The Keeper of the Kumm: Ancestral longing and belonging of a Boesmankind

By Sylvia Vollenhoven

Award-winning journalist Sylvia Vollenhoven tells the story of her life and how it's been turned upside down by an Ancestor: //Kabbo, a Bushman storyteller and revolutionary. She writes of being "too black" for her coloured school mates, working as one of the early female journalists in the misogynistic '70s and of the constant struggle to find an identity that fits. Finally, she unearths a history that speaks to her: first in the language of a long, nameless illness without conventional cure, and then in the Calling of her Ancestors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Jun 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9780624063094

Sylvia Vollenhoven

Sylvia Vollenhoven is an award-winning journalist and playwright as well as a filmmaker. She was nominated for the South African Film & TV Awards for Best Director and Best Documentary. A play she co-authored, My Word: Redesigning Buckingham Palace, was chosen for a run on London's West End. It received a four-star review in the prestigious Times newspaper. At the Grahamstown National Arts Festival another of her plays, Cold Case: Revisiting Dulcie September, won both a Standard Bank Audience Award and the inaugural Adelaide Tambo Award for Human Rights in the Arts. In the early '90s, Vollenhoven was the Southern African Correspondent for the Swedish newspaper, Expressen, and was awarded Sweden's top journalism prize by Scandinavia's prestigious Publicist Klubben. She is the founder of the VIA - Vision in Africa media organisation, which has spearheaded innovative international training initiatives, including a project called Africa Means Business to improve coverage of economics. In her spare time she does yoga and breathes very deeply.

Book preview

Sylvia Vollenhoven

The Keeper of the Kumm

Tafelberg

This book is dedicated to //Kabbo, my Grandmother Sophia Petersen and all the gifted !gixa of our people whose exceptional and often unrecognised talents have helped us survive and thrive.

Prologue

The Keeper of the Kumm

¹

Exorcising apartheid

The illness started unobtrusively but within a few years I was partially bedridden. For the first time in my life I had to live with unending pain and fear. And some days, the lack of a name for this illness made me wish I could die.

I told my story over and over to slick city specialists. But after exhausting conventional cures, I had to swallow my cynicism and consider options that forced me to delve into African traditions. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. Years later when the fog of illness finally dissipated, I began to see my world clearly for the very first time since I was a child.

It has been a long and difficult journey.

In the ’70s, when I landed my first job on a newspaper, I applied for my passport immediately. Carried it to work every day in case of rapid deployment to some far-off place. Only a brief holiday in Swaziland saved the shiny green document from obsolescence in those early years. But as my career progressed, the jet-setting that I had fantasised about in my 20s became a reality.

Decades later, when I was grappling with a debilitating and mysterious illness, a powerful reality dawned. I have travelled widely, written so much about so many things, covered the unfolding story of South Africa extensively, but I know absolutely nothing about myself. Who am I? Where do I come from? What is my place in the landscape of Africa’s history? My family tree is blank save for a few generations. I don’t even know who my great-grandparents were.

So a few years ago, as I lay in bed hoping that complete rest would get my strength back, I began to delve into the story of //Kabbo, a 19th-century Bushman visionary. It is my belief that my ancestral journey with //Kabbo became the key to unlocking the prison of an illness that I still cannot name. The ancients say this kind of sickness is the Ancestors’ way of getting our attention. My grandmother, if she had been alive, would have said it was a calling. And indeed, with reading about //Kabbo, something magical began to happen in my life.

Almost two centuries ago, a Bushman boy (San is a term some prefer) called /Han#i# (Father’s Desire) was born in a small settlement near Kenhardt in the Northern Cape. It was 1815, the year that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and Britain became the 19th-century superpower. Wrested once more from the Dutch, the Cape became a British Colony, and hordes of marauding settlers pushed into South Africa’s hinterland.

/Han#i#, an especially gifted child, grew up at a time when settlers and other Africans were intent on the complete destruction of his people; they were driven off their land, their languages were banned and they were enslaved. Boer commandos formed ‘hunting parties’ with the aim of slaughtering an entire people. When /Han#i# was about nine years old, a great famine killed his father and two older brothers. After the initiation rites of his first hunt, his adult name became //Kabbo, the Dreamer or Visionary.

When //Kabbo was in his early 30s, the colonial governor extended the boundaries of the Cape Colony, taking away almost all his people’s land, and thereby providing a conducive environment for Boer commandos to hunt them down.

