The Keeper of the Kumm. Sylvia Vollenhoven
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Follows the guidance of her Ancestors
Understands that science is suffused with spirit
But her landscape speaks of stories denied
Loss and exorcism
Defiant dust devils prance across the plains bringing a story the girl was not expecting that day.
We still wear apartheid race classifications like tattoos on hidden skin. South Africans have a way of doing rapid calculations based on subtle textures and tones, beyond the reach of outsiders. When the computing is done, we adjust our behaviour according to the all-important tag we have allocated the other person. Of all these tags that hint at identity, the one that has caused me the most harm is ‘coloured’. Decades of the new South Africa and colouredness is still a daily insurance of being marginalised. Reverberations of a heritage of genocide and dispossession.
I was not born with this tag. My birth certificate hints at a time when these things mattered less. It states simply ‘Mixed’. Behind the almost offhand classification lies a story of a hidden ancestry.
When I began delving feverishly into my connections with a Bushman visionary who lived in the 1800s, the trauma that surfaced was overwhelming. The pain of centuries, forcing me to embark on a journey. An exploration with //Kabbo became the key to unlocking the painful prison of colouredness.
But I didn’t expect in the beginning that an impassioned inquiry into who I really am would demand an exorcism.
I’ve burnt a forest of incense, chanted mantras from Betty’s Bay to Bangalore, and cleansed my space till the spirits left through sheer boredom.
And now here it is, a frightening reality that makes me wish I had never come down this road.
A line-up of the long dead stands waiting, souls jostling for space on white pages. I am afraid, but they will not go away. Stars on an inner sky. If I don’t tell the story of the gathering folk of this constellation, I will die.
Many months of weeping have given way to gut-wrenching howls. Waking up from a lifetime of fantasy is much like the passage through the birth canal. A painful, dark loneliness expressed in primal screams.
Sick and tired of a medical condition some doctors cannot name and others call ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’, I don’t have the courage to tell anyone what’s happening to me. To talk about the things that are vanishing, about losing pieces of myself. My voice seems to come down a long tunnel from a place I don’t know.
I wake up and do a body check to gauge whether I’ve lost anything important during the night. Each day another piece of my sanity slips away. I dress slowly. Everything is painful. My skin hurts, my body aches, my mind revels in fantasies of death.
I open a drawer and a favourite piece of jewellery is missing. There is only an empty box where my delicate gold bracelet adorned with tiny diamonds and emeralds used to be.
“Elize, have you seen my gold bracelet?”
“No, but you were wearing it when you went to Cape Town the other day.”
Things have started disappearing from my life. It started just recently. I anticipate draping my scarf with the shells that emanate soft sea sounds round my neck, but I can locate it only in photo albums. My reality has become a rickety tableau. Chunks are simply vanishing. I am homeless and jobless. I have wasted everything I owned chasing healers and cures. I know that when enough pieces disappear I too will vanish.
Too embarrassed to speak to others about these things, a slow acceptance creeps up on me. I live alone in a remote village and hardly ever get visitors. The gaps in the tableau are growing but I no longer care. If the spaces meet I will disappear. This I know. It’s a matter-of-fact, dispassionate knowing.
Sometimes when I run my hands over familiar places I feel the body parts of other people where mine should be. A former lover’s thigh or the hard pubic bone of an old man darkening the shiver of a young girl.
I want the high-pitched ringing in my head to stop. I want the ache in my body to understand the language of the painkillers. I want … I don’t want my life to close down while I’m still alive to experience every bit of the process.
When the illness gets worse, I am far away from home. I read books and watch films more avidly than I have for a long time. But missing elements prevent me from understanding, grasping information. I sit in a movie house looking at the end credits and wonder what happened in the film.
“Did you get that?” I ask a few times when I’m out with someone else. The explanations add to my confusion. So, I let the grey cloud settle and close my eyes.
I become devoted to my journal. I imagine that the daily writing is insurance against losing my mind.
The safety measure does not work. I wake every morning, struggling to breathe, as the panic emerges from the dark corner in which it resides at night.
Voices come and go, not attached to anything at all. Whispers of things I am losing, of things escaping that have been locked away in abandoned warehouses.
I dance alone in the light of early morning. The music softens the pain of loss, helps me lay out the pieces in some kind of order. Not so long ago I had a home, a family and a flourishing career. Everyone has left and the house is gone. I open the windows of the small, borrowed cottage where I live.
I take my dogs for a walk on the beach but I’m too weak and they sense it. They go wild, trying to attack everyone and everything around them. Battered by the effort to hold onto their leashes, I go back home. I no longer care much but I go to yet another healer, take medicines and surf the internet, hoping for a name, a handy description of some medical condition that I can claim.
Healer Niall Campbell sits cross-legged in front of me, dominating the small consulting room with his six-foot frame. For the first time in the many months that I’ve been seeing him, he is grave. Not a trace of a smile.
I tell him of stumbling through chaotic events clutching at only one source of comfort. An ancestral story I’ve started to write is like a beacon flickering across a dark, heaving ocean.
Stories know no boundaries of time and space. Stories know no limits of place. Stories travel from one realm to the next as easily as a stream falls to the ocean. It is given to a few to be the guardians of the story, to protect the treasures that touch the hearts of people. These guardians are the Keepers of the Kumm who roam the astral plains at will. My Ancestor //Kabbo is one such Keeper, a timeless visionary weaving story threads, delicate but powerful enough to hold the world in place.
I don’t understand when //Kabbo begins to talk with me. We, the hybrid people of a scarred city landscape, no longer know the language of the Elders. We shoulder the burden of the label ‘coloured’ with anger, frustration, embarrassment and occasionally a bit of offbeat pride. Once, when I was in my 20s, I was in hospital in a coma. When I woke up, a friend told me I spoke a strange gibberish full of clicks while I was unconscious. We are Africans shaping new identities with deep longings where the old ones should be. Niall, a highly trained diviner, teaches me that words are relatively futile in this process, especially English words. Listening to the call of the Ancestors is not a verbal experience.
“So with two disabled languages, English and Afrikaans, and an upbringing stripped of guidance, I have to write a story about a Bushman visionary who lived in the 19th century?” I ask nobody in particular.
The answer from Niall and the spirits who have burst into my world, one dominated by the deadlines of journalism, is a resounding “Yes!”
To describe Niall as a sangoma or traditional healer is accurate but insufficient. The word sangoma has lost some of its currency, its real meaning diluted, limited by its transposition into English.
I have been brought up to abhor these saviours of African sanity. Niall, the Botswana-born son of a Rhodesian4 policeman, is a qualified diviner, a doctor of traditional ceremonies as well as institutions and my spiritual teacher. In Botswana