Wild rapture and dance in Botswana

This is an extract from Love and Above: A Journey into Shamanism. Coma and Joy, Tafelberg 2022. by Sarah Bullen

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It is closing in on three in the morning and sleep is the furthest thing from my mind.

I am in Botswana again. This is the third trip I have taken up here in the two years in which we’ve been on these parallel treatment and healing journeys. Life is slowly returning to a level of relative normality. The well-wishers have tailed off, MRIs are less terrifying and have all come back clear.

Llewelyn is now very firmly on the path to becoming a koma doctor – a doctor of rites. In order to do this, he needs to get through a ritual for men’s rites of passage quite quickly and then start learning the work of these rites.

We had a celebration to mark this news, accompanied by a dinner.

Sangoma Niall Campbell (know by his traditional name Phokojwe or The Jackal) had started initiating a group of men with him and much of the time is spent doing ritual steams (sebololo). They are working with an ancestral practice called ‘washing the air’, which is getting somebody ‘straight with their ancestors and straight with their lineages’. At the same time, Llewelyn is learning medicine and herbs.

Some of these events took place in Venda, and others in Botswana, where I am currently.

In February each year we’d have a ‘first fruits’ ceremony, which is when we’d eat certain things from the fields, with all the living and all the dead.

The night is electric as the relentless call of drums stretches out into the air under the African stars. In front of me dances an old African man, Thembitongo – his back is bent, his eyes half-closed as his feet tap out an ancient rhythm. He is old and in pain. It is hard and painful to watch him as he creeps along in a shuffle-dance. As he falls to his knees the drums stop their call.

Thembitongo calls to his ancestors for blessings. His prayers are received by the watching crowd with claps of appreciation and a resounding ‘makhosi’ (thanks) in an age-old ritual that will play out all night.

Then his Xhosa greetings stop and he switches to a language I am far more familiar with: American. Thembitongo is not actually Xhosa – he is American. Nor is he old. He is 27 and grew up in Portland.

Two years ago, Thembi was called Doug. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of North Carolina. He is white and upper-middle class. He now lives in a rural village in the Transkei, where he is training to be a traditional African doctor and spirit channel.

Doug is part of a growing community of younger people looking for greater meaning in life. Many of them are turning to indigenous cultures to find a deeper connection to the world they live in. Because there are so few indigenous cultures left in the world, a lot of them have come here, to Africa.

There are even more guests this year than before.

Ya’Acov Darling Khan is an urban shaman who lives in Devon and takes people on dance workshops as part of his growing School for Movement Medicine. Mpateleni Makaule is from Venda who runs a foundation that is working to revive traditional culture and practices. Londoner Liz Hoskins is the head of the Gaia Foundation. Baba Ndimande is a ritual doctor living in a backwater town, but she travels the world as far and wide as Germany, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, working with clients.

There are heated conversations in the hot African bush. Over lunch we talk about a growing flood of westerners who are coming to find answers for life in traditional cultures. Niall believes that the soul is searching for older ways that are more in tune with the earth.

‘People the world over are seeking alternatives to the North Atlantic paradigm,’ he says. This is the model of work, spend and produce. Most of us live in cities and we work from the age of eighteen, most of the day. Most of us never actually ever touch the soil with our feet. We never take off our shoes until we go to bed and then it’s a carpet or a tile.

‘We are totally out of touch with nature and with the cycles of life. We work to buy things, to accumulate and to spend.

‘We are kept busy working and we are told not to look inside ourselves. It is conditioning that makes us think this is normal. I don’t think it’s normal and the end result is that there is a disconnection between the things that keep us connected with each other, and with nature.’

Earlier we crawled together into a traditional African steaming hut under the open skies. Before we entered the hut, we danced around and around in a circle under the full moon in the middle of the African bush to the drums and the screams and calls from our own voices.

Then we got on our knees and entered the steam tent set up next to the fire. We chanted and sang as the pace got faster and faster. Hot rocks were passed into the tiny hut as herbs and song carried our voices higher and higher.

Herbs were put on the fire.

Herbs for joy and beauty and luck.

When the songs ended it could have been hours, or days, later. It was timeless. Then it was time for each of us to crawl out of the baking hot steaming hut. We were splashed with ice water and stood, some naked and some in sarongs, spluttering under the ancient stars.

‘This is totally wild.’

I feel it.

Wild.

This is wild without drugs or clubs. Without a thumping bass and a cracking hangover.

This is a wild rapture, found under ancient skies and on ancient land.

