Post by Magnet Man on Jan 30, 2008 18:49:30 GMT -5
Credo Mutwa is a South African witchdoctor who became famous throughout the country when he took it upon himself to translate into English and thereby leave for posterity a written record of the great wealth of Zulu mythology. Indaba My Children serves as a priceless embellishment, not only to African culture but, like all other mythologies that reveal the earliest of our ancestor’s cosmic views, to the world’s anthropological records as well.
I first met Credo at his house in Soweto in 1976. His front yard was dominated by a number of towering giants; twelve foot high sculptures made from scrap metal that he welded together himself. Credo was an ‘nyanga, a native herbalist who had learned his craft from his father. He was also gifted as a psychic seer. I was producing a television documentary for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The program focused on the traditional training and practice of witchdoctors. My objective was to remove the negative image that Europeans had regarding African witchcraft and reveal the philanthropic nature of the calling. It was not generally known to European South Africans that the giant urban location just outside Johannesburg was home to some one thousand shamans, who continued to find clients and were able to sustain their ancient craft of administering herbal medicines and psychic healings, in the shadows of the modern Baragwaneth hospital. Nor were they aware that a good 80% of the shamans were female or that the males were, like Credo, androgynous.
Credo had painstakingly re-created a traditional African village as a living museum in the middle of the giant township, which he took me to see soon after we met. Over the next few weeks, as he saw that my interest in all aspects of witchcraft was genuine, he began to confide in me the troubles he was having in the dream world. He kept seeing rivers of blood running in the streets of Soweto. The dreams persisted and he became extremely agitated. He eventually begged me to use whatever influence I had in the SABC to warn them that unless some government intervention was done, a grim disaster portended. Exactly what his foreboding foretold he would not, or could not, say.
What I did not know then, and which I suspect Credo knew, was that, due to an autocratic edict from the Apartheid Government, which called for an abrupt change of the language of instruction inside the classroom, an ominous under-current of unrest was brewing among the thousands of school-children in Soweto. I knew about the new law, which stated that tens of thousands of school children would summarily be forced to switch course in mid school-term and learn all their lessons in Afrikaans instead of English. I remember feeling at the time how unfair and arrogant the Afrikaner government policy was. But I had no sense at that time, that, amongst all the other indignities that blacks suffered under the Apartheid system, this was the last straw that would eventually break the Government’s back. Credo’s blood-soaked dream foretold the inevitable fate of the entire apartheid system and the end of centuries of white rule.
Soweto serves as a giant dormitory suburb, feeding menial laborers to Johannesburg’s industrial complex. Unlike the predominantly politically orientated Afrikaner-administered centers of Pretoria and Cape Town, Johannesburg is the commercial hub of the nation, where English is predominantly spoken as the international lingua-franca of the business world. With millions clamoring for work, finding any kind of work in Johannesburg as a young black was hard enough, speaking and writing English was essential. Making a switch to another tongue while trying to graduate, added an entirely unnecessary burden to the students. Besides that, the third and fourth generations of urban blacks who lived in Soweto were becoming increasingly internationally connected. As far as the students were concerned, the great tidal wave of political freedom and change that had swept through the rest of Africa in the 1960”s, had to engulf South Africa eventually. One day they would be in control of the country and it was essential that they spoke a world tongue. Beyond South Africa’s borders, not a soul in the world spoke Afrikaans
Since I did not connect Credo’s dream to the school children, I was left with a tough call in trying to respond to his plea. Getting a government-directed mass communication medium, deeply rooted in apartheid, to react in some way to a black witchdoctor’s nightmares seemed beyond the realm of possibilities. However, having worked with over forty of his fellow shamans, I was deeply impressed, not only with their remarkable healing powers that came from near perfect empathy with their patient’s ailments, and their keen grasp of human behavior in general, but also with their uncanny intuitive insights into future event. So I took Credo’s distress signals to heart and decided to devise a way to try and to do something about it.
