Listen to the earth, listen to the stars

African Folklore by: Credo Mutwa

The following content is written from transcribed tapes recorded by the late Credo Mutwa, one of Southern Africa’s most celebrated Sangomas. The content, therefore, is not scientific but rather represents the feelings, beliefs and experiences of this exceptional man. These stories are written in precisely the same way that Credo Mutwa tells them, with all their original colloquialisms and styles.

"This is what I call a very special story, which is made in humble dedication to my late wife Cecilia Mutwa who used to love and adore the subject, discussed here.

First and foremost, our people believed that the earth was a living thing, that the earth was not just a thing of rocks, of rivers, of mountains, valleys, plains and seas.

The earth was something which was alive. The great thinkers of our people used to have a saying, which goes okupilayo kuweza okupilayo. And this saying in the Zulu language means that which is alive brings forth that which is alive. In old Africa our people were obsessed with the belief that the earth was a living entity, that it felt pain, that it felt joy, that it could also feel deadly anger.

So ingrained within the African soul was this belief, that Africans used to do a strange thing that was not done, as far as I know, by any other people anywhere in the world, even in ancient times. When Africans needed metal of any kind, metal such as copper, tin, silver, gold and even iron, they used to create mines, some of them of at a very great depth. They used to work these mines until the metal was almost, but not quite, exhausted.

Then there would come a day, which was known as the healing of the mother, ukulapa unina. This was an important day in which feasting was mingled with weeping. This was the day when hundreds of men and women would assemble from all over the land, regardless of tribe and they would perform an extremely amazing task - the closing of the mine. When white prospectors travelled through South Africa, they came across ancient mines which Africans had worked, and all these mines had either been partially or completely refilled. The refilling of a mineshaft was a task that used to take several months.

During that time, intertribal hostility and inter-clan feuding and quarrelling was strictly forbidden. Everybody had to perform the strange task of healing the earth mother of the injury that human beings in their greed and their need had inflicted upon her. Before the mine was closed, volunteers used to go down the mine and await their death, a horrible death of being crushed by falling stones.

They would sit there and their brothers and sisters on the surface would push large quantities of loose earth and rock upon them, refilling the mine. That is why in many instances when archaeologists reopened some of the ancient mines in South Africa, they used to find skeletons at the bottom of the mine. These were people, men and women, who sacrificed themselves in order to placate the great earth mother. After the mine had been refilled, a white cow was sacrificed on top of the site.

And then the people went away. If there was a river nearby, the people, young and old, male and female, used to go into the river and bathed there, cleansing the dust away from themselves and then with songs and with drumming return back to their homes and resume their daily lives. What South African archaeologists do not know is this: whenever the archaeologists came across an ancient mine, which had not been refilled, that mine had not been created by black people, but by foreigners; Phoenicians, Arabs and other people who came to South Africa and other parts of Africa in search of gold. There was more to this obsessive worshipping of the earth, much more. When a tribe was settled in a place, there were men and women who were known as the listeners to the earth, they who listened to the earth. These were men and women, usually families and generations of people doing one thing over many years and their task was to observe very, very carefully what was happening in the environment in the tribe’s territory.

They used to observe which trees were becoming extinct in the area; which plants, bulbs, roots or whatever was no longer in existence. If it was found that many plants, which had been growing in the area that the tribe had settled in, in early times, were now no longer in existence, then the tribe had to prepare to move in order to give the earth a rest. It was one of the duties of an African King to travel through each part of his empire, eating wild plants, tasting whatever fruits the land provided and drinking water from all the streams that flowed through the empire. A king had to know the taste of every river that flowed through his land, every steam, every pool and every lake, he had to ritually taste the water from there. One day at the height of his rule, King Shaka travelled the length and the breadth of the former Natal Province and wherever he went he ritually tasted the water that is to be found in that place. He did it exactly as a wine taster does.

First a clean calabash was given to the king and the water from a stream was scooped into this calabash and the king had to smell the water. And then the king had to sip the water and keep it in his mouth, savouring it and even listening spiritually to it. Should the king find a strange taste in the stream, a taste which was not there before, a deep investigation had to be launched to find out why this stream now tasted as it was now tasting. Shaka travelled from the North of Zululand right down the map. It was a journey, which took him almost a whole year accompanied by his attendance and his warriors. He ritually tasted the water of every river that flowed through the land of the Zulus until he came to a place where the water tasted amazingly good; the water was so pure. It was like music against the great king’s pallet.

