Baba (father; an endearing
and respectful way to address an older African man in Zulu)
Credo is a visionary, a historian, a seer, a prophet, a sculptor,
a painter, and unique individual with an uncanny ability
to clearly understand the Universe, the world and humanity.
Baba Credo is a South African giant of similar stature as
Madiba (Nelson Mandela), while no one will ever meet a more
humble person than he is.
I had the privilege to spend many, many
hours with him sharing knowledge and friendship, where
he taught me things what no one else could have taught
me on this planet. He also told me about things about my
own country’s ancient history, what only a very well
learned historian of my country could have known about.
He predicted a number of things, what all came true later
with great accuracy. He initiated me into African mysticism,
tradition, culture and history to a depth, where not many
European experts could ever dream to enter.
I feel also privileged, that I was allowed
to lay hands on both Baba Credo and his present wife Virginia
in healing. And that oftentimes, he listened very carefully
to my humble opinions and advice.
I will always be grateful to Baba Credo
for the honour he bestowed me, with deep respect and great
love.
George-Gabriel
Soulhealer
To all the kind people around the globe who
want to contact me to express a wish to connect up with Sanusi
Credo Mutwa:
We appreciate and value your interest in him,
but Baba Credo made a decision. Due to his age and not the
greatest of health, he totally removed himself from the public,
from society, and moved to traditional areas remaining uncontactable.
He now has to concentrate on traditional and spiritual matters.
Through his lifetime he has already contributed to the world
far more than most of us ever could.
This is his wish, and all of us need to respect
that.
Please send kind thoughts of goodwill for Baba
Credo’s health and well-being.
Credo Mutwa - Biography
Part 1: Introduction
I was born in Zululand on the 21st July 1921
according to my father. When my father met my mother, he
had just lost his wife and a number of children in a terrible
influenza epidemic, which had spread through Southern Africa,
killing thousands of people in the years 1918 and 1919. Thus
my father was a widower with three surviving children.
When my parents met it was in the year 1920,
and my father was a builder and a Christian, and my mother
was a young Zulu girl who practiced the ancient religion
of the Zulu people. I am told that my parents were deeply
in love with each other and wanted to get married, but the
white missionaries forbade my father from marrying my mother
until she became a Christian.
My mother’s father was a crusty old warrior
who had taken part in the bitter wars that the Zulus had
fought against the English, and he coldly refused to allow
his daughter to come under the yoke of what he called the "religion
of our enemies." I cannot allow my child to become a
Christian," my grandfather was said to have said," These
Christians are a race of thieves, of liars, and murderers,
who stole our country from us at sword point and at gunpoint.
I would rather die than see a Christ worshipping Christian
within the stockade of my village. Never!"
Caught between catholic missionaries on one
hand, and a stubborn old Zulu warrior on the other, my mother
and father had no choice but to separate. Although my father
already suspected that my mother was pregnant. A great scandal
broke out in my grandfather’s village when my mother’s
pregnancy was discovered. My grandfather chased my mother
out of his homestead and she was taken by one of her aunts
to her own village and there she gave birth to me, an illegitimate
child, a child of shame. In those days there was no greater
shame among the Zulus than for a girl to give birth out of
wedlock. A great stigma was attached to this thing. After
a time however, my grandfather allowed my mother -whom he
loved dearly to return, back to his village and he insisted
that she was not to see my father again.
It so happened that when I was about a year
old, a younger brother of my fathers, who had heard about
my birth come up from the Natal South Coast to my mothers
village and asked my grandfathers permission to take me away,
permission that my grandfather angrily granted. "Remove
this disgrace from my home, Christian fellow!" he said
to my fathers brother," And tell your brother that if
I ever set eyes on him, I will make him suffer bitterly for
what he did to my daughter. I will seize him and kill him
very slowly indeed. Tell him that. I was taken to my father’s
home in the South of Natal, on the northern bank of the Umkumazi
River, and there I grew up. And it was while growing up that
it was discovered that I was something of a visionary and
a prophet. A talent, which together with an artistic inclination,
to draw and to sculpt, the woman who now brought me up, my
fathers new wife, did her uttermost to suppress.
I did not attend school until I was well within
my 14th year of life. And because my family now kept on traveling,
as a result of my fathers building profession, which took
him from town to town, we became a family of travelers, who
never stayed long in one place.
In 1935, my father found a job, a major building
job, in the Transvaal and he brought us all from Natal to
join him where he was building. I attended school on and
off in different schools, and then, in 1937 I went through
great shock and trauma, when I was seized and sodomized by
a gang of mineworkers outside a mine compound. This caused
me to be ill for a long time.