And when you feel it, and connect with it, you feel as if you are touching the heavens. I am here, in the rapture and the magic.

After the steam we dance some more. There is no talking circle. There is no silent sitting. There is no lounge with tea served. There is no quiet time. It feels like there is no civilisation, even.

And still the drums beat on into the night and we dance.

‘You have to sing,’ Niall tells me. ‘You sing to connect to the divine or spirit. We call it going into air. Air is the etheric connection with the other realms. We get there by using song.’

Doug/Thembitongo comes to sit next to me later and we both nurse some tea. He tells me he found Niall through a dream he had one night in Portland.

‘I was living a pretty regular life. I was sleeping next to my girlfriend and I had a really vivid dream. The dream was incredibly powerful and in it I was told three very clear things. I had to leave the relationship I was in, move to South Africa and contact someone called Colin Campbell.’

As luck would have it, Campbell was not hard to find. He was in California at the time presenting a talk at an inter-spiritual conference. He told Doug to get hold of Niall, rather, in Cape Town.

‘I had another dream, that of a man wearing white beads on his forehead – the beads of the Xhosa tribe living in the Transkei. When I told Niall the dream, he knew what to do.’

It was there that he found his spiritual teacher and decided to undergo a process called ukutwasa, the gruelling training that an African shaman must undergo in order to become a traditional African doctor or ritual specialist. Most often, the calling to become a traditional doctor is not an easy path.

‘When I arrived on the first day the old grandmothers laughed – they said I would never make it. But I knew I would. There were times I thought I was going to die. I was living in a hut in the middle of nowhere and I realised fast that I am not as tough as the local people. I was a weak American. My immune system was not used to the bugs and parasites.’

His lowest time was when he ate goat and developed severe food poising.

‘I didn’t know at the time what was going on. I was just so incredibly sick – I didn’t know if I was going to live or die. I took a taxi to a clinic and they told me I would live and the doctor gave me good advice: “Don’t eat a sick goat.”’

I looked at him again. He was reed thin under the draping of animal skin and beads, and he had sores all over his mouth, body and feet.

He knew by then that an initiation is a baptism of fire, not to be taken lightly.

Stories like this are common around the fire in Botswana. This is the world the Campbell brothers work in. It is far from the realm of ‘rational’ understanding. But that’s why people all over the world are coming here to learn.

People want change. Niall has his finger on that pulse and is living it.

‘We are fortunate that we live still side by side with cultures who have maintained their relationship with the earth for millennia. It is these cultures now that will lead the way back to harmony and balance,’ he says.

‘Most of us live in isolated worlds and are driven by individualistic thinking. We are driven to amass and accumulate. We think of wealth in terms of finances or property, and it is artificial and unsustainable. We are all trying to accumulate and keep. There is no longer flow. This is going to change. We believe that the millennia of experience that indigenous people have should be recognised as a model for environmental and social sustainability.

‘Nature is the original law. Change comes when you show people the power of a more connected way of life. When people come on our workshops they may find their views change. We let them sleep a night in the bush; let them reconnect them with nature and community. We show them that they had ancestors who did the same. That is how change comes.’

The weekend was over too soon. I left Llewelyn there for a few more weeks and was due to fly back home.

I sat down on the British Airways flight back to Cape Town. As we lifted off and left the stark plains of the semi-desert of Botswana behind, I found myself seated next to a man I knew well. He was flying home from a work conference.

‘How’s Llewelyn?’ He had a concerned look in his eyes. ‘I heard he’s on borrowed time and I am so sorry for you all. How are the kids?’

It was as if a dose of cold water had been thrown in my face. It was so unexpected and foreign. We had left that world so far behind. Other than the six-monthly MRI scans, it was not a reality in our lives.

‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘you have it all wrong! He is amazing.’

‘Oh, that is such fantastic news. My brother-in-law had an astrocytoma and he made only six months. I can’t believe he is doing so well.’

He asked where I had been.

I worried that I had a crazy look in my eyes when I told him about the medicine journey Llew was taking and the ceremony we had just done, up in the bush.

‘Isn’t all that woo-woo weird stuff a bit scary?’ he asked.

I thought of the bugs and flies. I thought of last night, singing in a tiny hut that felt as if it was soaring in a charmed sky.

I thought of Henry, heading back on another plane to the cold concrete jungle in South Kensington.

I thought of our next trip to the MRI machine in eight weeks, looming when Llewelyn was finally back home.

I was pretty sure I could feel a bug in my shirt.

‘Yip,’ I grinned. ‘It was totally wild.’