Shaka called that place amanzimtoti, a name, which the place still bears to this day, the land of the pure, good tasting waters.

Then he came to another place where there was a river but where there was so much mud that the hooves of the king’s cattle were often sucked deep into the mud with the result that the beasts had to struggle to free themselves of the clinging mud. King Shaka named this place ixobo, which is a word imitative of the sound that a cow’s leg makes as it frees itself from the mud.

It was very, very important to listen to the earth, to observe any change in the environment, however small. Our people believed that if you see a small change in the environment, if you see one or two plants which used to grow there, no longer growing there, you must know that there is a big evil spirit at large in the land and you mustn’t just say that the loss of those plants is a small thing. Our people used to say nothing is small in the chest of the earth mother, everything is important.

There is overwhelming evidence that in the last sixty years or so, the environment in southern Africa has undergone a definite change and this change is extremely complex, deep-rooted and dangerous. Firstly, it has been noticeable during the lifetime of a person of my age, that the rainfall pattern in South Africa has definitely undergone a change.

Rains used to fall in the month of July in this country, which is why our people had a name for July, which means the month of the first rains. Today the rains have become later and later and later, and sometimes freak weather storms occur throughout South Africa. Some years ago, we had a heavy snowfall in South Africa during the month of October, which is the month of deep summer, the month in which our people used to celebrate the first harvest. We have had strange heat waves and these heat waves have wrought dramatic changes in animal as well as human behaviour. During these heat waves I have noticed, crime increases dramatically in South Africa, crime of violence, murder, rape and other forms of negative behaviour.

Drivers become more aggressive on the roads. Criminals become more vicious and more pitiless towards their victims. There is definitely something in the air.

But let me tell you more.

Amongst the people who were known as the watchers of the earth were men and women with good memories who used to listen to the thunder during a thunderstorm and imitate its sound accurately. These people, one of whom is my aunt Mina, who is a hundred and three years old, angrily confirm that the sound of thunder in today’s thunderstorms is totally different from the sound of thunder for example during the 1930’s. My aunt, Mina, says that there is now an angry sound to the thunder of today’s thunderstorms, an electric sound, which was not there before. And when she imitates the thunder that she knew as a girl and imitates today’s thunder it is a wonder to listen to her. She says that the thunder of olden times, in the 1930’s and the 20’s, had a fertile sound to it, a pregnant hollow sound. And this what she says it sounded like: Du-du-du-du-whaaa. But she says that today the thunder is different. It has a snarling quality to it and this is how she imitates it: Ka-ka-ka-ka-ka-whaaa. And she is right, she is quite right.

Africans have strange ways of dealing with strange things. When a child or a highly strung man or woman shows a natural fear of thunder and lightning and becomes a nervous wreck during a thunderstorm, then our people treat this person in an interesting way. They take an empty, clean basin (in ancient times it used to be a bowl made of clay) and they put it outside during a thunderstorm. On the following day, the basin full of rainwater, is taken to the person who is afraid of the thunder and they are ordered to drink.

This is called drinking the thunder, drinking the lightning.

We believe that if somebody ingests something he becomes less afraid of it. So, if a nervous person drinks rainwater, which has come as a result of a thunderstorm, then that person will become less afraid of the thunderstorm. For many years my aunt Mina was such a person. As a child she had seen relatives of hers killed when lightning struck a hut and that trauma filled her with fear of thunderstorms for many years. So, over the years she fought to rid herself of this fear by drinking water from a thunderstorm. Mina says, and I fully agree with her, that the taste of rainwater has changed in the last fifty years or so. She says that rainwater now has a strange bitter taste upon the pallet.

She has an old dish of clay with which she receives rainwater at nearly every thunderstorm. She puts this dish outside, covered with a cloth to ensure that no dirt should enter with the rainwater and the rainwater filters through this cloth. When she drinks the water, she says in strange Zulu that the water tastes of motorcar and she calls it the urine of the motorcar. A taste, which was not there before, and many old people of her age agree with her that the taste of the rain of our country has altered. Furthermore, the same kind of change is found when these old people eat snow from some of our country’s highest mountains, for example the Drakensberg Mountains. They all say that the water in the snow as well as the rainwater has changed in taste.

Mina also says that some of our rivers, such as the Tugela River and especially the Msoendusi River, taste of dirty oil and dirt metal. I fully agree with these old people. Our country has undergone a dangerous change climatically and something must be done about this immediately.

I wish that those of our country in authority would speak to these ancient people whose duty was to taste the rain, to listen to the thunder, to listen to the earth and to listen to the stars".