For political reasons, including the financial and logistic problem of adequately servicing thirteen different languages in the country, television was not introduced to South Africa until 1973. It was initially broadcast in only the two official languages: English and Afrikaans. I was among the first wave of young producers to join the brand new national Broadcasting system. So it was that in early part of 1976, while serving in my position as a producer for the English Documentary Department, I submitted a proposal that would extend my Soweto witchdoctor documentary to include an on-going series of programs, designed to reveal the daily struggles and hardships. as well as their dreams for the future, of the one million detribalized Africans living in the township,.
The proposal was turned down flat by my department head. So too by his boss when I took it over his head. The basic reason: “White television viewers did not want black faces on the box.” Over the next weeks and months I had repeated meetings with my fellow producers in the documentary department. I informed each of them in turn of the rejection of my proposal and the possibility of grim consequences. Without elaborating on my source of information, I told them that some extreme form of violence was brewing in Soweto, and that it was our responsibility to let our white audience become more informed of the black attitude inside the giant township. I asked them if they would join me in a group protest against the Administration, as a method of forcing the proposal through. There were no takers among them. I was accused of “over-reacting.”
On the morning of my final meeting, on June 16th, Credo’s bloody dream unfolded. Several thousand school children had organized a peaceful march on John Vorster Square (the notorious police headquarters and holding cells from which the draconian laws of Apartheid were enforced) where they intended to publicly air their grievances over the unfair school laws. The police forestalled the march by blockading the main road leading out of the township. When the students refused to stop, the officers opened a withering cross-fire with sub-machine guns. Four hundred students were massacred in the onslaught and the streets ran with their blood.
I was working in one of the editing rooms when the first newsreel rushes came in an hour later. I could hear the commotion next door and got up to investigate. A dozen news editors and producers were crowded around the editing screen, so I could see nothing. But I could hear the sound effects. There was the sound of a car approaching at high speed; then the rattle of automatic gunfire; there was a screech of tires on asphalt, followed by the loud crash of metal slamming into concrete; then, in the silence, a sound that I will never forget; from the accent, a young Blackman, hoarsely screaming a desperate plea, over and over again: “Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!”
At that exact moment, one of the crew around the table caught sight of me and hit the pause button on the editing table. As one, a dozen pairs of Afrikaner eyes turned in a solid block to face me. It was as though a group of beleaguered Boers reacted instinctively and pulled their wagons into a tight defensive circle. A verdamde Rooinek (dammed Englishman), and known kaffir-boetie (nigger-lover), had poked his nose where he had no business, I could see defiance, mixed with guilt, clouding the expressions on their faces. Nobody uttered a word. There was no need. That moment was pregnant with our nation’s history.
The winds of change had been sweeping across Africa since the 1950’s; for most of the world, the realization that the day of the colonial master was over. The massacre at Sharpville in 1961 followed by the Rivonia trial which had imprisoned Nelson Mandela, had brought the first chill breeze of change to our borders. Since then, all of us knew, deep down in our hearts, that the day of a final reckoning in South Africa had to come. Now, here, indelibly echoing in the hoarse tone of that young man’s accusatory death-wish in the editing room, the immorality of our European over-lordship on the Mother Continent, resonated in our ears.
A nation’s sense of integrity, like that of any individual, has to be based on a vigorous monitoring of the truth in relation to the self and consequences of one’s actions. The power and purpose of public television serves as an open window into the national soul. Those of us entrusted with reporting and commenting on the state of our being during broadcasts are obligated to uphold and sustain this essential sense of integrity. We have to trust in the rightness of the consequences, so long as the truth is being told.