//Kabbo had a vision that he could save his people. And so in 1870, //Kabbo /Uhi-ddoro Jantje Tooren, a pipe-smoking, revolutionary Bushman hunter driven by his need to safeguard his fragile culture, travelled hundreds of miles to find city people as he had heard that they could write down stories and preserve them in books.

The result of this vision quest is an archive recorded over a thousand days and nights. More than a century later, it was entered into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. The Bleek/Lloyd Archive, housed at the University of Cape Town, contains over 100 notebooks and more than 12 000 handwritten pages². It is the work of Victorian philologist Wilhelm Bleek, his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, and their teacher informants³. //Kabbo was the main teacher. But we the descendants of //Kabbo and his people are largely unaware of the existence or significance of the archive.

And in the same way that //Kabbo journeyed hundreds of miles to find Bleek and Lloyd, he reached out across time and space to the seaside cottage where I lay unable to work or do much except read, reflect and write.

As much as we feel that we choose the stories we wish to tell, we have to accept that some stories choose us. I’ve always known I wanted to be a storyteller. Never imagined anything else. Journalism became an outlet.

I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s when apartheid faced only a weak and battered opposition. I lived in Soweto while I did my journalism training, during the height of the youth uprising of 1976. The following decade I became a correspondent for a foreign media group and covered the devastating effect of apartheid. Standing outside the prison gates, watching Nelson Mandela take his first strides towards freedom felt like a dream. Afterwards, covering the negotiations that preceded the new South Africa, the dawn of democracy and our first elections took me ever deeper into a painful collective history.

With apartheid out of the way I could focus on other aspects of what ailed us as a nation. My own pain came rushing to the surface like lava from an erupting volcano. As I delved into the story of a long dead Ancestor, I began to understand that centuries of trauma have to be acknowledged before we can move on. Until we see ourselves in //Kabbo and engage with the //Kabbos in our own histories, we will continue to flounder in a sea of social problems.

To tell a story of this depth and magnitude, I have had to drop my conventional notions of time and space. Balance my respect for the scientific by honouring tradition. Create a place where African mysticism and modern knowledge sit side by side with ease. And finally, I have had to unearth my own story before I could access the meaning of a 19th-century visionary, rainmaker and shaman bursting into my life.

And now that I can see myself and my world clearly, I’ve found that a powerful movement has begun to stir. What started as a flicker of recognition in conversations and encounters has become a groundswell of social change. A recognisable crusade. It has been called into being to acknowledge the pain as well as the heroism of our Ancestors, and goes beyond the achievements that reside in the selective memory of popular political movements.

There are Khoekhoe language lessons at The Castle of Good Hope built by Jan van Riebeeck, there is an annual traditional Rieldans (a traditional southern African dance form) contest held at the Afrikaanse Taalmonument erected by the apartheid state and there is a movement of Khoisan activists reclaiming our rightful place.

The Keeper of the Kumm is my intuitive and creative response to a social current that is moving us away from the dangerous shores of division. Away from the systematic dispossession of being coloured to being an African with a claim to the land and its story.

Globally there is an awakening to a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing ourselves in the landscape of the past. With this awareness, neat timelines give way to a non-linear, interrelated reality.

My own awakening has helped me see my illness, which defied mainstream medicine, very differently. But it’s been extremely hard to cope with a reality that runs counter to my no-nonsense journalism training. To accept that a physical sickness in the 21st century can be connected to events that happened hundreds of years ago. So I gave up using my intellect to try to make sense of it all and accepted the magical journey that led to healing. A journey that rescued me from a prison that I did not know existed, even though I was trapped inside.

There is only one reason I am telling this story of loss and redemption. I simply have no other option.

PART 1

MIXED

I look into the mirror

A girl with a gemsbok face stares at me

She knows when to eat the springbok meat

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 he is called a Ngaka ya diKoma, a Doctor of The Law.

The irony of a white man guiding me through the complex maze of African tradition, a man who knows the law before laws, embarrasses me. I don’t really know why, it just does. Niall has been helping me step by step through the process of responding to the call from my Ancestors.

The Ancestors arrive unobtrusively and once they enter the old rules do not apply any longer. They come to teach us of the battle that ensues when worlds collide and of the places where healing can be found when the chaos subsides. Sometimes our immediate Ancestors work with visitor spirits but the process is tricky and the pitfalls are many. In the beginning I don’t know any of this and see only chaos. Feel only pain and confusion.

