This story traces the life of a traditional healer tasked by her ancestors to find grief-healing method. She goes to the "waterverse", a universe underwater, where she meets with dead people who bestow her with the method to heal grief.

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It was a month-long journey from Madjembeni—a small scenic village that flowed with fresh water. The water smelled of fish and pebbles in Bushbuckridge to the waterverse. It also smelled of cows and wild animals because that’s where they also drank.

Veronica Ngakala, the traditional healer, extended her long slender hand to greet Jack. A soft reddish shade of the morning sun rested on the forehead of her cherubic face. Droplets of sweat flowed down her oily brown skin and settled on her thick fine lips.

“Mr Singh,” she said while adjusting her traditional healer’s sarong.

“How are you?” they shook hands. To Jack, her face was like a dewy bunch of purple grapes on a misty morning—the kind he and his sister used to steal at his father’s farm in Cape Town. Her eyes were to him both home and exile; they were humble yet greedy, strong but needy, respite and repulsion.

“All good and how are you Veron?” Jack swept back his black oily slippery hair and licked his parched lips. They were peeling off, it had been a week since he’d been in Mpumalanga but his facial skin developed freckles and was burnt black like that of a Nyaope, a potent drug user. His water bottle was already half. It was a bottle of sparkling water. Veronica told him that Bushbuckridge had no running water, so clean water was his worry. But since he had covered warzones, he was not afraid.

He looked in her brown fiery distinguished eyes, her reply was sharp and short, “Also good, thanks.”

Jack Singh, the freelance journalist, met Veronica when he did research and wrote essays on the uses of indigenous knowledge systems and traditional healing. He wrote a review on the impact of indigenous knowledge for his blog. They hopped off the s’tiki bus at the edge of a dirt rough road that cut through an outwardly random foreign location in the bush leading to a mountain. The location they walked on was hardly visited except in winter when initiation schools were set up for boys to go through a rite of passage.

“This is the most dangerous part of the area; almost every tree has a bunch of wasps hanging like a sack of balls,” Veronica said trying to warn him but they ended up laughing. Although he partook in the laugher, Jack’s insipid blue eyes widened with fear when she told him the wasps could be fatal.

“Mr Singh, fear is a sickness. It creeps in your soul and paralyses you. It smells bad, I can smell it in you,” she said and fastened her red sarong emblazoned with King Moswati’s portrait around her waist.

When they got off from the bus, Jack was relieved because this meant the end of the unpleasant staring from dismayed passengers. He couldn’t blame them because the majority were Christians. Their perceptions of Sangomas were tainted by the many years of colonialism and apartheid. He knew that to them, Veronica was both evil and demonic. And they were afraid of his bizarrely dressed confidant and her odd-looking black goat.

They trekked to mountain Mogologolo in what seemed like a three hours trek of nowhere-flora. The trek was a macabre sequence of living and surviving in obscure forests. Veronica lectured Jack on ancient medicinal flowers and plants, which plants were used to extract oil to salve women who had just given birth, which one to use to wipe one’s ass, which one to eat if one desired to sharpen their sexual potency; which one helped to cure, ghilinyati, Spanish flue, and which one helped to revive deteriorating mental vigour. She showed him Lekhwekhweta, a small banana-like plant the roots of which could be cut into smaller chunks and boiled before using as an aphrodisiac or enema.

She raised Lekhwekhweta,

“This can give you a 24-hour erection. If not properly administered, this muti can itch on your body until you suffer rash or skin irritation,” she said.

They camped out in clearings they came across for ten consecutive nights and bathed in the near-by streams. They ate wild berries and cooked fish.

“When we are in here, we are not allowed by the ancestors to carry any weapon or kill animals for food,” she said.

Their destination was an ancient holy deep river. Jack suspected that no ordinary being knew about this place unless they had a special calling. The brown people, or the people of Anu, have it that when thunder parted the Holy River, Pfumere—the god of light and healing—threw sky-blue sarsens and celestial horns deep into the waterverse and divinely appointed traditional healers would dive deep and scour the verse looking for these scarce heavenly tinctures. Some of these sarsens would be enshrined in small exclusive tabernacles and used as mediums. Each tabernacle was the care of the traditional healers; they acted as both a transmitter and receiver of spiritual alternating current from the great beyond.

“This river has only three shrines,” Jack was scribbling something on his notebook. He raised his head and looked at Veronica.

“Okay,” he said.

“Yes, do you know what this means?” The rhetorical question was followed by a dead silence. But it was cut dead by the sound of singing birds and the heavily flowing river.

“It means only three traditional healers made if back from the waterverse, only three,” she crossed her index fingers to emphasise her point.

“So how many came here and didn’t make it back?” he asked with his pen poised waiting for her answer before he continued scribbling notes.

“We don’t know for certain. Some people came here before us, when we were training our gobelas told us that many people didn’t make it back. But it is more than a thousand people,” Veronica continued while Jack scribbled insistently on his notebook.

“Age-old customs and traditions in many black societies held that life on earth was an afterlife, humanity existed in the waterverse before they existed on any other planet the earth being the only they could remember ever inhabiting,” she continued.

