The Keeper of the Kumm. Sylvia Vollenhoven
I was working in Ghana recently, I reached an all-time spiritual low – the rather clichéd dark night of the soul. While trawling the internet in the hope of finding a clue to the cause of the feeling, I found an interview with Colin about his work. I listened to the podcast repeatedly and afterwards wished I could meet him to find out more about the brothers Campbell, the white sangomas from Botswana.
Two years down the line, I am waiting for them to perform an exorcism ritual. It feels as if I am very much in the passenger seat of the vehicle of my life.
Horses neigh outside the window as they are led from the paddocks to the stables. My mind travels to the people of the main house and their rich white family small talk in front of the TV.
“I have to ask you to get undressed and come back and sit here,” says Niall, pointing to the lion’s head on the reed mat.
I pick up my purple basket, the one I got for Christmas from my friend Bea, and head for the bathroom. She was the first to tell me I was channelling an ancestral spirit. At the bottom of the basket, hidden very deliberately from sight, is the small white Bible my mother gave me on my 18th birthday. Hedging my bets.
“Here, let me help you,” says one of the sangomas who has to cover my leotard and T-shirt with traditional sarongs. I am a bit embarrassed at the possibility that she might see the Bible under my clothes in the basket.
I sit in the middle of a six-person circle of sangomas. One healer is beating the sacred cowhide drum, said to have a spirit of its own. Two of the women are helping Niall prepare medicine in a wooden bowl. He is trembling slightly.
Myself and Ryan Lee, who is helping to film the event, are the only black people in the room. I think about the ancient dramas being played out here – the descendants of colonials nudging me closer to my African heritage. Harking back to a time when the term ‘coloured’ did not exist.
It’s been a very long journey from my upbringing in a fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist family to an exorcism and cleansing with a team of white sangomas. The forbidding dictates of the Old Testament have dominated my life and within that milieu African spirituality was not even up for discussion.
But no amount of dogma and packaged prayers have kept my Ancestors at bay. It is time to be ripped apart, and to lose everything, especially my religion. Lose even the comfort of people I love.
The stars of my inner sky light my way as I descend into the chaos. The line-up of the long dead who have been following me around move closer. My story is their story. It is time to remove the boundaries that have forced us apart. Time to go back to the beginning … or even further.
Time to explore where the damage of colouredness really began.
Talking dolls and string scooters
The girl sees the wind fighting its way across the plains and knows it is an invitation to dance
In a journey from the Sabbath school of the Seventh-day Adventists to an ancestral calling and the exorcism of Femba, it is probably best to begin with the time when things are abundantly clear. When the boundary of my world is a wire mesh fence that separates me from the grown-up children in the school next door to where we live.
I am born in the spring of 1952 at the St Joseph’s Maternity Home on the slopes of Table Mountain. Sylvia Elizabeth Juliana, the illegitimate firstborn of my mother, Eileen Magdalene Petersen. My birth certificate is issued before apartheid officialdom has dreamed up myriad classifications for people who are not white. The ‘Mixed’ tag on the document sets me apart from people born later with more definitive race classifications. I am very proud of this status, especially when it does not appear on the documents of my younger siblings. ‘Mixed’ just feels so much more benign than what came later, in the ’60s and ’70s.
My earliest memories go back to the time when we move to Wynberg because my devout Christian grandmother wants us to cut all ties with the family of my Muslim father, Ebrahim ‘Braima’ Hendricks. This is when the Vollenhoven family enters my life. My mother is dating Freddie Vollenhoven. I recall my forays into their intimidating house in Brentwood Road … but at this stage, they do not loom as large as my own family.
We stay in a wood and iron garden shed next to the school fence in the back yard of Uncle Willie and Auntie Gracie Davids’ run-down house with the fancy name. To this day, ‘Privet Villa’ is still right next to Ottery Road Methodist School.
Jesus loves me, this I know
For the Bible tells me so
Little ones to Him belong
They are weak but He is strong
“Ha’penny High,” says Pa Malfent, Auntie Gracie’s father, who is Welsh. It’s our secret greeting. I don’t know what it means. It feels good that someone has a pet name for me.
“You learn fast,” he says as I finish singing the chorus he has been teaching me.
Every time Pa Malfent comes to visit us my regiment of doll friends stands to attention. He picks each one up in turn, talks to them and somehow makes them answer.
“Ha’penny High, Jack is hungry,” says Pa Malfent before moving onto Raggedy Anne with red, woolly hair and a polka-dot apron. When they have all ‘spoken’, Pa Malfent sets them back down at the small pink wooden table and goes off for his afternoon walk. Sometimes if I’m lucky he invites me along. He is the only one who can see the crowd of people hovering in the corner. During the day they keep a safe distance. At night they sometimes catch up with me and my body shakes with fear. My grandmother tells me: “Pray and they will go away.”
But I think God might not listen to me because I watched my mother kissing her boyfriend Freddie Vollenhoven and I didn’t look away or tell my grandmother. She says upright young women should not allow a man to touch them and I assume this includes kissing.
My mother laughs a lot and more loudly than the other women. I love listening to my mother and her friends laugh and talk about Monatic, the shirt factory up the road where they work. My mother is a supervisor there. I can tell by the way she says the word and the way everyone listens to her that she’s no ordinary factory worker.
I love the soft sounds their wide flared skirts with many layers of stiffening make, especially when they dance in my Auntie Gracie’s lounge.
My mother’s favourite pastime is listening to LPs on Auntie Gracie’s new record player. When they stack them on top of each other, the arm of the record player rears back like a little horse to allow one disc to drop at a time. Then it moves forward shakily to settle on a “Jamaica Farewell”.
The silver arm moves back and forth, releasing tunes that fill the house. It is so much better than playing outside. I’m not allowed to touch the records, ever. On some of the labels, a dog is singing into a gramophone. My mother and her friends listen to their favourites and talk endlessly about the singers … Pat Boone, Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole and The Everly Brothers. Sometimes when they play slow songs they hug themselves and dance alone, talking about the boys at the factory. That’s when they chase the children out of the room. I get to stay because they think I don’t understand. I’m so quiet people hardly notice me.
My mother has a beautiful voice and she is often asked to sing at weddings. Her songs explode in very high notes that she can hold much longer than the singers on the gram. When she makes the notes wobble, I sometimes worry that the words will get stuck in her throat.
My Auntie Grace’s daughters, Valerie and Lorna, tease my mother about her boyfriend Freddie who plays the banjo in the St Joseph’s String Band, the Christmas Choir that marches down our road in blue blazers and grey trousers during the festive season.
When Freddie walks down the road, playing his banjo with the string band in their smart outfits, my mother waves and runs into the road excitedly. He’s tall, so he’s always in the last row. My mother walks behind him for a while as if she belongs to St Joseph’s.
“Ha’penny High, come, let’s go find Claudie,”