The sangoma, the mountain and the bureaucratic mud

I. The call

It was the same dream, it came again and again, and it only stopped when Ntate Ephraim Mabena agreed to do what his departed grandfather asked.

The first time it came, in 2001, he was famous in these parts for other things. Back then, he was known as the founder of the local kickboxing and karate club, the man to go to if you wanted to keep your son or daughter off the streets. Others knew him as the driving force behind the Mamelodi Fencing Club, which in the late 1990s made a clean sweep of the medals at the national junior championships. A defier of the body’s limits, Mabena had also made a name for himself as an endurance runner, having once undertaken a five-day marathon to raise funds for a trip to Japan.

But on the day he responded to the call in his dream, he was stepping way beyond the physical.

“You know, it started as something I couldn’t figure out,” he explained. “It was my grandfather on my mother’s side who came to me and said, ‘You see that place on the mountain, where you used to jog and catch birds? You see where there is a dumping site?’ I said, ‘Ja’. He said, ‘Go and build a house there.’ ”

Today, that “mountain”— a pristine expanse of the Magaliesburg on the north side of Mamelodi — is known as the Mothong African Heritage Trust. At first by himself, then with his wife Mabel (who has since become a sangoma too, earning the honorific “Ma Mabena”), then with his family, Ntate Mabena cleared the mountainside of the trash that had been dumped up there for generations.

He was told in his dreams that squatters would arrive if he didn’t move fast, and so, when sure enough the squatters did come, he convinced them to go elsewhere. At one point, he found a dead body hanging from a tree, a cellphone ringing in the hapless man’s pocket. Undeterred by the murderers, rapists and thieves who performed their dark arts in the mountain’s shadows, he eventually built his house, which is now a colourful landmark in an unlikely haven where nature and the environment are sacrosanct.

Ummilo, a tree whose fruit is used to treat colds and flu; umdladlathi, which eases the pain in swollen ankle and knee joints; udodhlana, or wild dagga, which boosts the immune system and is said to be effective in the treatment of various cancers — these are just some of the indigenous healing plants that grow in Mothong’s nursery.

Below the nursery, on the south side, a sign proclaims the endorsements — garnered after Mabena and kin had done almost all the heavy lifting — of the University of Pretoria, Unisa, the Tshwane University of Technology and the national government itself, in the guise of the Department of Science and Technology. It is only the local municipality, the City of Tshwane, that is notably absent from the honour roll.

But that was something that Ntate Mabena wanted to talk about later. Right now, he had guests to attend to. Two Wixaritari shamans from Mexico, brought out by Angela Prusa of Namibia and the Sesiyakhula Njalo NPO healers of Mamelodi, led by Gogo Zandi, had come together on this Monday in September to drum and dance and pray for the healing of the land.

Tree planting ceremony with Don Rafael and Ntate Mabena.