She held that humanity came from the waterverse because man was made of water and clay, therefore to fully understand human grief and suffering it was imperative to understand the waterverse.

“Orgasm, sperms, ovary, blood and energy are water which means water is God. Or God is water. So water and clay made us then fire, what we came to know—in worldly terms—as sufferings, pains, trepidations and grief put shape into the clay to form what we know today as the anatomy of a human body,” she continued with the lecture.

“This is what Pythagoras taught us in the waterverse. The Pythagorean system of doctrines of opposites: Harmony, Fire, Mind—since it is composed of fire atoms— Immortality, expressed as transmigration of Souls, and the summum bonum or the purpose of philosophy,” Jack asked her to slow down since he missed on important points.

“These are all founded in the idea of balance: water to fire, air to space, life to death, flesh to dust and so on. That’s where we all came, therefore to understand grief one must understand the source were humanity originate, and that’s—without a doubt—the waterverse,”she added.

Jack took the notes as she waxed lyrical about her ancestors; he had a story and a book to write. He was fascinated because in the western society science was dogmatically appreciated and acknowledged as the only logical instrument that could apply to explain human existence. And it was strongly against the traditionally long held African belief that a human being could be initiated under water, in the waterverse, for more than 30 minutes. But Veronica, as she narrated the waterverse tale to him, told him that the only way to access the waterverse was to learn how to do some dying first. And learn to break from the prison of the human body and transmigrate to a cosmic state; to eliminate the belief that human existence is only limited to the sixth senses.

“Because from the waterverse we were taken and to the waterverse we shall return,” she said.

They sat at the river while she waited for a spiritual call to jump inside the river and dive deep to its bottom. Jack was already tired from taking notes. He asked her for a break. They sat the boulder, Veronica pulled out a Shogun-sharp bone-shank. She ordered Jack to give her his hand. He was terrified. But he was intrigued by the intricacy of its creative detailed engravings. It had designs worthy of an artist’s envy. It had zigzag designs with different colours like the design on a locust. She searched for his threadbare vein on his wrist.

“It won’t hurt a lot,” she said, in a poor attempt to calm Jack. She then slit a vertical line at the base of Jack’s palm and squeezed out a reddish-black sludge. The sludge hit the top of the flat boulder with a splat that made Jack’s skin crawl. In less than five minutes, Jack was already dizzy. She held his head and looked him straight in the eyes before she started,

“When you wake up and I am not here, don’t hesitate. Nothing will attack you,” he listened to her in compete stupor. He felt like he was yanked from a lucid dream. And now he was in a dream within a dream.

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A lady who identified herself as Cholera opened the two big iron gates; the gates were brighter than the light of a shining moon. She gave Veronica a hug. The hug was shadowy, but Veronica could feel her presence. It was a warm yet sick hug. She felt nauseas, an ocean of putrid vomit boiled in her stomach but she made sure not to puke out. Her hair was just drops of water and her lips shadows, they moved with ease.

“Welcome to the waterverse, we’ve been expecting you Vero,” she said as she handed her a programme which detailed all the events that would take place at the waterverse. Veronica gave Cholera the reddish-sludge she withdrew from Jack’s palm.

“Thanks, I will hand it over to the relevant authorities,” said Cholera.

Veronica looked at the program, the blood that was used as ink made her skin crawl. She flipped the pages to the page were her name written. Under it was her message:

Dear: Mss Veronica Ngakala.

We are glad to announce to you that our Command Council on Grief Healing and Death (CCGHD) have decided to appoint you as a ‘grief healer’. Your purpose during this visit in this month of June will include the following: being trained to find new methods on how to heal grief, to understand where it came from and how it came about. It will also include knowing how it can be removed from people, more especially those who suffer from a generational grief. After thorough deliberation with our boss, ‘Death’, he resolved that we appoint you as our leader. You will receive all the necessary training material and other sacred kit to help you during your stay in the waterverse. Please proceed to village ‘Life’ house number 4464 where you will be congratulated and a big feast held to welcome you to your new position. At Grief Street St Ghosts, please turn to your right and enter the Death Against Grief Festival room. Don’t be afraid, Death is off from his deathly duties and will continue with his deathly duties once we are done with your initiation. He is not at the event to collect anyone’s soul but to celebrate your appointment. Let’s carouse!

Yours sincerely:

Aids.

At the Death Against Grief Room, Veronica’s thoughts and fears were drowned by a thunderous sound of a clapping audience, they were cheering the artists on stage. When she arrived at the gate, Malaria requested her event access card.

“I don’t have one,” she replied.

Asthenic Malaria brushed her antennas and opened her wings; she wanted to fly to her boss but quickly remembered that Veronica was given a programme.

“You sure have a program you received at the gate, that’s what I am looking for,” said Malaria.

Malaria had the body of a mosquito but the head of a cockroach.

When she got inside, her attention was swept by Brenda Fassie’s ‘Weekend Special.’ She looked around; Paul Ndlovu came to her and asked if she could follow him to her seat. They walked for three days before she could get to her seat. Her seat was on the front row. On the third day, Amie Winehouse, Jimmy Hendrix and Jabu Khanyile graced the stage with their presence.

