The thing people don’t realize about a sangoma is we first
are twaza sangoma, trainees, learning tricks-of-trade in Thwasa
way—ancestors must have many pleasure before any magic gets
me naked to medicine hut where steam is so sticky-hot on my body it feel
like giving birth and I just want to see sun. The head sangoma laugh, say
she hope I can stomach next ritual: washing all black off my body until its red
with blood from sacrificed animals. I keep quiet but I sure didn’t know how
to get my black off with blood… then put it back on again after. Maybe magic
dos it for yuh. The blood come from a goat my parents had, smelled like a Zulu
man’s breath after a hunt… thick and thirsty with kill. Once I drown in the sliced
veins, drained of a life now lost, I go on to inyanga: man of the trees—must show
me use of all things Muti.
The thing people don’t realize about a sangoma is we first learn to kill
our body, and the body of others, before the magic come—before witch
doctor power and healing move through me, then out to the sick with
disease; labor pain piercing our women, shooting through parts of us like
venom from mamba; skin boils size of lizard heads from too many days
under African sun; hungry babies with bellies swollen the size of their
pregnant mothers; and a thing called HIV that even the white man say
his magic won’t heal.
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