From Africa to Ankara, More Experiments in Ethnographic Narration/Fiction

"You know a white South African man would not sleep in the same bed with a black man. As soon as he saw the arrangement in this guest house, he would say 'Hey Piet, find me another room to stay in'. But then you are an American and you have Obama. There is hope!"

Well I appreciated his optimism, but it may be too early to say much on that front.

I stood in the doorway chatting to Reverend Smith wondering when we would set off to Moutouleng. There we were to meet with the local sangomas (traditional healers) and to see a sacred body of water, after which we headed to a holy cave where venerated men and women live or spend much of their time engaged in ritual and prayer, a continuation of ancient religious traditions. Some of these places may be among the earliest continuously ritualized sites on our planet. Here many woke to make their invocations early, in the middle of the night, as soon as they saw the Morning Star, linked in mythos to this site, where I had been brought as part of a Dutch-South African research collaboration. We gathered to study the ritual field of South Africa, a place generally known for very different themes.

On our second day together as a group, after walking through paths of the most amazing wide open meadows, forests and caves, I started to see goats and lambs chained to trees awaiting sacrifice and heard the sounds of bells ringing, the powerful thud of deep bass drums, voices and...

Forgive the digression, but I can't help asking a question myself, thinking back...What, for example, did this land feel like - the golden and green living container for the experiences beginning to be described? What is there before the story, if not the biosphere?

When I set my feet on the earth of some places it seems at times like my roots go into the ground and my branches spread, taking in the air and creating a sort of link with the entire ecosystem. I feel like the country, the place and the environs are a natural laboratory, a kind of greenhouse. At others times, well...not at all. But South Africa's earth, sky and air are irresistible, however much the people may be troubled in their dealings with each other in the anthrosphere. Fences are high and barbed wire is even higher, in paradise.

The South African countryside is a sort of solidified, rarified atmosphere and no one knows this better than the sangoma who live there, work there, minister there and interdependently blossom next to the rivers that runs through southern earth. They are what, paradoxically, lead me to eventually meet Zöhre Ana, devotee of Ataturk and Imam Hussein. It was among them that I began to ask questions about the traditional social functions and the places reserved, in any community, for those who work in the realm of the psyche, the myth, contemplative act, those who perform rituals of reparation in wide fields of sacred lands where the forces of apartheid have tortured their insurgent children. I started to wonder about the place reserved for those that throw the bones, those that work on the psychic hotlines we are quick to sneer at and those on fire with the Holy Ghost, from Bloemfontein to Johannesburg, from Izmir to Ankara.

Some of the sangoma took me under their wing as we approached places like Moutoleng, Quite literally, there are few places that I remember physically approaching with as much lucidity as that place, that sacred 'park' where animal sacrifices lay open on the side of the path that you were to walk by genuflecting and clapping to each person that passed you by. And yes, as you approached the holy-of-holies there were drums, loud communal songs, and people being baptized again and again, and sprinled with water from ritual brooms, dunked like Baptists in waters where the tradition of immersion in honor of the righteous ancestors had reached back into antiquity, long before a Christian form was elegantly swept into and colored the older current of Lesotho spirituality.

The drums, the clang of the bells, the ecstatic singing, dancing, the flow of baptisms, the bloody reinterpretation of the Hebrew sacrificial altar, the power of the place...I was frightened, to be honest. At the same time I was struck by the contrast with the tepid, comfortable world of what passed for spirituality in the western world, for the most part. Where was the sacrifice? What happened to the awe inspiring mysterium tremendum, with all of these amethyst sellers and enema hawkers dominating the field? Where was the challenge? I was soon to find out. I also considered that this might have been much closer to the biblical world than the tame textual Protestantism that I grew up surrounded by in North America.

We had our lunch, digested a bit of what had happened and moved on. A bearded figure regarded as prophetic by devotees of the cave that we visited after Moutoleng answered visitors questions about whether it was really inauspicious to see white people in your dreams. No, indeed it wasn't and who were the nasty folks that had encouraged that idea, he wondered? These were speculations taking place more than a decade after the end of apartheid.  When I shook his hand on our way home, he looked at me with some unsettling seriousness.

The next day we were to meet a trainer of traditional healers, a woman named Monica who, also shaking my hand, seemed promptly read my life story from my eyes. She politely greeted us all before letting her assistants go into trance. We had entered one of the cavernous huts she and her students had constructed near the entrance of an important sacred site. Members of her community were mostly women or third gender people (or in modern westernized speak 'transwomen'). Her followers danced, sang and one-by-one called us into their circle to perform our own ritual functions, as indicated, some dancing along, some taking herbal drinks. That night I went home and had some of the most unusual dreams of my life, full of snakes and ancient herdsmen and wondered if I had been too quick to admire the challenge that all of this obviously, posed. I mean, after all, the air was soaked with power and power is never handled lightly, in any realm life. By the time the reverend woke up, he was sweating like he had run a marathon in his sleep, too, not I assume because he couldn't handle the jokes about our booking mishap.

Since I began to be fascinated by this Sociology of roles and Anthropology of the oracular, I can't say that I have ever felt particularly at ease. And should I? Ethnography, when it is challenging, powerful, almost chthonically divine, is anything but comfortable. We can never live anywhere on our planet where we will lack those that step into the role of the oracular-therapeutic no matter how much we may prefer the solid and grounded certainties (?) of materialism. We can laugh, we can disbelieve, but we cannot make the social reality disappear. It is perennially present, if not as a Yaqui curandero blowing away your pains with a cleansing of vodka, fire and romero, then as a television psychic. Byzantium produced a medieval Patriarch of Constantinople who groomed a young virgin to inhale sacred fumes, and to describe her sibylline visions to Christian priest-interpreters. He lost his job.

Whatever one may think of these sorts of things, the dance of the ethnographer in the field is delicate.

It was with all of this in mind that I met Zöhre Ana who, in her own way, drew me into her circle and also sent me home to sweat out the fevers that would come later....




(Both photos copyright of Santu Mofokeng)