Ntsiki Mazwai shades light on African spirituality

Poet and activist Ntsiki Mazwai says African elders’ and traditional healers’ bodies need to come together and mend the broken communication between the generations.

This comes after Ntsiki criticised dancer and reality TV star Zodwa Wabantu for wearing ancestral beads while gyrating half-naked, saying it was disrespectful to the African culture.

“There needs to be more control in these initiation schools. In other spiritual practices you go through processes and there are elders and there are Gobelas. Also in African spirituality who have spent many years doing this. So this thing where we disregard the elders is a problem because then as the youth we start making up our own rules, and when you make up your own rules that’s when you are going to mess up with spirits and then we all know that messing with spirits can go horribly wrong.”

A tendency that Sangoma and African spiritual teacher Gogo Dineo Ndlanzi also noticed about the youth is lack of patience.

Speaking to TshisaLIVE, at a panel discussion hosted by Castle Milk Stout on April 25 she said the most important tool to have on one’s spiritual journey was patience.

“When you are impatient don’t even bother to start. Go find out why you are impatient, deal with that, because our youth, especially the ones born in the 1990s, are very impatient.

“We don’t blame them because the programme was set for everything, they were born into — a programme of a sense of entitlement more than anything. So already they say, ‘no this thing is taking too long, I want to see changes now’.”

Ntsiki said black people need to go back to the basics of having conversations where information and knowledge were passed down from the older generations to the new.

“In ancient times there was a circle between the young and the old, and that was how information was transferred .There was a full circle from the young to the old and from the old to the young. So there’s been a disruption of the communication by colonialism and we need to start having conversations around how do we come back to being African.

“We keep doing it in trends but until we are fully committed to going back to ourselves we are going to continue losing ourselves and we will continue not having anything and not owning anything.”

Shocked by the lack of outrage after the video clip of Zodwa Wabantu that emerged on the socials she said people cant be left to their devices.

“I definitely think we need traditional bodies to regulate this, I’m so ready for that. We need to lay down law and to have control. We need control in the black nation. People can’t just do as they please. Another thing is that some people think they have amaDlozi but it is sometimes unhealed childhood trauma. And if they went to therapy you will find that they don’t do most of the stuff that they do. So we can’t allow our things to be disrespected. They have been disrespected enough.”