LISTEN | Zodwa Wabantu hits back at Ntsiki Mazwai as they debate ‘nudity-loving sangomas’

Her ancestors blessed her with her dancing and TV career, says reality star Zodwa Wabantu, who has brushed off criticism that wearing ancestral beads while gyrating half-naked was disrespectful to African culture.

The star sparked debate after a video clip emerged of her dancing at a gig in her “next to nothing” ensemble, accessorised with ancestral beads.

Poet Ntsiki Mazwai blew off steam on Twitter: “OK, I need to sit down and ask what kind of a sangoma shows her vagina for a living? We keep disrespecting African spiritually. Which stripper is a pastor publicly and unashamedly without being held accountable by some religious authority?”

Zodwa told TshisaLIVE she was embracing her journey and did not feel she was hindering her calling to become a sangoma in any way.

“This is my job. You know, my ancestors gave it to me. My great-grandfather was the one who was famous. All the travelling that I’ve done or I’m still doing, I don’t think they will make me live bad ... [or] change my living conditions, because they know I’m their child from now, as long as I go wherever they send me.”

Should there be a need to switch careers the guidance should come from her ancestors, she added.

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“The dreams that I’m having, the prophecies that I tell people ... so if there’s going to be a time that they are going to stop my dancing as Zodwa Wabantu, they should show me which job they are going to give me, so that’s why my cameo on Black Door,  it could be them maybe saying you can still make your cash this side. But they haven’t revealed so much, the ancestors, and I’m still getting bookings.”

She plans on keeping things the way they are.

“So their concern about the beads being there or not when you do your job, we have women working at KFC who are wearing beads in the workplace and in corporates we have people wearing their ancestral beads. It’s just that because with me everything that I do is taboo and it's extra.”

But Mazwai said people such as Zodwa were disrespecting African spirituality.

Speaking to TshisaLIVE, the poet and activist said spirituality is about the mind, body and soul: “Some people are gifted intellectually, some physically and some spiritually.

“When we speak about spirituality, we speak about the spiritual realm and the realm that  deals with energy and spirits.

“So African spirituality is based on the natural science and we use our ancestors who are our spirit guides to communicate with the creator of man. When you respect something you go at it with a certain decorum. All the other races and nations, when it comes to their spiritual masters and leaders, there is a great reverence to their work and almost a stillness around their spirituality and it's sacred.”

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The poet said she believed people should not distance themselves from their culture.

“There is a sacred way that spirituality is approached. What has happened with Africans and colonialism is that the infiltration of white people and the undermining of our culture and our customs has now led us to hate ourselves and to disrespect ourselves. That is why when we would be faced with a situation like this where somebody who has taken a covenant with the elders to say I'm going to be your spiritual custodian and when we see images like in that video of somebody who has taken a spiritual covenant there should be an uproar.

“We haven't gone through a process were we correct what's happened to us in the past. In other cultures and races there would've been an uproar about this,” Ntsiki said.