The irony of that moment, in a multi-cultural society where inter-racial marriage was outlawed and wed-lock between English and Afrikaans taboo, I was almost certainly the only person present in that editing room who carried all three of the major bloodlines – and in that sense the only one with the ancestral rights to evaluate and make a decision on what to do with that news-reel: Though ostensibly classified as English, my paternal grandmother, was an Afrikaner, the grand-daughter of a Voortrekker. On the other side of my family, my maternal grandmother had Bantu blood. As their blood relative, I could fully appreciated and empathize with the political predicament of the Afrikaners in that room. They were an isolated people fighting a rear-guard action, trying desperately to maintain their hard-won cultural traditions in a fast changing world. Their over-view as newscasters was consequently clouded by rigid national dogma. I knew, and the men facing me in that editing room knew that I knew, that not a single frame of that damning news footage of children being shot dead in the streets of Soweto, would ever be broadcast to the nation or to the world beyond our borders. Any argument from me right then would have been as pointless as fighting the Anglo/Boer War and the Kaffir Wars all over again. So I turned on my heel and left them to deal with their distortion of reality – knowing full well that our white culture, both English and Afrikaans, would have to eventually face the consequences.
I jumped in my car and raced to Soweto. The road blocks were still up and the police would not let me through. I circled the township, fruitlessly looking for another road in. On the way I picked up a hitch-hiker, a young African. He stood by the roadside, tears streaming down his face. I could smell the yeasty aroma of native beer on his breath when he climbed in beside me. We drove in silence while he struggled with his emotions. Then he spoke, his voice choked with shame. “She is back there! My girl friend. She faced the police guns. She would not runaway. She was not scared like me.” He lapsed back into silence and the tears came again. We reached a place where he asked to be let out. I gave him some money. He was still distraught. He suddenly and unexpectedly reminded me of our combined history, “You know baas, Dingaan made a great mistake!” Then he turned away and was gone.
Dingaan became paramount chief of the amaZula, when his step brother, Shaka, who founded the Zulu nation, was assassinated. During the period of Dingaan’s rule, the Boers started the Great Trek – leaving the Cape by their thousands, trekking in ox-wagons, loaded with all their possessions, in search of new haven, far away from English domination. One of the trekker parties, lead by the Boer leader Piet Retief, crossed over the Drakensburg Mountains and sought land in the fertile valleys of the Tugela Basin, in Natal.. Several hundred of them encamped and waited on the banks of a tributary of the Tugela, while Retief, together with seventy men from his party, rode on horseback the hundred odd miles to Dingaan’s great kraal at KwaBulawayo. Their mission was to make a treaty with the Zulu king and gain from him the right to settle in Natal. As a goodwill gesture, Dingaan insisted that they disarm for the meeting. The Boers complied. Then while they were encircled by the packed ranks of thousands of warriors during the meeting, the Zulu king gave the signal and, treacherously, had all seventy men massacred. Dingaan then immediately sent a regiment of five thousand warriors to kill the rest of the Voortrekkers. The daughter of the English missionary stationed at KwaBulawayo, who saw the massacre, raced the hundred miles on horseback and warned the encampment of the treachery.
Forewarned the Boers made ready for the attack. With their wagons encircled on an embankment above the river, the Zulu impi was forced to attack by wading chest-deep across the water. Despite over-whelming numbers, in the end, Bronze Age spears were no match for Iron Age bullets. With women and children loading, the Boers poured a relentless hail of lead balls into the packed Zulu ranks. Hundreds of dead bodies floated downstream. The river literally ran red with their blood. Almost the entire regiment was annihilated. After their victory at the Battle of Blood River, the Boers, certain that God was on their side, vowed to forego all further attempts at a negotiated sharing of the country and from then on, took what land they wanted by force.
So, yes, it can be said that Dingaan had made a great mistake. Who knows? The history of South Africa might have been a lot different if he had played by the rules. And now, at the bitter end of seven generations of increasing racial disenchantment, the Boers found themselves once again firing on massed ranks of Africans. Like Blood River, the streets of Soweto ran red with black blood.
