Excerpt: Sacred Earth Philosophy by Esinako Ndabeni

i.

your grandmother’s garden

 

Your grandmother had a garden. When you were growing up, she spent hours tending to it. There were rows and rows of mealies, cabbage, pumpkin, potatoes, spinach and melons. More than she desired to make this expensive life more bearable, she wanted to have something of her own. When she emerged tired from the garden, the adults in the house would brew amarhewu from the mealies for her and all those who returned from a hard day’s labour, whether they went emasimini, they were herding cattle, or they were washing laundry at the river. Amarhewu were the bridge between the hard work of the day and the wait for supper. You spent much of your childhood in the rondavel as she ground the mealies to make mealie-meal for your favourite dish — umqa. She taught you how to sort the beans she’d grown — how to remove the damaged ones and wash the good ones for a bean soup or umngqusho. Her chickens were her pride. They fed off the maize, were given the water she harvested from the rain with her Jojo tanks whenever necessary, and they slept in the rondavel. It was seldom that she slaughtered them, and you were ecstatic on the days you could have the eggs that they’d laid. You knew that with each grade you passed in school, she would pick out a chicken for you and slaughter it in honour of the strides you had taken in your education. She herself had never gone far with her formal schooling.

 

Your grandmother did not undergo any kind of training to be a gardener, she simply did as she had been raised to do, and listened to the earth. She knew the seasons intimately because they told her which food would be good for harvesting at the time. This was nothing special in her context; every other family in the village had this skill. But in hindsight, what she did was phenomenal. This is what your spirit knows about what it means to be plant-based and to live off as well as with the land.

 

Your grandmother raked the yard regularly. She couldn’t stand littering. Every now and then, she’d burn the rubbish when it accumulated. There were no garbage trucks, no landfills, just fire. To curb food waste, she had pigs, and she was too poor for excessive portioning. She kept all her plastic bags from the shops in a drawer so they could be reused in the house. That empty Rama container that she washed and kept for storing steel wool, a sponge, a green Sunlight bar, and a pot scrape. Plastic has nine lives in black homes. You also had clothing items that lasted years. When you had grown out of certain items, you passed them onto younger family members just as it had been done for you. If your t-shirt had become raggedy from too much wear, it became the cloth that was used when your aunt knelt on the floor and polished it after scrubbing. This is what your spirit knows about a zero-waste lifestyle.

***

part three

an ecospiritual memoir pt. 2

The Kuilsriver

2018

It’s the last year of my anthropology degree and two of our lecturers, Marlon and Nikiwe, have taken us to the Kuilsriver on our first ethnographic field trip. The river is 23 kilometres long — it runs from Durbanville, through the Cape Flats, and all the way to Khayelitsha. In Durbanville, the water is crystal clear. We’re told that settlers in the 1600s used the river as a refreshment station for their sheep. In Kuils River, the Zandvliet Wastewater Treatment plant has polluted the river with treated sewage. Marlon tells us to close our eyes; imagine what this river was named before it was called the Kuilsriver. I can’t see a thing. We break into groups and speak to members of the community. I used to play by the river here, a coloured woman tells us, now I don’t even let my children near that water. She tells me that she watched the life in the river die. We see some cows and Nikiwe tells us that they still drink there. That municipalities have racist laws that disrupt our pastoralist tradition. In Khayelitsha, where the river runs through eMfuleni, the waters have turned a devastating shade of brown. We go river rafting. On our way home, a white classmate throws trash out of her window into Khayelitsha.

 

 

Cape Town

2022

I’ve come to the ocean to cleanse a client. It was supposed to be a river, but all of these belong to Table Mountain National Park. I’d have to drive very far out to reach a river where my ancestors and I can perform this ritual in peace. Without breaking the law. So, I’m here. It is early morning. A white woman sees us kneeling in this cove during her run. She stares. I’ve already thrown in my silver coins to ask abanikazi bamanzi, the real owners of the ocean, to let us in. Now, I’m waiting for the ocean to come to us. I’m picturing scenes of the white woman coming down with a camera, escorted by policemen, saying this sort of witchcraft isn’t allowed here. I keep looking between her and the ocean. It starts to rain and the white woman leaves. The ocean comes to greet us. We go in.

 

 

Sacred Earth

2023

 

A girl has been found dead inside the Klip River in Johannesburg. News reports say that she was involved in a cleansing. There is a boy that also went missing after last being seen by the river. The papers suspect that he was involved in the cleansing as well. I wonder where the sangoma is, why nobody is looking for them. If there was one at all. I wonder how they know that these people died in the middle of a cleansing. I think about the importance of initiation, how undergoing the rites and passages to become a healer is integral to combating dangers such as this one. I think about how great the river is, how much it needs reverence in all the power it holds.

 

On my way to Istanbul, I am reading The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu) when I find myself dozing off. I’ve been reading it for months and it’s as difficult to finish as The Bible, or Das Kapital. One of the protagonists, Professor Wang, has discovered the three-body problem in a game called Three Body. The universe has three suns, the game claims. In this world, the sun comes and goes at will. It can disappear for civilisations. The people in this world live according to two periods; the Stable Era and the Chaotic Era. When the sun disappears ushering in the chaotic era, people begin a process of dehydration — they dehydrate themselves and others, a kind of sleeping death, and only wake when the sun rises again. It feels important, as though it’s telling me something about how much more resilient the earth is than humankind. But some of the science in this novel feels too dense and I doze off and awaken later to look outside my window. I can’t tell where we are, but we’ve passed Egypt.

 

Upon empty desert land, I see a house. A modest house on its own. I know that it isn’t visible to the naked eye. But something about this lone house makes me think of the empty land theory. The civilisations that existed before colonialism and conquest came to destroy and deny them. Then I see a castle — dusty brown and old. Soon after that, I see ancient cities. Clusters of brown. I don’t see a tar road, or a mall, or a cellphone tower, only patches of a pale brown. Visions of an old world, one where majesty and progress didn’t come with industry or the dirty black fog I once mistook for a dark cloud when my plane was landing in Johannesburg from my pilgrimage to Nongqawuse’s grave in the Eastern Cape.

 

I wonder about inhospitable environments. If survival is possible. I conclude that the native ancestors would know how to survive their own land. Then I think about  deforestation in central Africa,  how the colonialists found the heat and humidity of tropical Africa too harsh for them; and so they cut down the trees. How the environment’s hostility should’ve told them to go home. How whiteness teaches humankind that our role is to tame the earth, go to the moon, and colonise the galaxy. How this tradition has destroyed the people — the vulnerable women, men and children — who are forced to mine for cobalt in Congo. I think about how racial capitalism teaches humankind that the only valuable life is that of a white man. I know we can never fully go back to what we’ve lost, but in the future, I see a plurality of technologies and voices led by indigenous knowledge systems: a sacred earth philosophy.

***

Order Sacred Earth Philosophy here: MDL SEE