And although I was taken to white doctors,
I could find no help until my fathers brother, the same one
who had taken me away from my maternal grandfather decided
to take me back to my mothers village in the hope that I
would find help there. And I did. My grandfather, a man whom
my father despised as a heathen and a demon worshipper helped
me and brought me back to health, where Christian doctors
had failed. I, still a Christian and a confessing catholic,
had not believed at all that my grandfather would be able
to help me. And I was greatly surprised when he did, and
I began to wonder were not the missionaries wrong when they
called people such as my grandfather ungodly heathens. If
my grandfather had been a stupid heathen savage, as white
missionaries loved to call people like him, how is it that
he had been able to help me?
It was here that I began to question many things
that I never questioned before. Where our ancestors really
the savages that quiet missionaries would have us believe
they were? Were we Africans really a race of primitives who
possessed no knowledge at all before the white man came to
Africa? These and many, many other questions began to haunt
my mind. And then one day when he was sure that I was fully
returned to health, my grandfather told me that the illness
that had been troubling me for so long, had actually been
a sacred illness which required that I had to become a shaman,
a healer. And when the old man said this to me, I readily
agreed to undergo initiation at the hands of one of my grandfather’s
daughters, a young sangoma named Myrna.
When they heard that I had become a sangoma,
both my father and my stepmother, told my maternal uncle
that I was never to set foot in their home again. And so
I found myself on my own, a youth without a home, without
family and so I began traveling. First I went to Swaziland
and then the land of the Basotho, and I developed a wanderlust
that was to be with me until today. I was not traveling for
enjoyment, however I was traveling for knowledge, in search
of clarity of mind and in search of the truth about my people.
Sometimes I would find jobs for a few months
and then move on. Sometimes I found myself traveling with
missionaries, the very people in whom I no longer believed.
Sometimes I found myself traveling with miners, returning
home from the Johannesburg gold mines. I came into contact
with men and women of countries that I had not known about
before. I learned things that I had not known about before.
I experienced things, which only those that walk the path
of the healer in Africa experience.
If a strange thing was happening in the place
that I happened to be, I became one of those who were summoned
to that place to help using Africa's ancient wisdom and knowledge
in that situation. I found myself amongst amazing and strange
people. I found myself amongst men and women, possessing
knowledge that was already ancient when the man Jesus Christ
was born. I heard stories from the lips of storytellers that
went back to the remotest of the remote times. Stories that
very few had ever heard before.
As the years past, I became filled with a fanatical
obsession; I realized how rapidly Africa was changing. I
realized to my shock and sorrow that the culture of my people,
a culture that I had thought immortal, was actually dying.
Very, very soon the Africa that I knew would become a forgotten
thing. A thing of the past and I decided to try and preserve
somehow, what I could of my people’s culture. How was
I to do that? Friends advised me to write books. One friend
advised me to build living museums in which I would preserve
the dying culture of my people, and I struggled very hard
to bring these things about. I wrote books, and I tried to
borrow money from banks and organizations supposedly established
to help black people who wanted to establish businesses.
Again and again, I was disappointed until,
after long years of struggle. In 1975 I succeeded in obtaining
permission and funds to build the first living museum, for
the preservation of my people’s knowledge, religion
and culture, in the centre of Soweto. Many black people misunderstood
the purpose of my having built this living museum. They falsely
accused me of cooperating with the apartheid regime and of
quote-"glamorising the Soweto ghetto"
But I did not see myself as a politician, I
saw myself as a healer, whose duty it was to preserve the
greatness of his people, regardless of which government happened
to be in power in South Africa. I saw myself as a healer
whose purpose it was to create job opportunities for my starving
people in Soweto, regardless of whether we were ruled by
the apartheid regime or the A.N.C government. I believed
firmly that knowledge was about politics and that a race
that did not know its true greatness, will never obtain full
freedom. And I was saddened by the fact that out people were
making huge sacrifices, fighting for freedom when they did
not know their full greatness. I said to my now late wife,
Cecilia, and myself that if our people gain freedom under
these circumstances, that freedom would be an illusion and
a fraud.
Years of careful investigation had taught me
the European powers that had colonized Africa had done more
than just beat our people into submission with artillery
and rifles. They had done more than simply sown confusion
amongst our people by introducing many conflicting versions
of the Christian religion amongst the people. They had deliberately
so brain washed our people, that Africans had lost all self-knowledge,
self-love, self-respect, self-pride and self-dependency.
If you rob a people of all these things you turn them into
a race of robots, forever dependent upon you. And even if
you stood up and walked away from these people, and said
to them that you were giving them back their freedom, they
would stand up and follow you wherever you are going for
their minds were still your slaves even though their bodies
were now free of your chains.
I believed then as I believe now, that the
African has never really gained freedom and independence.
Which is why our people have not been able to achieve what
nations such as India and the tiger Nations of South East
Asia, which were once also colonized by the white people
as we were, have today achieved. For example today India
is a nuclear power feared and respected by all nations on
earth. India is admired for its great culture and its ancient
religious philosophies as well as its other philosophies.
