RHYTHM OF RECONNECTION Venda, South Africa

Meet Mashudu, who is reconnecting knowledgeable elders with young people to animate their ancestral wisdom, culture and confidence.

A new story of decolonisation from the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective, told by Mashudu Takalani of EarthLore Foundation, supported by The Gaia Foundation. Stills taken from the animation (above) by artist Tim Hawkins.

My name is Mashudu Takalani. I was born and raised in a small township in Venda, a region in northwest South Africa that is home to the VhaVenda People.

Like many people in town, I grew up Christian and quite distant from the culture and beliefs of our VhaVenda ancestors and relatives in more rural areas.

All that changed when my mother fell ill.

My mother grew up in a Christian family who were very disconnected from customary practices. It was only after she started suffering from severe illness in the 1980s, and found no cure from western medicines or churches, that she discovered the healing power of returning to our Indigenous roots.

She tried everything to get well, including many types of western medicine and going to several churches. Nothing worked.

But in our customary culture, such an illness is understood as an ancestral calling; the illness will only go away when a person goes through the thwasa initiation and becomes a sangoma - a traditional healer.

In the end, my other went through this initiation. She was cured and began saving other local people as a healer.

After my mother had become a traditional healer many people came to seek her help, but always by night so the neighbours wouldn't spot them. Colonialism and Christianity had taught us to be ashamed of such 'backward' practices. While I loved helping my mother behind closed doors, but it was not until working with EarthLore and The Gaia Foundation that I grew confident enough to share my appreciation of my culture with the wider world.

Our family suffered a lot of persecution from that moment onwards. At school people would bully me and call my mother a witch. In the township, our family was denounced as demonic. In public, I was taught to be ashamed of my culture, while in private I helped my mother to heal people. In our home, I learned about our old ways, to respect and appreciate them.

The one way I could show my growing love of my culture was through traditional dance. And it was through my travels with a local dance troupe that I came across the EarthLore Foundation - the environmental organisation where I work now.

My school started teaching girls traditional dances, like Chigumbura, Chiconda and Marende, as a way of keeping us off the streets and out of danger in the township. I would listen carefully to the beating drums then dance with both my feet - in South Africa, Venda people are the only people to lead with their feet in this way. Each dance taught us something, such as the dance called Domba, in which elders showed us how to hold ourselves as we grow up. It is a right of passage and for me that was huge, as a young Venda girl living in a township and disconnected from traditional knowledge. Connecting with our ancestry through practices like song and dance is magical, because the spirit and joy that's invoked is healing to us as human beings.

In my early days with EarthLore, I attended a gathering that brought together Indigenous People from Russia, Colombia, and all across Africa who were proud of their traditions and had come together to share them. This meeting filled me with so much joy and confidence! I was finally among people like me. I decided I must journey back to my roots.

During the gathering with The Gaia Foundation, EarthLore and people from all over the world, I sat in my corner laughing out loud and thinking 'wow, I think this is a place that I can call home'. Since I was born I had never met a group of people openly practicing their tradition, and appreciating what the ancestors have left for us as an inheritance. I started feeling confident, happy, and so excited - I remember that time.

I was invited to join a special three year training on Earth Jurisprudence , run by The Gaia Foundation. As part of that training, I went back to Mazwimba, my father's village.

I began meeting and speaking with my elders. In the beginning, they were surprised that a young person like me wanted to speak to them. One elder told me that they had feared all the old people would die with their ancestral knowledge and their inheritance of native seeds - because young people were not interested.

Elder Masega helped me to invite everyone to come together. We planned to meet in the middle of the community, which is quite built up and not an ideal venue for talking about reviving our traditions. As it turned out, that day the sun was very hot and the community decided to move down towards the river in the forest, where there is a big snake that passes at midday to drink water. Elders starting remembering that this was the place where they used to meet with the chief to resolve issues relating to their fields, and these stories were the start of sharing their Indigenous knowledge. I was excited because, by the end of the meeting, the community agreed to come together regularly to revive their practices.

Since then, we have started getting young people and elders together in the village to share our Indigenous seeds, food, culture and ways of looking after Nature. We are just at the beginning of this work, but my vision is that young VhaVenda people like me will fall in love with their traditions again.

I learnt a lot of things from my grandma. She would teach me how to collect firewood, cook traditional meals, and how to separate seed for planting from seed for food. I learnt the importance of farming without killing the worms and the insects that live in the soil. I learnt to fetch water from the river in the wetlands without harming a single reptile. Sharing the space with people and other beings was everyday life in Mazwimba village. But communities have fragmented: wild life is dying, young people go away to schools or the city, while the elders become isolated and vulnerable - when they begin hiding their harvest and knowledge from neighbours, the problem grows. I am excited to bring young people and elders back together, so that communities can heal. And I know the ancestors are opening pathways for us, making sure there won't be any more blockages in the river of knowledge.

This intergenerational exchange of knowledge will help us build a more inclusive society, where we embrace our differences and learn from one another; I believe it is the only way to truly create a harmonious environment. I am passionate about this path and determined to make a difference.

If we are strong, we can show everyone that our Indigenous culture is something to be cherished, not ashamed of. By going back to roots, we can bring back our pride in who we are.

ABOUT THE AFRICAN EARTH JURISPRUDENCE COLLECTIVE

The African Earth Jurisprudence Collective is comprised of dedicated Earth Jurisprudence Practitioners from east, west, central and southern Africa.

For several years, they have been accompanying communities on a journey of revival, using holistic methodologies such as elder-centred community dialogues and eco-cultural mapping, learnt from Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon.

ABOUT EARTHLORE FOUNDATION

EarthLore Foundation is decolonising the development model.

The team, led by Earth Jurisprudence Practitioners Method Gundidza and Mashudu Takalani, are accompanying communities in their revival of Indigenous lifeways across South Africa and Zimbabwe: nurturing seed diversity and food sovereignty; regenerating ancestral lands from soils to sacred sites; and strengthening customary governance to increase community-wide resilience to climate change and other challenges.

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ABOUT THE GAIA FOUNDATION

For 35 years, Earth Jurisprudence has been the lodestar by which The Gaia Foundation navigates.

A small, international organisation, Gaia accompanies partners, communities and movements around the world to revive and protect biocultural diversity.

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ABOUT EARTH JURISPRUDENCE

In simple terms, Earth Jurisprudence is a way of relating to our living world with respect.

As a philosophy it enables us to recognise that viewing humans as superior to and separate from nature, as advocated by industrial growth societies, has caused interconnected ecological, climate and social crises on a planetary scale. As a practice, Earth Jurisprudence encourages us to shift to an Earth-centred perspective, and govern our lives according to an attentive relationship with the wider web of life.

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