There is a need for a National Cleansing Ceremony!

A week before January 8th, I received a letter from the Office of the ANC Treasurer-General inviting me to lead a team on the traditional ceremony of Mophaso as part of the ANC 110 celebration in January 2022. The aim of the Mophaso Ceremony was for us to connect with the spirits of our founding fathers.

A team of five members of the Traditional Healers Association from each district of Limpopo were selected for the purpose. The ceremony took place finally around 11h00 outside at the stadium.

The sound of our voices, calling out to our founding leaders floated in the embrace of the Malombo drums as the air transported our anguish to all four corners of the universe, appealing to our founders not to turn their back on us. We felt unbearably hurt, deeply from our individual and collective beings. Only the deep wells of human heritage could be called upon to salvage the situation.

Six months later, it is with pain that I make the observation that though we were reeling with agony after the rejection by the people in the local government elections of 1st November 2021, there are signs from things we continue to do that we still need to be prevailed upon to change our ways. I continue to hear self-centredness and lack of humility in the atmosphere that surrounds engagements towards the important constitutional gatherings – including various conferences that have passed – and those of the next 6 months. This political culture must change.

The founding values and culture of servant leadership must be infused back into how we do things. We have to reflect deeply on how we address organisational and societal concerns on factionalism and corruption that feeds on it. It is in this context that we have allowed ourselves to tolerate foreign practices when we go to conferences. These foreign tendencies permeate our organisation from branch to national level.

Weaknesses and sick conduct that have afflicted the processes have included vulnerability to deployment of large sums of money from sources that remain in the dark. Our fundamental character of being a servant to the people is no longer showing. This disease manifests itself around leadership choices processes from the local level right up to the continental.

Youth and women structures get infiltrated for purposes of influencing the outcomes of elections, in order to put people in positions who would favour particular agendas. Those are not agendas that look out for our poor people; they are either personal ego trips based on other foreign tendencies to the ANC, or the genuine spirit of the Alliance or the Constitution of RSA. Every effort must be made to defeat this culture. We must learn a different way of doing things.

As we move closer to the December Conference, we should be prioritising the considerations of what is in the national interest, the interest of our organisation, the ANC which is the vehicle to a better future for South Africa. We should be conscious that this vehicle was handed down to us by the founders who are watching over us. I believe that they are troubled and determined to steer us away from any disaster. To truly follow through on the mophaso ceremony, it is necessary to disrupt the ‘business as usual’ business of our lobby groups.

Comrades, I believe that the spirit world exists and is poised through collaborations with us to be enabled to help us get unstuck from the spiritual mud we are in. To take this in at a deeper level, we need a calmness of our individual spirits, an absence of ego-based considerations, and humility to accept that we do not possess full understanding and full knowledge of the potency of our heritage. It is time to be immersed in the silences we need; it is time for us to listen to responses to the January 8 Mophaso ceremony. We must change!

Comrades, it is impossible to change if we continue as usual. The new culture of unbridled factionalism in our movement is the source of all our troubles. Let us work towards stability and allow the ANC to breath in the fresh air that is necessary for it to pursue its renewal, rebuilding and revitalisation. For stability to set in, let us only attend to what is essentially needed in the changes to top leadership e.g. currently, changes in the Secretary General’s office are the obvious ones.

Unleashing of a full scale contestation of all positions aided by negative distorted interpretations by daily hostile media reports are the last thing we need this time. It would be the opposite of what took the ANC head office to direct us to the mophaso ceremony mode.

The ANC prays not only by singing “Nkosi Sikelela iAfrika”. We call for blessings also through teams of multi-denominational faith leaders who call on higher powers to watch over us, protect us from evil and propel us to higher levels of being. We call on God to watch over us, blessing of our leaders, for the blessing of the ordinary man and woman, for the blessings of families, for the blessing of the land, and for the forgiveness of our transgressions.

For us as the Republic of South Africa we must pause and reflect deeply, especially after the fire in our Parliament. Over time, we have been alerted to the necessity to cleanse our spaces at a national scale given the blood that has been spilt over centuries in the contestation for power and land, right up to the 1994 breakthrough and beyond.