While Africa is a downtrodden casualty of history forever
dependent like a whipped slave upon her former oppressors.
This breaks my heart as a black man, I who,
over many years of traveling through my motherland, have
discovered that there was a time when we, the black people
now held in contempt by many races were once masters of the
world. When we, now derided as a nation of savages incapable
of ruling itself were once the tutors of the early world,
I feel great bitterness, when I see how far we have been
made to fall. We whose sons and daughters once walked tall
in the Americas, not as slaves but rather as civilizes and
rulers. I wept when I found out that we were once the founders
of some of the world’s oldest civilizations. We were
there in Sumeria, we were there in India, we founded great
kingdoms in Cambodia, and the first man to be saluted as
emperor of China was one of us, a son of Africa, a black
man. Buddha was a black man from Africa, his earliest statues
confirm this. Krishna was a black warrior. The goddess Kali,
is depicted as an African woman. Even the bible states that
Nimrod was a great man in the eyes of the Lord and he was
the father of Cush, who founded the great cushite nation.
I weep even now when I see Africans slaughter each other
in the streets of South Africa, now supposedly a free nation.
I weep even now when my people hunger and suffer in the veld
in South Africa. I weep even now when Euro-centric education
is being fed to our children. Fed in order to make them Afrofobes,
creatures that hate and despise their motherland, which look
down in contempt upon their own people, because this is what
all European educated black people do. They despise Africa
and all she stands for. And they are in contempt of the culture
of her people. They are still even now doing the colonialists
dirty work for them, because if you want to destroy the culture
of a nation, you must brainwash the youth of that nation
and make them do your dirty work for you.
There is not a single university in Africa,
even now which teaches our people the truth about themselves.
There is not a single school in South Africa even now which
teaches our people about what it means to be an African.
Our children who will stone a Sangoma to death, who will
burn an Inyanga to death with a petrol soaked car tire even
now, do not know, and were never taught that Africans were
once kings of the Americas. They were founders of the amazing
Olmec Civilization, whose breath taking relics craved in
eternal stone still amaze visitors in museums to this day.
Our children who would gladly spit at the face
of a sangoma, who hate the traditional dress of their people,
would gladly put on a highland kilt, not knowing that amongst
the founders of the Scottish nation were black men and woman
and that the surnames of some of these Scotsmen, confirm
this. Sholto-Douglas, what does this word mean? What does
this Surname mean? Sholto- Douglas. It means Behold the black
man. Black knights once fought for the kings of Scotland,
and the Danish people who are fraudulently represented in
the history books as blond and pink skinned Nordics, had
large numbers of black men in their ranks. When Alfred slaughtered
the Danes, in England so many years ago, amongst the warriors
that he slew were dark skinned men, whose ancestors had come
to Denmark from Africa thousands of years before. All these
truths are hidden from our children.
Our political leaders, fail to create United
Nations in Africa. Our political leaders live on a razors
edge in Africa everywhere. They sit on shaky thrones from
which they can get kicked off by any armed thug carrying
the rank of colonel or general. Why? Because you can never
build a viable nation on the cesspit of self-ignorance and
self-despite. I have seen many African leaders at first sight,
I have spoken to some of these men and all of them have one
thing in common, they are simply white men in black skins.
And this is why they fail again and again to create a peaceful,
progressing and prosperous Africa. They are still slaves
of their long departed colonial masters. Look at what is
happening in South Africa now. Look at the confusion and
the crime, the disunity and the epidemic political killings.
What do all these things tell you? That our people lack self-pride
and self-knowledge and therefore can never be politically
united ever.
I have suffered in the cause of my battle against
shadows. When you are fighting against ignorance you suffer
just as much as you if you were on a battlefield under gun
fire. I have lost people I love; I have lost a woman I love
years ago in 1960 to the guns of the white man. To the guns
of the oppressive regime I was falsely accused of being a
supporter of. I lost a son, my first-born son, Innocent,
to the knives of black activists, murdering people under
the banner of the mass democratic movement. I came close
to losing another son to the spears of the Inkatha freedom
party, God have mercy upon us! I have been cheated by whites
who took advantage of my ignorance and stupidity and who
robbed me of millions of rands of money I made out of my
books. Even as I am talking to you now there is a white woman,
who deceived me into signing away everything that I wrote,
everything that I painted, and everything that I sculpted.
I have suffered, and am still suffering. Even now there are
white men that have set my own children, my sons against
me. A born again Christian preacher of lies brain washed
my daughters mind and stole her away from me, saying, you
must not talk to your father , he is a devil worshipper.
I am not seeking anybodies sympathy when I
am telling you this; I just want you all to know who and
what Credo Mutwa is. I am one of the scums of this earth,
a creature dejected and ridiculed by university professors.
Professors who later came sneaking into my home seeking the
very information that they ridiculed me for revealing. I
am a black man who has every reason to be bitter and angry.