But this time God was not on the Boer’s side. The massacre of school children in Soweto was a turning point in the greater battle against apartheid. It spelled the end of Afrikaner rule two decades later. The blood spilled by those hundreds of African children was not shed in vain and their memory will live on forever more.
I first met Credo at his house in Soweto in 1976. His front yard was dominated by a number of towering giants; twelve foot high sculptures made from scrap metal that he welded together himself. Credo was an ‘nyanga, a native herbalist who had learned his craft from his father. He was also gifted as a psychic seer. I was producing a television documentary for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The program focused on the traditional training and practice of witchdoctors. My objective was to remove the negative image that Europeans had regarding African witchcraft and reveal the philanthropic nature of the calling. It was not generally known to European South Africans that the giant urban location just outside Johannesburg was home to some one thousand shamans, who continued to find clients and were able to sustain their ancient craft of administering herbal medicines and psychic healings, in the shadows of the modern Baragwaneth hospital. Nor were they aware that a good 80% of the shamans were female or that the males were, like Credo, androgynous.
Credo had painstakingly re-created a traditional African village as a living museum in the middle of the giant township, which he took me to see soon after we met. Over the next few weeks, as he saw that my interest in all aspects of witchcraft was genuine, he began to confide in me the troubles he was having in the dream world. He kept seeing rivers of blood running in the streets of Soweto. The dreams persisted and he became extremely agitated. He eventually begged me to use whatever influence I had in the SABC to warn them that unless some government intervention was done, a grim disaster portended. Exactly what his foreboding foretold he would not, or could not, say.
What I did not know then, and which I suspect Credo knew, was that, due to an autocratic edict from the Apartheid Government, which called for an abrupt change of the language of instruction inside the classroom, an ominous under-current of unrest was brewing among the thousands of school-children in Soweto. I knew about the new law, which stated that tens of thousands of school children would summarily be forced to switch course in mid school-term and learn all their lessons in Afrikaans instead of English. I remember feeling at the time how unfair and arrogant the Afrikaner government policy was. But I had no sense at that time, that, amongst all the other indignities that blacks suffered under the Apartheid system, this was the last straw that would eventually break the Government’s back. Credo’s blood-soaked dream foretold the inevitable fate of the entire apartheid system and the end of centuries of white rule.
Soweto serves as a giant dormitory suburb, feeding menial laborers to Johannesburg’s industrial complex. Unlike the predominantly politically orientated Afrikaner-administered centers of Pretoria and Cape Town, Johannesburg is the commercial hub of the nation, where English is predominantly spoken as the international lingua-franca of the business world. With millions clamoring for work, finding any kind of work in Johannesburg as a young black was hard enough, speaking and writing English was essential. Making a switch to another tongue while trying to graduate, added an entirely unnecessary burden to the students. Besides that, the third and fourth generations of urban blacks who lived in Soweto were becoming increasingly internationally connected. As far as the students were concerned, the great tidal wave of political freedom and change that had swept through the rest of Africa in the 1960”s, had to engulf South Africa eventually. One day they would be in control of the country and it was essential that they spoke a world tongue. Beyond South Africa’s borders, not a soul in the world spoke Afrikaans
Since I did not connect Credo’s dream to the school children, I was left with a tough call in trying to respond to his plea. Getting a government-directed mass communication medium, deeply rooted in apartheid, to react in some way to a black witchdoctor’s nightmares seemed beyond the realm of possibilities. However, having worked with over forty of his fellow shamans, I was deeply impressed, not only with their remarkable healing powers that came from near perfect empathy with their patient’s ailments, and their keen grasp of human behavior in general, but also with their uncanny intuitive insights into future event. So I took Credo’s distress signals to heart and decided to devise a way to try and to do something about it.