//Kabbo /Han#i#i /Uhi-ddoro Jantje Tooren, a visitor spirit and Story Guardian, a Keeper of the Kumm, arrived in my life many years ago, but sits patiently waiting until I am ready. Since this 19th-century visionary entered my world, the fine line I walk between reason and chaos has become a razor wire some days.

I have no money and I’ve borrowed from the bank and from friends. My total debts are now larger than a decent annual income. It frightens me to write this. The needle indicating my energy levels barely inches out of the red zone.

I haven’t seen Niall for months as I battle to find enough money to pay my rent and bills, paying one friend back only to borrow even more from another. I tell him about an illness I’ve had since I had to shoot a short film in a room where post-mortems are done, at a pathology lab in Hermanus.

Next time you have to work around dead people, come to me first, says Niall as I sit shivering opposite him in the midwinter cold.

I’ve been getting ill every few weeks. I spend half a month in bed and the other half working myself to a standstill to make up for it. But no matter what I do, I feel as if my life is closing down. As if I am operating in narrow fissures, in minute breathing spaces, that remain open with great difficulty.

I wake up tired. My head throbs, especially when I lie down. A field of crickets is furiously busy in my ears. I am afraid to eat because so many things make me nauseated. In the middle of the night, I sometimes have to go to the bathroom to throw up. My body aches and even short spells of writing make the pain in my left shoulder unbearable. My stomach is in a permanent knot, no matter how many laxatives I swallow. Any relief I gain through exercise is limited because my left knee is painful and swollen. My skin is patched with eczema. It feels as if my system is fighting itself. Specialists cannot find the cause of the constant pain in my left side.

I know I need healing but I don’t know how. I am so, so tired, I tell Niall.

I don’t say that I’m hardly making any progress with my writing, that I skim over the growing pile of debt that keeps me awake at night, and I don’t mention the fear that has grown too big to name.

I have a suspicion about what might be happening to you but I will have to check to make sure, says Niall.

For the first time, there is a shadow on his face. He is usually all light and smiles. No matter my dilemma, he shows me how much I have going for me and sends me away with healing herbs to wear and to put in my bath.

This time is different.

I knew it would be different because I couldn’t sleep and felt so sick that I almost cancelled my appointment. And when I got to his gate, he came out to greet me looking puzzled.

Did we schedule you for today? I have someone else coming right now.

This slight upset is enough to make my throat ache, as the tears are about to flow.

Not again. This confusion is happening all the time, I say softly.

We stand at his gate in the half-hearted sunshine of the winter morning and I show him the text message I sent to confirm our appointment at 10am. He in turn shows me the trail on his phone and my reply is simply not there.

I didn’t get your confirmation so I assumed you couldn’t make it, says Niall.

He sees the panic in my eyes and tells me to come back in an hour.

Lately, this has been happening a lot. Two mobile phones, a fixed line, a desktop computer and a tablet … But some days everything freezes up. Nothing goes in and nothing comes out. It’s as if there is a steel wall around me, pushing me into oblivion. I am being cut off from people, from opportunities.

Several projects have attracted great interest from all the right people initially, but then suddenly the enthusiasm disappears. My emails and phone calls are unanswered. Sudden dead ends. I am not accustomed to this. At one point I throw a pile of books and notes into a corner of my office and give up. No matter how hard I work, I can’t make any headway. For almost six months, I haven’t been able to get past a chapter about death in the book I am writing.

You’ve won. I don’t have the energy to fight this any longer. I give up, I say.

A voice, soft but urgent, intervenes: Don’t converse with it, whatever you do!

I wait in a coffee shop for an hour and return to Niall’s house on the lower reaches of the Steenberg, a mountain that abuts the Cape Town suburb of Tokai. We make small talk first, as we always do. I remind him of the dream I had before I met him. Recently, I looked at the entry in my journal. It is accompanied by a sketch. My drawings are terrible, so usually I don’t even try.

It’s a description of the house you used to live in, I say.

Niall’s old house was number three. In my dream, before I had heard of him, I saw it as the third house from the corner.

You went into another room while I struggled with a huge darkness. ‘Like a limpet on my back’, my journal says.