But somehow I cannot get myself to be angry. You cannot be
angry at the ignorant. You cannot but pity the self-destructive.
Many years ago I was fortunate enough to find
a woman who loved me, a woman who became my wife and the
mother of my seven children. This woman was a strong and
godly woman whose quietness, hid a person of steel, this
woman gave up drinking, gave up dependence on alcohol out
of the love of her children, and of love of fool and the
cretin that she married. Today I stand alone, a man rejected
by the world. A widower who lost his wife a few months ago
under extremely sinister circumstances. My wife went to hospital
supposedly suffering from cancer of the uterus, while I was
away, and x-rays showed a strange metal device inside her
womb. Nobody knows what this device was. Nobody knows how
it had got into my wife's uterus, but before my wife passed
away, I received a threatening letter warning me not to talk
to a man named David Icke or else my wife would die. I did
not take that warning seriously, and my wife died within
two weeks after I had received it. I have every reason to
be angry with the frot that is called western civilization.
I have every reason to be angry with the various foreign
religions that enslave our peoples minds and blinker their
vision. I have every reason to be angry with education systems
that rob our people of their true worth, of the truth about
themselves. My friends, this is Credo Mutwa.
I am a sculptor, who has created large sculptures
in various parts of South Africa. I am a painter who has
painted pictures that were afterwards stolen from him, by
exploiters. I am the writer of books, whose books fill the
pockets of others with money, and not my own. That is Credo
Mutwa. I have used the knowledge that I acquired over many
years of investigation and travel, I have used that knowledge
to create job opportunities for my starving people. The villages
that I built in Soweto, and which were destroyed by misguided
youths. The villages that I built in Mafekeng, and the village
and the statues that I built in the Eastern Cape, placed
bread in the hands of my starving fellow South Africans.
I made jobs where there are none. I made livings for my people
where there had been none. I believe that a truly democratic
country, is a country that uses the spiritual talents and
the heritage of its people to feed the hungry and clothe
the naked. But what has been my reward? I have been scorned,
demonized, lied about by conspirators, who delight in setting
black against black, by gullible blacks that swallow any
garbage white newspapers feed them. If you speak about the
international conspiracies, that is the government behind
many countries governments, people laugh at you for a fourteen
carrot lunatic, but there is such a thing and it is ruining
my people even now. The Aids epidemic which will soon wipe
out great tribes, such as the Zulus, my people, is no accident,
neither is the flood of drugs that is sweeping over this
once beautiful country. The soaring crime wave is no accident.
The epidemic of political killings which are almost a daily
occurrence in some parts of South Africa is no accident either.
All these things are planned by someone and carried out by
someone on behalf of that someone.
They tell us that the high incidence of rape
in South Africa is a macho thing. Rubbish! It is deliberate,
it is planned, and most of the women who are raped in South
Africa are raped for black magical purposes. Children who
disappear; where do they disappear to? In South Africa today,
criminals have got more rights than law-abiding citizens.
A criminal will kill your father, in the morning, be arrested
in the afternoon and be released on bail on the following
morning to come back and kill you who helped the police to
put him behind bars. Today in South Africa, as in the Prohibition
era in America, the distinction between the police and the
criminals is getting dimmer and dimmer by the day. And all
this is no accident.
Biography Part 2: Africa My People
There are many shameful things that are being
done to Africa and her people by Western nations these days.
These shameful things are also being done to African people
by Western researchers as well as ordinary writers, who deliberately
by pass my Motherland, driving her into isolation, and treating
her as though she was not part and parcel of humankind. These
writers and these researchers deliberately overlook many
important facts about our people, and some time go out of
their way to deliberately merely skim the surface of African
knowledge, overlooking the rest, and passing on to nations
and races that they favour. There was a time when I wondered,
why this was being done? But now I know, too late, the cold-blooded
satanic purpose behind all this. The black man of South Africa
must be denied his identity to make it easier for people
with sinister agendas to turn him into a puppet, spiritually
and physically dependent on the west and its rapacious and
exploitive ways. The black man must be made to look down
upon himself and the other nations too, must be made to look
down upon him in contempt. I know as a keeper of my peoples
oldest traditions, that sometimes when an animal, be it a
goat or an ox, is about to be sacrificed to the ancestral
spirits, it must be driven into isolation, kept apart from
the other animals, before it is slaughtered. And Africa today
is being slaughtered. The wars that are tearing her apart,
the thing that is called Aids, that is raging like wild fire
though the plains and valleys though my motherland, are all
part of the arsenal of murder that is being employed by certain
organizations and nations, in order to bring about Africa’s
destruction as a race. When I say this, I am not paranoid;
I am a man who has studied a number of terrible facts that
are to be seen in Africa for some years now. Africa is being
destroyed. There are those in whose interests it is that
this, the Mother Continent of humankind must be depopulated
though war famine and disease and sent into oblivion along
with the great knowledge that it’s people possessed.
