time and time again I see impenetrable nationalistic cliques that are derided by people from certain countries – yet these same people cry out “South Africa why?!”…The hypocrisy!

Don’t use the hatred and confusion others have as a scapegoat to justify the just-as-filthy sentiments you harbour.

The xenophobic attacks that occurred in South Africa last month are beyond shameful and it’s painful to see the loss of respect for human lives. I applaud the media and the citizens of the internet for keeping us informed. However, the dexterity and rapidity with which we personally spread calamity leads me to believe that tragedy is sadly met with normalcy. The appalling images of dead bodies were shared far and wide on the internet. I saw it with the Garissa attack and now I see it with xenophobic violence. Our inability to cringe over such shocking depictions of fellow human beings reveals a sad truth.

The protagonists behind these killings have no respect for life, and in our act of “keeping others aware” by spreading graphic depictions of atrocities, we are showing that we have no respect for death. That is just as deplorable because if we do not respect these deaths we are unfit to defend and fight for these lives. So excuse your “We are one” speech when you are quick to broadcast a picture of someone being burned alive.

The anti-xenophobia marches and attitude that manifested are a fine example of African resistance, something we often believe is non-existent when we consider pacified African citizens and governments. This time, we also saw a rare example of solidarity, a harmony that seems to be imaginary; mere ideology and theory.

Let’s face it, we are scattered! As nations we all have experiences unique to us – apartheid, ethnic cleansing etc. – that affect and influence our philosophies and policies, but for the sake of our future let’s begin to recognise and seek similarities. Familiarity will lead to some empathy; in this empathy we will find tolerance and tolerance will help us walk together in unity.

My sincere condolences to people who have lost loved ones and my support to the people living the struggle stories that are in obscurity.

Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. God bless Africa.

Clenia Gigi is a a student, avid reader, poet, spoken-word artist, Pan-Africanist, feminist and eternally a child at the face of education.