From shaman to star man:
I feel her retreating energy as it coils back into her armour. I have no more to say to her. I leave the Black Magic Woman hankering for more and, I guess, a tad disappointed.
It struck me then that although underground poets and counterfeit existentialists in my beloved country often spoke about Mutwa in tongues, we knew fuck all about his range. We chanted his name to close ranks, fortify or glam-rock our rhetoric. We’d call his name to silence others while elevating ourselves above the fray. Yet none of that brought us any closer to decrypting either the man or his richly complex repertoire of visual art, incandescent sci-fa (for “factual” and not “fictional” futuristic tales) and luminescence.
None of that ushered us into a closer understanding of the archangels, the core of this man, possibly extracting their heavy dues in ways healers are made to suffer for possessing the “gift”.
Ileave the backstage area feeling like an empty shell. I also leave Brooklyn and New York promising her that, one day, I will go and see Credo Mutwa and try to get to the core of his story, if only to return and impress her. Her stage name, she tells me, in flight mode, ready to bolt out and run, is Janelle. Nine months later, Janelle Monáe, the elf-like space cadet in monochrome hues, releases an album, The ArchAndroid. It becomes a huge summer breakthrough event of 2010. Meanwhile I, back in Mzansi, begin my desperate attempt to have an audience with Mutwa. It would take seven years before I would be granted that honour. Seven lean years.
It’s 2016: the year of the omen of chaos. The year of the revival of student and social angst. The year of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the final phases of the disintegration of colonial empires.
For what it’s worth, it is the year of ideological renewal, if not the recharging of old nationalist batteries across the universe. This is also the year I’d finally be granted an audience with the Sanusi.
Last weekend, I led a small group of committed, if beautifully idealistic, colleagues on an arduous trip through the Kalahari, in pursuit of that rare audience with the Sanusi. This was no Ken Kesey’s chemically injected Merry Pranksters trippin’ across the Mojave. And yet it promised its pound of flesh, if not faith, from all on board.
After a five-hour road trip from Sin City (Johannesburg) to Kuruman, hot-pedalling it across what felt like vast stretches of the Coen brothers’ or Herman Charles Bosman’s world — a rusty, yellowing, flat landscape, stretches and stretches of gorgeous emptiness bar an old highway store with an outdated Bull Brand ad — we arrive in Magojaneng.
Magojaneng, which is Sechuana (as the locals pronounce it) for “swampy spots”, is perched a 15-minute drive southeast of Kuruman’s city centre, on the beaten track that disentangles itself from the main and menacing highway and stretches to Namibia. It is full moon and we can’t help noticing the now amber-red moon, dancing ahead of us as though beckoning us. What it, the moon — in Nguni vernac inyanga, meaning a “healer” and “seer” in its own right — understands all too well is our journey into the Pandora’s box of secrets and magic.
By the time we arrive at the Mutwa compound, it is way past suppertime. The crew is ushered into a small but neat and warm room where Mutwa, who had just turned 95 earlier in the week, had no business waiting for a band of banana peels like us from the big city. We are beyond humbled and soon, we’d be humbled further. I love night-time interviews. Nothing can be hidden from the night. They are nopunches-pulled affairs, and this one would prove no different.
Vusamazulu “Credo” Mutwa cuts a picture of a serene old man. Gone is the iconic image — French-chic thick 1940s spectacles, outfit made of animal hide, neck and chest draped with a click-clickatty golden necklace strung with all sorts of voudon jewels to make Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow drool with envy.
Gone is the visual memory of what and how Credo must look like, even to those who have never laid their eyes on him. Sitting in a reclining position next to a two-bar electric heater is an old man with a bush of white beard wearing a burgundy wool jersey, grey trousers and black-and-white All Stars. He looks human — accessibly so. This does not make sense.
Looks can be deceiving. This man is the iconic Credo Mutwa all right, just not as we choose to remember him. Still sharp as a razor, with a mind, erudition and language far more eloquent than people a quarter of his age, Mutwa has no time for small talk.
Just before we start, he throws me under the bus. “Why would you be interested in me, a witch doctor like me? A dirty piece of meat like me?” he demands. “Since when have I, Credo Mutwa, a liar, a cheat and a fake — so said the whites — become an object of interest? Please sir, answer me that?”
He’s on a roll. “People who believed that we were Satan’s children? Since when have they started having inter- est? My heart is very suspicious. Explain, why this interest in Credo Mutwa? Do you know what fire feels like on your flesh? I am very uneasy. I fought for black African tradition. was ridiculed, I was robbed and, furthermore, two attempts were made to kill me. Why am I now an object interest?’’
He is referring to when he was exiled out of Soweto in the mid-1970s by bands of bloodhounds, youth who believed Mutwa was either a collaborator with the Boers or a false prophet, possibly both.
Mutwa’s only sin is that he dared to be different and hark back to what was felt to be an outmoded sense African past, one that was incongru-