I have taken an oath that even if Africa is ultimately destroyed,
as the great prophets once foresaw that it would be, the
shiny fruits of its children’s mind would not perish.
Hundreds of books and magazines have been written and published
about Native American people and their undeniably great cultures
that they once possessed. Hundreds of books have been written
and published in the west about the Hindu people of India,
their religion, their sciences and their great philosophies.
But nobody ever wants to write anything worthwhile and in
depth about Africa.
For example it is a well-known fact that Native
American people in Central and South America possessed deep
knowledge about the universe, about the constellations, about
solar as well as lunar eclipses. It is also well known that
these people possessed great calendars of great sophistication
and great accuracy. But the fact that African people of various
tribes of Eastern, Central, Western, and Southern Africa
possess the same knowledge has been overlooked. One particularly
atrocious crime for which I cannot forgive people of Europe
is that whenever they write about the people of Africa they
deliberately separate them. They treat the ones they talk
about as if they were not part and parcel of the African
continent at all. Nowhere is this more evident than when
European scientists talk about Egypt. They deal with the
Egyptians as if Egyptians were a totally separate race from
the rest of Africa, and yet anyone that knows Africa well
will tell you that Africa is interconnected. That the various
people of our Mother land are inter connected as are the
gears and flywheels of a clock, and to see the people of
Egypt apart from the rest of Africa is a fraud, a delusion,
a crime. The people of Egypt were an African people, not
at all removed from those in Nubia, in Ethiopia and in those
African regions far to the South of Egypt.
For example anyone that knows Africa well will
tell you that the many half-human, and half-animal gods that
the Egyptians worshipped had their origins deep in Central
as well as Southern Africa and that these gods are still
being worshipped by the people of Africa even now. Here is
yet another example of how the western investigator deliberately
distort facts about Africa. There are writers who write about
the Khoi San people in Southern Africa- the Bushman people.
These writers deliberately view the Khoi San as if they were
an entity completely isolated from the rest of the African
people, and yet I can tell you, I who have Khoi San blood
in me, that the cultures of many black nations in Southern
Africa were intimately interconnected with the Khoi San cultures.
The same thing is done when writers write about people such
as the pygmies in Central Africa, the Wat-wu. One writer
even went as far as to say that the Wat-wa were not an African
race and I ask myself, where the thundering hell this white
fool thinks the Wat-wa comes from? On which far island does
he find them? Anyone that knows the culture and the language
of the Wat-wa will tell you that this culture and language
are interconnected with the cultures of other people in that
part of Africa, where the Wat-wa, or Twa are to be found.
This deliberate separation of Africa, the creation of some
of the separate races and tribes has resulted in great disaster
for the people of Africa as a whole.
For example, for many years, Belgium committed
the crime of dividing up the people of the Burundi and Rwanda
into two separate races. The Watutsi were believed to belong
to the Nileotics, and the Bahutu were seen to be Bantu. But
anyone who knows the history of these people will tell you
that the Watutsi and the Bahutu are not so separate a people,
they are simply two divisions of exactly the same people,
and these two divisions had lived in peace for hundreds of
years until animosity was stirred up between them by the
Belgian colonists to suit their own sinister agenda. Before
Africa vanishes under the clouds of endemic civil wars, before
my motherland disappears under the fog of Aids and other
man made diseases, designed for the extermination of my people,
I Credo Mutwa, want to correct these blatant injustices.
I Credo Mutwa want to expose these crimes, shameful crimes
of the intellect. And as a first step towards correcting
this injustice, I want to tell you that it was not only the
Mayans, the Incas, the Aztecs and other people of Central
and South America who possessed amazing knowledge about the
mysteries of the Universe. It was not only these people that
possessed knowledge about solar as well as lunar eclipses,
as well as the Earth’s movement though space. Our people
of many tribes in Southern, Eastern and Central Africa possessed
this knowledge. And they passed it on from generation to
generation in various ways, but mostly orally.