“This is for y’all and our beautiful sister, you are about to be bestowed with the most special gift,” 2pac said with a mike close to his lips, his nose ring shone brighter than his fiery eyes. His song, ‘Keep Ya Head Up,’ sounded so different and edifying. 2pac handed the mike to Nelson Mandela, his elaborate dashiki and gaudy watch complemented the heavenly looking background. Death also spoke at length about Veronica’s achievements as a traditional healer and applauded her for her special talents. After President Mandela’s speech, they went were food was served and ate worms, termites and other flying insects.

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For a month, Jack camped on top of a flat boulder that spread out nicely around near the river. He was worried about what he was going to do if she didn’t come back but found solace and companionship on the strange goat tied on a morula tree. There he sat and tried out electrifying titles such as ‘macabre journey to the waterverse’ and ‘the [verse] from where humanity originate’ for his highly anticipated book as well as newspaper and magazine columns.

The river broke into two equal halves; water spurted and sprayed up like a bullet shot from a gun. It was like Moses parting the ocean. Her head emerged, followed by her entire body. It was like the river was giving birth to her.

She knelt before Jack, and without looking at him then said,

“I have completed my initiation. We can go.”

A few days later, Jack wrote to different hospitals about a woman who had a special gift: healing grief. He also put up advertorials in local newspapers and a scientific monthly about a black traditional healer who spent a month in the bottom of a river and came back with ways to heal grief. A Jewish Hospital in St Madjembeni contacted her.

Her first clientele was a woman. She sat at a bench. The hospital staff, mostly Jew, said they have had enough of this woman. She had always begged them to help remove her grief. But they didn’t offer such medical assistance. She had a creased face and blistered lips. It was early in the morning. When Veronica looked at her, she could tell the woman had survived many traumatic events. Her grief had roots. It grew from her psyche or soul deep to her physical body. She could tell that her grief was generational.

“Can you see it? Can you remove it?” Veronica didn’t reply.

“Please, can you make it go away forever?”

“I want to die in peace when I have to go,” she pleaded.

She held the woman by the head and calculated her grief by tracing her genealogical sufferings as far back as the oldest generation she could trace. She then looked at the impact her current grief had on her mental health.

“I will need you to undress,” she ordered the woman.

The woman looked terrified but she remained calm. When the woman was done, Veronica scrutinised her whole body. When she struggled to find what she was looking for, she laid a reed mat on the ground and threw her bones.

“Your grief is so aggressive,” she said.

“Please bend your head,” the woman complied. Veronica scrutinised the back of the woman’s neck. After a while, she exclaimed in joy, like a scientist who had just made a new discovery.

“There, I have got it,” she pressed her thumb on the moth planted behind the woman’s neck. The moth was cold, it was colder than winter. When she pressed it, the warmth of her thumb made the woman shook in fear. The woman felt what she had never felt before. She was scared of life, to live. She felt alive, like someone who had a special place in the universe. She felt loved, she felt relieved like someone had just lifted a burden she had been carrying for 65 years. Veronica gave her a good 30-second press; this was not an easy task. The women went into a brief ecstasy; she got carried into a greenish world, a world she had never even dreamt of. All her dreams were just miscellanies events of bombs and dead bodies with torn torsos. She felt like she had taken a drug that was not yet made. Her nipples twitched, her lips quivered. She could hear ants threading, water flowing from a far distance. What struck her most was the eruptive orgasm she received. It swept her whole body like a deluge. Her memory faded. Veronica then put her down on the reed mat. There she lay like a dead goat, her mouth and eyes opened. She was in an unknown stupor.

Veronica slit a vertical line on the moth. She opened it wide, and then squeezed the wound. A life worm-like reddish-black sludge came out, and then she drew out the remains like poison from a septic wound. It fell on her gloved hand and twitched like a worm.

“So there are people in your family who were killed and their bodies were never discovered?” She asked.

The woman just nodded, her eyes were still wide opened. Her mind was still wandering the greenish world. When she returned, the woman had a fresh memory. She could no longer remember anything. The only things she had remembered was that she ran away from her home, her village and that her people were killed by outsiders. But she forgot the pain these caused; she forgot how to feel grief. She forgot anger. She forgot anguish.

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When Jack drove her back that night, Veronica did not say a thing until back to her house in Madjembeni. That night, they arranged for her to see Tony Blair and Prime Minister Benjamin Neyanyahu. Veronica didn’t decline nor agree to see the two. Everyone wanted to see her, even the guy who, on the phone, confessed to have hung over 200 black people during apartheid.

That night, she walked through the shrubs, and without looking back, disappeared into the darkness. It was the last time anyone saw Veronica. She went back home, her home where she’d never be forced to heal murderers. And people wanted for committing crimes against humanity. She disappeared into the thin silence of the winter night, like candle light when snubbed, no one knew where she went!

By Keketso Mashigo

From: South Africa

Website: http://www.thepurplewound.com

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