For political reasons, including the financial and logistic problem of adequately servicing thirteen different languages in the country, television was not introduced to South Africa until 1973. It was initially broadcast in only the two official languages: English and Afrikaans. I was among the first wave of young producers to join the brand new national Broadcasting system. So it was that in early part of 1976, while serving in my position as a producer for the English Documentary Department, I submitted a proposal that would extend my Soweto witchdoctor documentary to include an on-going series of programs, designed to reveal the daily struggles and hardships. as well as their dreams for the future, of the one million detribalized Africans living in the township,.
The proposal was turned down flat by my department head. So too by his boss when I took it over his head. The basic reason: “White television viewers did not want black faces on the box.” Over the next weeks and months I had repeated meetings with my fellow producers in the documentary department. I informed each of them in turn of the rejection of my proposal and the possibility of grim consequences. Without elaborating on my source of information, I told them that some extreme form of violence was brewing in Soweto, and that it was our responsibility to let our white audience become more informed of the black attitude inside the giant township. I asked them if they would join me in a group protest against the Administration, as a method of forcing the proposal through. There were no takers among them. I was accused of “over-reacting.”
On the morning of my final meeting, on June 16th, Credo’s bloody dream unfolded. Several thousand school children had organized a peaceful march on John Vorster Square (the notorious police headquarters and holding cells from which the draconian laws of Apartheid were enforced) where they intended to publicly air their grievances over the unfair school laws. The police forestalled the march by blockading the main road leading out of the township. When the students refused to stop, the officers opened a withering cross-fire with sub-machine guns. Four hundred students were massacred in the onslaught and the streets ran with their blood.
I was working in one of the editing rooms when the first newsreel rushes came in an hour later. I could hear the commotion next door and got up to investigate. A dozen news editors and producers were crowded around the editing screen, so I could see nothing. But I could hear the sound effects. There was the sound of a car approaching at high speed; then the rattle of automatic gunfire; there was a screech of tires on asphalt, followed by the loud crash of metal slamming into concrete; then, in the silence, a sound that I will never forget; from the accent, a young Blackman, hoarsely screaming a desperate plea, over and over again: “Kill me! Kill me! Kill me!”
At that exact moment, one of the crew around the table caught sight of me and hit the pause button on the editing table. As one, a dozen pairs of Afrikaner eyes turned in a solid block to face me. It was as though a group of beleaguered Boers reacted instinctively and pulled their wagons into a tight defensive circle. A verdamde Rooinek (dammed Englishman), and known kaffir-boetie (nigger-lover), had poked his nose where he had no business, I could see defiance, mixed with guilt, clouding the expressions on their faces. Nobody uttered a word. There was no need. That moment was pregnant with our nation’s history.
The winds of change had been sweeping across Africa since the 1950’s; for most of the world, the realization that the day of the colonial master was over. The massacre at Sharpville in 1961 followed by the Rivonia trial which had imprisoned Nelson Mandela, had brought the first chill breeze of change to our borders. Since then, all of us knew, deep down in our hearts, that the day of a final reckoning in South Africa had to come. Now, here, indelibly echoing in the hoarse tone of that young man’s accusatory death-wish in the editing room, the immorality of our European over-lordship on the Mother Continent, resonated in our ears.
A nation’s sense of integrity, like that of any individual, has to be based on a vigorous monitoring of the truth in relation to the self and consequences of one’s actions. The power and purpose of public television serves as an open window into the national soul. Those of us entrusted with reporting and commenting on the state of our being during broadcasts are obligated to uphold and sustain this essential sense of integrity. We have to trust in the rightness of the consequences, so long as the truth is being told.
