A Sangoma Graduation

Saturday, June 29th, 2013

My scholars and I went to a Sangoma graduation today. Sangoma’s are traditional healers/fortune tellers of this culture. They were playing drums all night and in the morning they slaughtered a goat and drank its blood and then threw up the blood because they goat had been poisoned so they couldn’t let the poison reach their system. One woman was graduating from her Sangoma training and now she officially had become one.

It was so intense and cool, yet kind of frightening at the same time. I felt like a voyeur. Like I was watching something that I wasn’t allowed to see and would never normally see just traveling as tourist in Africa.

The woman who was graduating as well as a few other Sangomas in training came out topless and ate the raw goat meat and vomited it up while they were being brushed on their bare backs with these horse tail whips as the elder Sangoma’s banged on drums while chanting and singing. This older Sangoma lady drinking directly out of a 40 bottle of beer kept getting up in the middle of the circle and breaking it down. It was hilarious!

This was written during the ceremony…

A dream came to her one night. A vision. She knew. She listened. She must answer her calling. A calling that as soon as she was old enough to understand the wisdom and magic of her elders she would have to go. She knew she was different. She knew she was destined to become a Sangoma.

          Years flew by. Sweat and tears drenched her skin as the warm fresh goat blood slid down her scratchy throat. She felt her heart beating faster. The thump, thump, thumping of the drums rectified her heart to the rhythm of the earth. All night they had chanted. As she danced around the fire she prayed to her ancestors to give her strength, to show her the way. The time had come.

          As she vomited up the poison she felt her fear of death slip away, fall. She no longer feared dying as she slammed her heels into the dirt with her master. As the dust rose around her she knew. She had been reborn. She knew now that she was a Sangoma.

Later that day I went with Mama Siyaphi, one of my scholar’s homestay mothers, to get a Sangoma reading myself. She was there to translate for me and make sure that I didn’t get swindled as far as payment.

It was cool to see her throw the bones but I’m not gonna lie I expected and wanted more of an experience like being with Mama Ode from Disney’s “The Princess and the Frog.”

Everything she told me was very general and almost ‘Well, yeah duh’ statements. A few examples, ‘Sometimes when you walk a long distance you get very tired… Well, yeah, who doesn’t? ‘Sometimes you get headaches and stomach aches.’ Well, yeah sometimes I do! HA!

Eventually her reading resulted in her saying that I needed to buy some concoction from her to wash over my body to make bad spirits and demons leave my life.

Eh-eh. (“No” in Shangon) Opted out of that one.

P.S: Since vomit is a word prevalent in this entry I’d thought I’d share something with you. Papaya smells like vomit. Don’t believe me? Go take a whiff.