It is January 1996 in a high school in KwaNyavu village in the Umkhambathini region of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. A young teacher notices in the first week of the school year that none of the large contingent of pupils belonging to the Ngcobo clan are present at school. He makes some inquiries.
Apparently, he is told, the week before schools opened, one of the men in the large Ngcobo clan was struck by lightning while sleeping in his hut, and passed away. As was the custom in the village, his remains were interred the very next morning.
The villagers gathered at the homestead for the burial ceremony. It was a typically sunny summer day. Without warning, clouds gathered within a matter of minutes and lightning struck again, killing three more Ngcobo males and rendering a few more unable to speak for weeks thereafter. No one from any other family was touched in the incident.Panic set in. There was obviously a powerful sorcerer in the village, hell-bent on obliterating all the Ngcobos. And this is why all the Ngcobo pupils were absent from school. They were busy with traditional healers in rituals called ukuqinisa (a vaccination of sorts against being bewitched).
A wise septuagenarian who served in the school governing body pulled the young teacher aside to whisper: "It would serve you well to perform some rituals as well, seeing as you are a Ngcobo. Just to be safe."
That young teacher was yours truly.
Now, I don't consider myself a superstitious man. But if you look carefully at my wrists, neck and the tender area above my toes, you will see tiny razor marks where my dad used to nick all of us when we were growing up, delivering this Zulu "vaccine" against evil spirits and witchcraft.
Millions of Zulu folks have similar razor scars. I am absolutely comfortable sharing this, without any sense of shame. And I have a sharp appreciation of the possible contradictions, seeing as I was raised in what I call "a hectically Catholic" household.Yes, growing up I munched on those thin wafers, guzzled sherry from a metal chalice, calling them the body and blood of Christ - then burnt incense under the nose of a goat before it was slaughtered to appease the ancestors.
To quote Frank Gallagher from TV's Shameless, a straight man who slept with men for cash, "I am whatever I need to be at the time I need to be it."This is my long-winded way of saying that after the Ngcobo lightning incident, I was more than a bit shaken. The scientific man in me was telling me the obvious: this was just a statistically improbable coincidence. But I am also a practical man who likes to hedge his bets.
For instance, I have never seen any evidence that Vitamin C prevents flu but every winter I'm that guy popping pills and eating oranges by the sack. The way I figure: if it doesn't kill me, what's the harm? So I went home and told my mom. She scoffed, prayed one mystery of the Holy Rosary, possibly invoked Saint Barbara of Nicomedia, the patron saint of lightning, sprayed me with holy water and told me to stop being silly. It must have worked because ... well, here I am.
Deep down in places we don't talk about at cocktail parties, most of us believe in the supernatural, ghosts and the mystical.
King Shaka was a notorious sceptic of the supernatural, but, like this lowly columnist, he was a practical man who hedged his bets. So before his army went to war, he would organise traditional healers to perform ukuqinisa rituals. After battle there would also be cleansing rituals followed by ukusula imikhonto (wiping of spears), which was basically letting the warriors loose to indulge in pleasures of the flesh.If the stories I read in Sunday World are anything to go by, Chiefs and Pirates players are notorious for wiping their spears in every town after famous victories.
When I was about 13 we had a helper at home who was obsessed with stories about spirits that speak to us when we sleep. Apparently their language is whistling. So imagine my horror when I heard whistling while trying to sleep one night. Finally, in shock, I responded, "Khulumani balozi ngilalele" (Speak, oh great spirits, I'm listening). As it turns out, it was only my portable radio that I had left in shortwave mode, just emitting interference...