The irony of that moment, in a multi-cultural society where inter-racial marriage was outlawed and wed-lock between English and Afrikaans taboo, I was almost certainly the only person present in that editing room who carried all three of the major bloodlines – and in that sense the only one with the ancestral rights to evaluate and make a decision on what to do with that news-reel: Though ostensibly classified as English, my paternal grandmother, was an Afrikaner, the grand-daughter of a Voortrekker. On the other side of my family, my maternal grandmother had Bantu blood. As their blood relative, I could fully appreciated and empathize with the political predicament of the Afrikaners in that room. They were an isolated people fighting a rear-guard action, trying desperately to maintain their hard-won cultural traditions in a fast changing world. Their over-view as newscasters was consequently clouded by rigid national dogma. I knew, and the men facing me in that editing room knew that I knew, that not a single frame of that damning news footage of children being shot dead in the streets of Soweto, would ever be broadcast to the nation or to the world beyond our borders. Any argument from me right then would have been as pointless as fighting the Anglo/Boer War and the Kaffir Wars all over again. So I turned on my heel and left them to deal with their distortion of reality – knowing full well that our white culture, both English and Afrikaans, would have to eventually face the consequences.
I jumped in my car and raced to Soweto. The road blocks were still up and the police would not let me through. I circled the township, fruitlessly looking for another road in. On the way I picked up a hitch-hiker, a young African. He stood by the roadside, tears streaming down his face. I could smell the yeasty aroma of native beer on his breath when he climbed in beside me. We drove in silence while he struggled with his emotions. Then he spoke, his voice choked with shame. “She is back there! My girl friend. She faced the police guns. She would not runaway. She was not scared like me.” He lapsed back into silence and the tears came again. We reached a place where he asked to be let out. I gave him some money. He was still distraught. He suddenly and unexpectedly reminded me of our combined history, “You know baas, Dingaan made a great mistake!” Then he turned away and was gone.
Dingaan became paramount chief of the amaZula, when his step brother, Shaka, who founded the Zulu nation, was assassinated. During the period of Dingaan’s rule, the Boers started the Great Trek – leaving the Cape by their thousands, trekking in ox-wagons, loaded with all their possessions, in search of new haven, far away from English domination. One of the trekker parties, lead by the Boer leader Piet Retief, crossed over the Drakensburg Mountains and sought land in the fertile valleys of the Tugela Basin, in Natal.. Several hundred of them encamped and waited on the banks of a tributary of the Tugela, while Retief, together with seventy men from his party, rode on horseback the hundred odd miles to Dingaan’s great kraal at KwaBulawayo. Their mission was to make a treaty with the Zulu king and gain from him the right to settle in Natal. As a goodwill gesture, Dingaan insisted that they disarm for the meeting. The Boers complied. Then while they were encircled by the packed ranks of thousands of warriors during the meeting, the Zulu king gave the signal and, treacherously, had all seventy men massacred. Dingaan then immediately sent a regiment of five thousand warriors to kill the rest of the Voortrekkers. The daughter of the English missionary stationed at KwaBulawayo, who saw the massacre, raced the hundred miles on horseback and warned the encampment of the treachery.
Forewarned the Boers made ready for the attack. With their wagons encircled on an embankment above the river, the Zulu impi was forced to attack by wading chest-deep across the water. Despite over-whelming numbers, in the end, Bronze Age spears were no match for Iron Age bullets. With women and children loading, the Boers poured a relentless hail of lead balls into the packed Zulu ranks. Hundreds of dead bodies floated downstream. The river literally ran red with their blood. Almost the entire regiment was annihilated. After their victory at the Battle of Blood River, the Boers, certain that God was on their side, vowed to forego all further attempts at a negotiated sharing of the country and from then on, took what land they wanted by force.
So, yes, it can be said that Dingaan had made a great mistake. Who knows? The history of South Africa might have been a lot different if he had played by the rules. And now, at the bitter end of seven generations of increasing racial disenchantment, the Boers found themselves once again firing on massed ranks of Africans. Like Blood River, the streets of Soweto ran red with black blood.
But this time God was not on the Boer’s side. The massacre of school children in Soweto was a turning point in the greater battle against apartheid. It spelled the end of Afrikaner rule two decades later. The blood spilled by those hundreds of African children was not shed in vain and their memory will live on forever more.