A spotlight must focus from the period of colonisation, segregation, apartheid and the transitional period. This will again require calmness of the spirt and an ability to embrace differences in interpretation of historic events. The endgame being a large scale campaign of cleansing ourselves of the burden of history. This is a necessary step forward.

I am of the belief that the acknowledgement and celebration of the founding giant, Mama Charlotte Mannya-Maxeke has unleashed an even higher potency by way of her particular brand of fighting spirit. The gender based violence (GBV) and femicide that continues to afflict our communities – in the end – will not escape the more sharpened knives of these spirit warriors. We had never seen the atrocious conduct seen in some of the crimes that have been reported.

Our children dare not adopt this conduct that can only be understood as amanyala done by sick minds. Healing at a deeper soul level must address this, not only by using Western medical solutions, but also amasiko! We have to shake off our ‘shame’ in using our ancient cultures and traditional forms of finding ukuphila in the gatherings of our families and communities which Mama Charlotte urges us we must not discard as where we belong.

Telling the past painful history we are emerging from, warts and all, is unavoidable in the process. Its like squeezing pus from a wound. If you do not do it, the wound festers and take longer to heal. We need to heal, but to get there will take the confrontation of the immediate tests and challenges. History must be conveyed truthfully by way of acknowledging the wrongs of our past.

Stories and secrets in our families must come out. Neglected rituals needed when family members have passed. How many of these spiritual debts are we owing? They must be done. For us to heal individually and within family tensions and rifts, these rituals must be done for healing to set in at this deep level.

We must straighten the record in relation to the bravery of souls like uBab’ Skelm of Impi Yamasende. He confessed to the “crime” of murdering a white farm owner who had been cutting off African farm workers’ balls with impunity. Skelm bravely declined the community intervention of the idea of 100 cows to buy his freedom from the hangman. Not only that, he directed that his own 40 cattle, rather than be used to save his life, be sold to educate a boy and a girl, at the time when only boys were favoured with being sent to school. This is a story packed with pride and dignity. Long live the spirit of Skelm. A story within living memory. It had to take him visiting his granddaughter for his family to start talking about him again. This cannot be allowed to keep the pride and dignity of those that sacrificed for us to get to this point, hidden in mysteries we fear to unpack.

Here I wish to linger around a particular messenger on this subject of cleansing. An old man from the Shembe church, whom I met in 2015, making references to ancient traditions and rituals, he focused attention on agitation in the spirit world of souls that left abnormally from earth. Soon thereafter, I got visits by spirits of two such recently-departed well-known comrades confirming the old man’s message. This is the result of decades and even centuries of neglect of cleansing rituals and ceremonies at various levels. The key takeout is; there’s a need for a NATIONAL CLEANSING CEREMONY!

Three years later, he specified the need to do something about the lingering soul/spirit of an old order leader in parliament. Records will prove that the matter was formally pursued at different levels and forums. Perhaps, the modern ways of seeing and doing things need to benefit and reflect deeper. The bible itself urges us to heed the necessity to do things as our for-bearers showed us in ancient times. We must have humility to be guided on the necessary rituals to fundamentally clear our way into a healthy future.

To deepen the effect of this campaign, it must be multi-sectoral; it must be from local to national levels. It must be thorough going in touching every ANC branch in the application of not the usual groups that were created on factional lines, but gatherings of healing through opening every chest and freeing ourselves of accumulated anger, tension, suspicions, mistrust, grudges, jealousies, hatred etc.

The ANC branch level is critical and must be exemplary. It must lay the ground for local communities to be assisted in appropriately resourced thorough-going programmes which must enlist the requisite skills including CDW’s, Traditional Health Practitioners and Traditional Leaders. If we do justice at this level of this cleansing, the provincial and national stages of it will not defeat us. Our mature selves at the levels of our souls, will have kicked in. Those souls should lead the transition to the future, where all that matters will be responding to the needs of the people, no room for individual agendas and ego trips. All resources have to be focused on us doing an honest job in the service of the people!

This article first appeared in ANC Today, 1 July 2022