Biography Part 3: Mysteries of Africa
Before human beings were created on this planet,
there had existed a very wise race of people known as the
Imanyukela. These people had come from the constellation
known to white people as Orion, and they had inhabited our
earth for thousands and thousands of years. And that before
they had left our earth to return once more to the sacred
Spider constellation, they made a great excavation under
the earth, beneath the Ruwensory Mountains- the Mountains
of the Moon and deep in the bowels of Mother Earth, the Imanyukela
built a city of copper buildings. A city with a wall of silver
all around it. A city built at the huge mountain of pure
crystal. The mountain of knowledge. The mountain from which
all knowledge on earth comes. And a mountain to which all
knowledge on earth ultimately returns. This old woman told
me that her grandmother had told her this story while she
was still a virgin of some fifteen years or so and under
going initiation into the mysteries and the culture of the
Bahutu people. The old woman went on to tell me that many
generations ago, there came to the land of the Bahutu, a
group of little yellow skinned men, who wore colourful robes
and strange brightly coloured hats. These men she said had
come in search of the great city of knowledge which they
had heard many, many years ago, stands in the earth under
the Mountains of the Moon- the Ruwensory Mountains. This
story remained in my mind and was one of the many, many strange
stories that I had heard during my long, long travels through
Africa. And then much to my amazement, in the year 1975 there
arrived at my home in Soweto, a friendly bright priest from
Tibet. The priests name was Akyong Rin Poche, whom ever today
I still regard as a great friend of mine, is a man who sparkles
like a glass of precious champagne. He is a man, unlike most
Tibetan monks whom I have met in my life, who looks at life
through the mask of humour. He is a man who ever smiling.
A man who’s ever word is perfumed with humour. A man
who laughs readily. A lovely and lively fellow human being.
I was honoured to talk to this man in one of the huts that
formed the museum village that I had built in Soweto, and
Akyong Rin Poche nearly knocked me over by asking me a question
that caught me totally by surprise, and which brought back
memories of bygone years in a green and half forgotten Central
African country. "Do you know anything," he asked," About
the city of copper, which is said to be somewhere in Central
Africa?" For a few moments I was stricken dumb by astonishment.
And then I replied," Yes, honourable Rin Poche. In the
days I was traveling through the land of the Watutsi and
the Bahutu, the land that was then known as Rwanda Burundi,
I heard a story about this mysterious city, and I also heard
that this city lies deep under ground- under the Mountains
of the Moon." Akyong Rin Poche threw another surprise
at my feet. He told me how in olden days a great Lama led
a group of fellow monks on an expedition into Central Africa
in search of this mysterious city, and that Lama and his
followers were never heard from again. I was stunned, here
was an African story being confirmed by a man from Tibet.
I was totally flabbergasted, and I thanked God that many
years ago I had set myself the task of recovering that I
had learned through my long journeys through Africa. Today
Rwanda and Burundi are countries in grip of death. Tens of
thousands of people have been slaughtered. Scores of tribes
have been decimated and scattered, never to be reformed again.
And great quantities of knowledge have been lost forever.
This is the agony of Africa. This is the shame of my motherland.
Biography Part 4: The Origins of the Gods
In many western countries, when an old person
dies it is simply the death of an old human being who has
gone through life and whose days on earth now come to an
end. But in Africa, the death of an elder- an old man or
an old woman, becomes a supreme disaster because in the mind
of that elder often carries knowledge passed down from parent
to child. Knowledge that is not only valuable to Africa and
her children, but to human kind as a whole. No matter where
you go in Africa, no matter how deep into the interior of
the dark continent you tread, you will find very ancient
stories which are incredibly similar.
You will find African tribes and races who
will tell you that they are descendants from gods who came
out of the skies thousands of years ago. Some however say
that theses gods came to them from the sea in magical boats
made out of reeds or wood or copper or even gold. In some
cases these gods and goddesses are described as beautiful
human beings whose skins were either bright blue or green
or even silver. But most of the time you will find it being
said these great gods, especially the ones that came out
of the sky were non human, scaly creatures, which lived most
of the time in mud or in water. Creatures of an extremely
frightening and hideously ugly appearance. Some say that
these creatures were like crocodiles, with crocodile like
teeth and jaws, but with very large round heads. Some say
that these creatures are very tall beings with snake like
heads, set on long thin necks, very long arms and very long
legs. There are those that tell us that these gods who came
from the skies traveled through the land in magical boats
made of bright metal, silver, copper or gold. Boats which
had the ability to sail over water or even to fly through
the sky like birds.
It is further said that some of these sky gods
carried their souls in little bags which hung from their
belts. These souls being in the form spheres of crystals
clear material. Spheres which could float about in the air,
and which emitted a dazzling light. A light that could illuminate
an entire village at night. We are told that some very brave
African chiefs used to hold these great gods hostage simply
by snatching their little shiny soul globes away from them
and hiding them in holes deep in the ground.
Throughout Africa we are told that these mysterious
beings taught human beings many things. They taught human
beings how to have laws, knowledge of herbal medicine, knowledge
of arts and knowledge of the mysteries of creation and the
cosmos as a whole. We are told that some of these gods had
the ability to change their shapes at will. They had the
ability to assume the shape and the appearance of any creature
that there is on earth whenever they had good reason to do
so. A sky god could even turn itself into a rhinoceros and
elephant or even a stork, a sky god could even turn itself
into a rock or even a tree.
We are told that some of the gods used to travel
through the sky in swings made out of brightly coloured lengths
of rope. The Wutwa people of the forests of the Congo told
me about one such god, who swung through the sky on a swing
whose ends were attached to the clouds in the sky and who
could go anywhere, no matter how far away, and come back
before sunset on his magical swing.
