The Bird of Heaven. Peter Dunseith

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      Growing up in the household of a sangoma was never dull. When Mandla came to live with his grandmother it seemed as though he had stepped into another world, a world where magic and sorcery were the fabric of reality, the stuff upon which all happiness, health and prosperity depended. According to Grandmother, unless the sangoma charmed goodwill out of the Ancestors there would be no success in any venture.

      Sitting around the fire on cold winter nights Mandla often heard tales of sorcerers who could fly through time, turn into animals and use lightning as a weapon against their enemies. He heard about the great diviners of the past: Shomane, whose spirit still inhabited the Mantsholo Pool in the form of a huge watersnake, Mahube, who saw the past and the future as clearly as we see pebbles in the bed of the stream, and Fembani, the smeller of wizards, who discovered the murderer of the young chief Sidloko.

      One evening, when Mandla was about twelve years old, he was sitting with the apprentices at the fire. The senior apprentice, Jabu, was telling a funny story about a woman who had come to her in search of special muti to make her husband unattractive to other women. Yet, according to Jabu, her husband was the ugliest man she had ever seen.

      They were all laughing loudly when Grandmother emerged from her Indumba and came to join them. Clapping her hands for silence, Jabu signalled to Mandla to move from the large stone on which Grandmother usually sat. The old lady was carrying her lishoba, a switch made from the tail hair of a wildebeest, and this showed that she had come prepared for teaching.

      Grandmother was majestically fat and along with this physical solidity came a moral solidity that inspired respect. She lowered her large buttocks onto the stone seat and planted her feet firmly on the earth. “Thokoza, my children,” she greeted the circle of apprentices. “You haven’t stopped your laughter because of me, I hope … or were you saying something unkind?”

      Jabu hung her head. She knew Grandmother had a strict rule against gossiping about patients. “We were laughing about the lady who wanted sangongongo for her ugly husband, Gogo,” she said, looking down at her feet.

      Grandmother threw back her head and laughed, showing a row of stumpy teeth in a cavernous pink mouth. “Sangongongo for an ugly husband! Only a fool looks for dung where the cow never grazes.”

      No one who heard Grandmother laugh could help but laugh with her. She made a noise like the bellow of the old cow hippo that lived nearby in the Komati River: “Hsssh! Haw-haw-haw-haw-heee-haw!”

      The apprentices all chuckled, but Mandla laughed loudly, even though he didn’t understand the joke. He loved it when his grandmother was in a good mood.

      Hearing Mandla’s laughter above that of the others, Grandmother smiled at the boy, then shook her lishoba at him. “Get along, child, you haven’t yet cleared away the dishes. Take them to the kitchen hut and then off to sleep you go!”

      Mandla knew better than to argue, but he took his time gathering up the dishes. He knew that sometimes, if she was in a playful mood, Grandmother would test the skills of her apprentices and he wanted to see what she had planned for them this time.

      As Mandla watched Grandmother took a small clay pot from under her skin apron and turned it upside down on the ground next to the fire. She told the apprentices that there was an object hidden inside the pot and that she wanted to see which of them would be able to identify it.

      Mandla lingered, pretending to scrape some food into the fire. He wanted to stay and learn about this magic, but Grandmother hissed at him and nodded her head in the direction of the kitchen.

      Walking quickly to the kitchen hut Mandla dropped the dishes into the washing basin. Then he circled around the outside of the sleeping huts and back to the group assembled around the fire. By the time he sat down quietly in the darkness beyond the firelight Grandmother was explaining to the apprentices how to probe the clay pot with the eye of the spirit until the object could be seen.

      Mandla tried looking at the pot in the way that Grandmother had explained. There was a sudden pressure in his forehead and a humming sound in his ears like a swarm of bees. Inside the pot, lit by a strange glow, he could see Grandmother’s goatskin bracelet. “It’s your siphandla, Gogo,” Mandla cried, so excited that he forgot he wasn’t supposed to be there.

      With astonishing speed, Grandmother appeared next to Mandla and grasped him by the ear, lifting him to his feet. There was no sign of her earlier good humour. She whipped him on the legs with the tail of her lishoba, grunting angrily. “Foolish child,” she said, finally letting him tumble to the ground. “This magic is not for you. Do you want the spirits to steal your soul? If you open your head to these things I will send you away to live with your cousins in the bushveld.”

      Mandla slunk off to his sleeping hut, tears of shame on his cheeks. He had wanted to prove that he too could train to be a sangoma, but instead he had made Grandmother angry and shamed himself before the other apprentices. He threw himself down on his sleeping mat and lay on his back, looking up at the thatched dome of the hut. Grandmother had said the world of magic was not for him, but one thing he knew for certain: one day he would be a sangoma. And not just an ordinary sangoma, giving jealous women potions to keep their husbands from straying, but a true diviner, a master of the magic arts. He wiped away his tears with the back of his hand and wrapped himself in the rough woollen blanket. He could still hear a humming in his ears, like the distant song of the crickets in the trees down by the stream. If he listened carefully, if he really concentrated, he could hear words hidden in the humming, chanted words repeated over and over from a far-off place deep inside him. The boy wrapped his thin arms around his knees and closed his eyes as the song sang him to sleep.

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