An audience with the seer

with the crude challenges of the Soweto youth of the time.

They tarred his name, beat him up, insulted him and ran him out of the township like a dog. Since then, he’s been living as a refugee, some sort of internal exile, in his fatherland. Even when he later acquired a mysterious aura as South Africa’s prime mystic, Vusamazulu was never, ever at home

his psyche. He was, and still is, a wounded man. Exiled from Soweto, he settled in

then Bophuthatswana homeland, where he built one of his typical Credo Mutwa villages. Alas, home it was not be, either. Gripped by a mixture of paranoia and celebrity envy, homeland linchpin Lucas Mangope showed him the door. He went north and settled in

Hartbees area, west of Pretoria, before relocating to Kuruman. It is as though South Africa cannot deal with Mutwa and yet claims him as one of imponderable oracles. Listening to Mutwa, though, we

I want to scream: Indeed we are. He prefers old expressions such as Bantu, African, native and indigenous, and sees no ethnocentric or anthropological offence in those. He believes in owning language, pouring life into it, for it not to be owned by other’s perceptions of who you are as an African.

On the one hand he extols the heritage gifts of “indigenous Africans”. “I grew up hearing stories I have no reason to disbelieve, stories of our ability to communicate with entities from space, long before the arrival of whites here.” He might even catch you off-guard with one of his aphorisms: “Do you know that African men and women known as the Olmecs sailed to America way before Columbus and his ironclad thugs even set foot there?”

Thus, to hear how merciless he is towards what he calls the “African condition” can knock the wind out of your sails: “Sometimes it does seem like we Africans, gifted as we are in the cosmological sense of how the universe works, don’t know whether we are coming or going. We are directionless people paralysed by fear.”

Often when Mutwa speaks it is too easy either to disbelieve him, thus dismissing him as a whimsical or deranged genius, or just fall for each and every word of his as though it is unassailable scripture.

Both of those impulses are dangerous and dishonest, at the very least. Although the latter reveals our laziness to engage with minds and mindsets that operate in different realms from the norm, dismissing them as madmen is horrifying.

It is getting late. But Mutwa has just started. I confess to him my struggle to tease out the “factual” from his bottomless well of “anecdotes” and the warren of his gloriously “fantastical” characters and plots — the realism from the magic realism, as it were. A prime example is the genre-defying tricks and gifts that books such as Indaba, My Children come bearing for the reader. Mutwa will hear none of it and is quick to correct me: “No. Nothing I tell is fiction, none.”

He is aware that some readers grapple with making sense of his dense — if grounded in rich poetics and life philosophy — teachings, especially those works of art veering into what the Western world refers to as sci-fi.

In the introduction to Indaba, My Children, he acknowledges the awareness of such doubt and yet, instead of coddling us to believe him, he chooses to tell it the only way he knows it to be “true”. “The only way I, as an outcast, one of the guardians of umlando or tribal history, shall tell these stories to you in the very words of the guardians who passed them to me before.”

He writes: “Many will find it hard to believe much of what I have revealed, but I am not in the very least concerned, because whether I am believed or not, everything I write here is true.”

Not one to go with the crowds, he girds his loins, unsheathes his sword and prepares to die standing rather than begging to be understood. “But I shall not despair,” he pumps his chest, “I shall not be discouraged, because he who takes an oath before the all-seeing gods to carry a certain task, come what may, is already doubly shielded against the assegais of failure, ridicule and adversary.”

You will understand why his foes would see his self-affirmation as unbridled righteousness. He wrote those words in the late 1950s or early 1960s. To be fair, Mutwa is only human. He, too, has had moments of doubt he will always struggle to convey to us in simpler terms.

In the postscript to a chapter titled The Great Journey Begins, he observes: “We have reached the end of a long and tedious story, a strange mixture of historical fact and legendary fantast, a strange mixture of truth and nonsense.” Are we observing a rare expression of self-doubt — or is he aware that the reader is too taxed by the author’s complexity and thus, self-deprecatingly, he is attempting to appear simpatico?

One thing we can be sure of that’s not curated to curry any favour is Mutwa’s simple yet deeply felt, if inelegant, reverence and scholarship for the soul and figure of a woman in both his visual art and his interviews.

He exalts the feminine spirit, speaking about women’s place in the interplanetary and galactic genealogy. He speaks about what the visual image of a woman elicits in a man, a psychic desire for both necessary emotional pain and the transcendence Nina Simone aspired to when she sang “I wish/ I knew how it feels to be free”.

He talks about women’s power and does not shy away from describing them anatomically, imbuing his vivid descriptions — such as when he told us you need to respect your mothers, bo mmao ba marago-a-magolo, “the big-buttocked women who raise you’’ — with deep, erotic poetics. The last time I heard or read anything as bold and graphic with no intention to reduce, hurt or (as the smart types put it) “other” others was in Antjie Krog’s 2014 collection Synapse.

He speaks about women almost interchangeably with the luminous power of the stars. “Immense knowledge comes from the stars, immense light issues out of them, forever. Our people respected stars so much that they had names for them. Same as women; they are the carriers of life itself.”

Right in the middle of this, his voice seems to gain an extra weight. He straightens his drooping back. “In Nguni a woman is called umfazi. Ukufaza is to scatter. Women are the scatterers of the living seed. Just as the stars pour unto lights, some break into little pieces to create an even richer Milky Way.”

Feminists might not be charmed by Mutwa’s traditional exultation of womanhood in a seemingly narrow and male-possessive manner. They will not be chuffed either by how some of his women characters “with itches and hips” are depicted as devourers of men. And they might have a point.

But Mutwa, a man not of his time, born in 1921, continues, in intimate conversations and broader work (nowhere expressed better than in his gigantic silver and gold female sculptures) to engage broader sexism in ways the patriarchs will probably take aeons even to internalise.

“We don’t respect women at our own peril: we whistle at them, rape them, loot their bodies. We have no sense of what they represent to this world.”

At about midnight, we are ushered out of his room. I leave feeling like everyone can say the things he says. I also felt that, despite his reputation as a complex artist and storyteller, much of Mutwa’s wisdom is common wisdom. Perhaps that’s what makes it and him so hard to fathom — what seems common often takes lifetimes to distil into received wisdom.

Mutwa is not a perfect man. Yet he inspires us to escape our programmed condition, what John Coltrane might have meant by levitation towards a “love supreme”. It’s the same kinetic transcendence movement and merger of body and soul so selfless in its embrace and oblivious that the spiritual sum total of such a bond can only go one way — rupture into an out-of-body experience, metaphysical emotion.

Something the Electric Lady, Janelle, was trying to game me up to appreciate and I was not listening.