In Africa these mysterious gods are known by
various names, in West Africa, in the land of the Bumbara
people these amphibian or reptilian sky gods are known as
Zishwezi. The word zishwezi means either the swimmers or
the divers or the gliders. It was said that these sky gods
could dive from above the clouds down to the top of a mountain
whenever they felt like it, they could also take deep dives
into the bottom of the ocean and from there fetch magical
objects and then bring them to the shore, placing them at
the feet of the astonished black people.
In West Africa again, these creatures are called
the Asa, which means the mighty ones of magic. It is from
this word asa, a word that speaks great magical power that
comes the name Asanti, which means a king, but literally
means, the child of asaand as you know Asanti gave birth
to the word, Ashanti.
In the land of the Dogon people we find the
famous Nommo, a race of reptilian or amphibian beings who
were said to have come from the Sirius star to give knowledge
and religion to the black people of Dogon. Incidentally,
scientists have never explained the meaning of Dogon; it
means God Almighty and the Dogon people know themselves as
the children of the God Almighty.
There are tribes in various parts of Africa,
which regard themselves as God's chosen people. These tribes
call themselves by a name, which means god. In South Africa
there is a tribe that calls itself the Tonga, and another
very large group, which calls itself the Tsonga. And in Zimbabwe
there are two tribes, one of which is called the Batonga,
and another that is called the Tongaila. The name Tonga,
Tsonga or Donga means people of god and you will find these
people living in some of the holiest and most spiritual places
in Africa. For example, the Matonga people of Northern Zululand
live in the area of the sacred St Lucia Lake which is believed
by the Zulu people and other tribes in Natal to be the place
where, hundreds of years ago, the great earth mother arrived
in a boat of reeds, accompanied by her son and his two wives.
And she came to give laws, culture, religion
as well as healing arts, and other mysteries to human beings.
It is said that the great earth mother was a huge woman;
very, very fat with bright green skin and so was her son
and his two wives. There once existed in Zimbabwe a very
sacred place called Kariba Gorge, which is now covered by
a huge lake as a result of the damming of the Zambezi River
at this place. In Kariba Gorge there lived two remarkable
tribes, the Batonga, which means people of God, and the more
remarkable tribe whose name is the Tongaila. Tonga as you
know means God, but the word Ila also means god, thus the
Tongaila people are called the people of the God Ila- the
wise old god, who according to some stories created the earth
and everything in it. The Tonga and the Tongaila used to
tell me that not only are the chosen people sent by God to
guard the Kariba Gorge, but they are also in yearly touch
with the great gods who come from the stars, whom they call
the Bananaila, the children of Ila. Now let us go to West
Africa for a while, in the land of the Dogon, there, one
is told that when the Nommo arrived from the sky in their
fantastic sky ship, there were several of them, thirteen
or fourteen of them. And they created a lake around their
sky ship and every morning they used to swim from their sky
ship to the shores of the lake and there preach to the people
who assembled in large numbers around the lake. It is said
that before the Nommo departed, returning with a great noise
back to their home star, they first chose one of their number,
killed it and cut its body up into little pieces and then
gave these pieces to the assembled people to eat in the first
sacrificial ritual of its kind on earth. When the people
had eaten the sacred flesh of the star creature and drunk
its blood mixed with water, the Nommo took the lower jaw
of their creature and by some incredible fact of magic brought
the whole creature back to life again. We are told that this
is the way that the Nommo taught our people that there is
no death and that behind every death there shall be a resurrection.
And also that an individual must sometimes
sacrifice himself or herself for the good of the community.
It is the Nommo, we are told that taught the people of Africa
about the mysteries of reincarnation, about the belief that,
that which goes away, gone off on the wings of death, will
always come back again on the fragrant wings of life. In
the land of Nigeria, we hear of how the great mother goddess,
Mawi gave birth to human beings after having created the
world, and that after a number of centuries, people on earth
became filled with selfishness and other forms of negative
behaviour and the great mother who was now in the land of
the gods, sent down her daughter, Gabato, to earth to once
more place human beings upon the path of righteous. It is
said hat Gabato arrived on earth in the mouth of a great
serpent with all the colours of the rainbow, And this serpent,
crawled all over the earth, and such was its size and so
great was its weight that wherever it went it created gorges
and valleys and canyons. What I found was very astonishing,
was that in many countries of the world, amongst the aborigines
of Australia, and amongst the native people of the Americas,
as in Africa, you find belief in the rainbow serpent. And
you also find belief in the feathered serpent.
In the Americas, in South and Central America
mostly, the feathered serpent is called Quetzalcoatl, and
amongst my people, the Zulus, we find belief in a serpent
called Yndlondlo. The Yndlondlo is said to be a huge mamba
or a huge python, whose neck is covered in greyish blue feathers,
like the feathers of a blue crane, and at the top of the
serpents head grow three feathers. One green one, one red
one and a white one, which look like huge ostrich, tail feathers.