I’ve told him about this dream before. I don’t know why I’m repeating it. He listens attentively. I also tell him about dreams of dying and a bit more about the shoot at the pathology lab. He interrupts in his usual gentle style:

When did you do the shoot?

Several months ago now, I reply, and tell him how I had to go home to sleep halfway through the shoot, except that it was more like losing consciousness than sleeping.

Niall’s gentle insistence stops me again. Something about the way he is looking at me makes me lose track of my story.

When was it, exactly?

About six months ago, December last year I think.

My story fizzles as Niall’s face becomes very serious. I’ve never seen such a shadow between us before. He reaches for the genet-skin pouch in which he keeps his traditional ‘bones’. The objects in the bag are a talismanic mixture that also includes a few bones. Only once before has he used this method of divination – to reassure me that in spite of my concerns about working with an ancestral spirit all would be well.

Give it a blow if you will, he says, opening the pouch and pushing the contents toward me. We sit opposite each other on the floor. The room is bedecked with the comforting symbols of African healing and divination. Neatly stacked jars of herbs flank a small altar. The wall behind it is covered with brightly coloured cloth. A tangible border between us and the horsey suburb in which he lives.

I breathe deeply and blow into the pouch. When Niall holds the bag close to him and chants an incantation, I close my eyes in silent prayer. The chanting summons his guides. Their presence is tangible. It is the feeling you get when a group of powerful personalities has walked into a room.

I continue breathing deeply and praying. After several minutes of incantation, Niall opens his eyes and empties the contents of the pouch onto the reed mat between us. He doesn’t touch anything but uses a whisk made of bone and animal hair to point at ‘constellations’.

Yes, it’s just as I thought, he says looking up at me. Nothing in our relationship has prepared me for seeing the expression of dread in my sangoma’s eyes.

What he says next doesn’t make sense to me as a complete sentence, not at that moment and not for a long while after.

You have picked up a death energy … the energy of a dead person, maybe even several entities, and that is what is causing the chaos in your life.

No, that can’t be. I feel a bit ill and things have been difficult, but …

In denial, I tumble mentally from one response to the next without absorbing what Niall is saying.

I don’t look like someone who is cursed. Shouldn’t my hair be falling out or my house be creaking with sulphurous ectoplasm like in the movies? I think.

I miss some of Niall’s words and run away deliberately from others:

Terrible … hate doing this … very dangerous … must do something fast.

Niall sees my panic and confusion so he repeats a few things slowly. Even then the words drift between us like unclaimed baggage in an airport terminal. Until one comes that I have to deal with because it knocks me over.

Do you know the Femba ritual?

I look at him blankly.

Exorcism!

That single word makes all the others disappear. A host of frightening stories come rushing in to stand alongside the word Niall has just uttered.

But then something even more frightening than the E word comes at me. It is the repeated, seemingly benign, use of the second person singular pronoun. Why doesn’t he say ‘we’?

"You will have to find a sangoma who can do Femba for you. It is not done by one person. It has to be done by a team of sangomas. You will have to do this as soon as possible."

How do I …?

And then more silence.

I assume that he wants nothing to do with the dark force that is sucking the life out of me. I feel more alone and frightened than I have ever felt in my entire life.

As he notices the tears begin to fall, Niall says, I am not allowed to offer.

Perceiving my fear, he adds, In terms of custom and tradition, I can’t offer to do it but I can tell you that I am qualified to perform the ritual. You can seek a second opinion and you can choose anyone you want. I charge five for the ritual and two for the follow-up.

At last my mind has something to fasten onto in the wake of the fear and confusion brought on by the E word. Five what? I say, exposing my complete ignorance of the terrain Niall is treading.

Five thousand for the Femba ritual and two thousand for the process that has to happen after.

I stop crying.

He will do it, I think, and I feel almost elated.

Then the sadness returns as I realise that if I give a group of sangomas R7 000 I will not have a place to stay. But I don’t say that in case he goes back to talking about ‘you’ and not ‘us’ again.

I will raise the money, I say, with little confidence.

Let me know when you want to do it. I have to gather a group of sangomas. It’s not something I like doing. It’s very dangerous, says Niall. He hasn’t smiled once since looking at the bones.

Before I go he explains: You have been working with your Ancestors. This opens up portals and these energies have used the openings to get to you.

I walk away, playing the conversation over and over. For the first time since I have been consulting Niall, he takes me all the way to my car. When I get in and he walks away, I feel like a child who has been