The Yndlondlo, like the (South) American Quetzalcoatl, is
associated with God the Son.
Biography Part 5: Mysterious Africa the History
of the Cross
A mystery that has fascinated African's for
thousands of years. Seen in cross section, this rather dull
looking crystal shows a cross like pattern in it. It shows
a pattern of the kind that our people of olden days used
to call the perfect cross, or the cross of the sun. Before
I tell you more, I wish you to know that the thing known
as a cross was not brought to Africa by missionaries, knowledge
of the cross in its many forms, was here in South Africa
from the remotest of remote times. It was already known to
the mystics of Africa long, long before the Christian religion
was established in Europe, and further more, the various
types of cross were used by African healers and mystics for
either good purposes, or evil ones. Africans believed that
the cross, either made of wood, ivory or metal was a powerful
object, possessed of great magic, capable of unleashing powers
of healing, or renewing or powers of destruction and killing.
There were three types of cross that Africans used for healing,
there was the T-shaped cross known in Western mysticism as
the tau cross, then there was the proper cross of the kind
we are told Jesus was crucified upon. A cross with a long
stem and short arms. Then there was the unsaid cross, known
to white people as the Ankh, which many western thinkers
wrongly assume to have been only known to the ancient Egyptians.
This ankh was actually known by our people as the knot of
eternity, or the knot of eternal life, and it was used even
by Khoi San people, for purposes of healing.
The greatest users of the ankh, were the almost
extinct Khoi Khoi or Hottentot people. The Khoi Khoi said
that the unsaid cross represented their great sun god, Heitsie-Ibib.
The Zulus, Xhosas and the Swazis and other Ngoni speaking
peoples of South Africa also believed in a sun god, who died
each evening to be reborn again each morning. Who died each
winter and was reborn again each spring. They believed that
this beautiful son of God the Father and God the Mother whom
they knew by various names, had lost his left leg in a savage
fight against a terrible dragon, some say a gigantic crocodile
which walked on its hind legs, its rear legs much, much longer
than its fore legs. The symbol of this handsome God of the
sun, this hero God and bringer of peace, was also the unsaid
cross, which the Zulus called Mlenze-munye. The Swazis knew
him as Mlente-munye. The name Mlenze-munye or Mlente-mmunye
mean the one legged one. The one with one leg. And incidentally,
when Africans saw the cross, which missionaries often hung
around their necks, they immediately recognized it as the
symbol of the eternal God with one leg who dies and is born
again forever and ever. And they respected missionaries as
messengers from this God. Which is why in some part of Africa
missionaries were called a name which is also one of the
many names of the African sun god, namely Muruti, which means
the great teacher, a name by which Twana speaking, Owambo
speaking and Sotho speaking people still call missionaries
to this day.
Our people believed also in what they called
the perfect cross, the most powerful cross of all. This was
a cross that had all its four wings of exactly equal length.
The crosses of the kind that white people call the Celtic
cross. A cross which is often imprisoned within a circle,
with all its wings of exactly equal length, our people used
this cross, drawing it in its many forms, healing some of
the most horribly diseases to which the body is prone. Before
a person was treated for cancer, the herbs, the powdered
herbs which were to be used in this treatment, were first
laid out on a piece of clean springbok skin on the likeness
of the perfect cross, then spoon after spoon, they were taken
and poured into a clay pot which had been blessed several
times. There were forms of the cross, which unlike these
which I have briefly described which were used for healing,
were used for extremely destructive purposes and one of these
is what the white people call the Saint Andrews cross. The
X-shaped cross which even today we find teachers in mission
schools using to mark a wrong answer written by a pupil in
his or her exercise book. Africans believed that the X-shaped
cross possessed great powers of evil, and they used it to
put curses upon people. It may be of interest to you to learn
that when a Xhosa person from the Eastern Cape, says that
you are crazy, you are mad he says, "Uphameene." And
the literal meaning of this word is, "You have a cross
put upon you," across which has made you cross-witted,
mad. In ancient times and even modern times, when a African
artist, woodcarver or decorator of any kind draws a cross,
he or she must take great care to only draw one of those
crosses that heal and not to dare to draw, carve or render
in beads, one of the evil crosses, because Africans say that
the first person that gets affected by a negative engraving
or a negative drawing is the artist himself. And the first
person to be affected by a positive drawing or a positive
engraving is the artist himself or herself.
Credo Mutwa
Credo Mutwa Books:
There are several books written by Credo Mutwa
and about him by others:
- Indaba, My Children, the definitive
work originally published 1964
- Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies, and
Mysteries, published 2003
- Song of Stars: Lore of a Zulu Shaman,
published 1995
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