Once upon a time we made new rituals: Bringing the norms of home to new places.
4 July 2025
Wednesday.
In her dream —
as relayed to me by my big sister over a steaming bowl of samp and beans —
my mother remembers herself in a large hall of strangers.
Men, women and young people sandwiched in queues,
the way South Africans tend to do when lined up in any bank,
post office or voting line.
No faith in personal space, my people.
The sun is out.
Mama is standing at the tail of a queue whose head she can’t see,
when a familiar voice calls out her name from behind.
“Uphi uNonziphu? Where is Nonziphu?” — three times the voice forages.
Mama turns around to find her late aunt Nomagama coming towards her,
wearing a faded pink nightdress,
arm outstretched, in palpable haste.
“Ndinguyelo anti! Here I am aunty”! Mama declares.
The elder says nothing and pulls my mother by the hem of her skirt,
away from the queue she is standing in and delivers her to a parallel line.
This is the queue you belong in, not the one you were standing in
Great-aunt Nomagama says in the language of dreams
and calmly walks away.
Mama wakes up. She slept through her 4pm tea.
Standing around her bed are my sister Vuyo, her boyfriend S,
Sis’ Nontsebenzo, who works at my mother's Bed & Breakfast as a cook and cleaner and
the late Sis’ Lindelwa, who was in charge of guest relations and cooked and cleaned.
She immediately tells them about her dream.
They silently chew on its ominous mystery.
I imagine the comforting combination of
Sis Nontsebenzo's beef stew and steamed bread
filling the house with a fragrance of order
on gravid days like this.
It’s the 15th of December 2020.
There have been no guests for months, for obvious reasons.
My sick mother is sleeping in the biggest of the guest rooms.
A sprawling room with an en-suite bathroom that has become smaller and smaller
The older we’ve grown.
It’s hers and my father's old bedroom, now called the Phalo Room,
named after my younger sister Singalakha’s first born son Phalo.
My parents’ bedroom always smelled of potpourri, Elizabeth Arden Red Door
and the inside of my mother's many purses
for the 25 years we’ve lived on Lazarus Road in East London, South Africa.
My father’s only contributions to the room’s general aroma were his Brylcreem —
opened twice a week to soften the bald dark brown mass that was his head —
and his 21 pairs shoes that Singalakha and I
had the weekly chore of taking out and polishing every Saturday.
I can still smell the black Kiwi shoe polish.
Nestled between the bed and my mother’s caregivers is an oxygen tank,
an oximeter and vitamins that I shipped from Johannesburg yesterday.
She refuses to get tested. She refuses to go to the hospital, Vuyo writes
in our Just Us whatsapp group: me, Vuyo, Singalakha and my youngest sister Qhayiya.
Mama has already lost two of her friends this week to Covid,
their last breaths taken at St Dominic’s.
Friday.
My sisters and I, having learnt of the apocalyptic scenes
playing out in and around hospitals in our hometown,
arrange an ambulance to collect our mother from home and
to drive her to Johannesburg, some 10 hours and 957 km away.
A decision that felt like throwing the kitchen knives in the garden.
Utterly absurd.
En route, somewhere near Bloemfontein,
mama has two cardiac arrests.
My sister is in the ambulance with her but knows [we thank you, God]
the value of hope in a moment like this.
She omits this information to us her three younger sisters,
following the journey on WhatsApp Live Location.
Four little black swans rehearsing a song.
Death circling like anmurder of crows.
Saturday.
For the first time in our lives,
in my Yeoville apartment,
my sisters and I pray together without any adults leading the singing,
prayer or ufefe, The Benediction.
I make salads and clean.
I smell of olive oil, lemon and
Sunlight Liquid dish soap.
Mama remains in the ICU until New Years eve.
She has no idea that over Christmas,
we were at the Zoom funeral of her partner of 7 years,
whom she last saw the night of the dream.
We couldn't tell her in the handwritten letters we wrote back and forth
while she was in hospital.
An order from her doctors.
Between the flood of phone calls,
We are all thinking about the queues from her dream.
What if mama had stayed in the queue she was in?
Was that the queue of the dying?
Wednesday
Only silence is appropriate as she emerges from my aunt's car,
half her original weight, smelling of hospital,
fragile.
Sunday.
I packed my bags the night before:
two tomato red candles
to acknowledge the presence of negative energy.
one small sewing needle
to insert at the bottom of the red candle. the metal conductor absorbs the negative energy and will be the only thing left when the red candle has finished burning. this must be discarded by burying it in the earth away from our home
one black candle
to look into the eyes of fear and ask it for guidance.
two canary yellow candles
our female ancestors.
two cobault blue candles
our male ancestors.
six Lighthouse Special white candles
the symbol of spirituality.
one tin of McChrystals Snuff
a universal altar offering of tobacco that resembles fine medium roast ground coffee and
smells like distilled peppermint. each inhale ends in a cascade of sneezes.
one fist full of iMpepho
cleanser of air. bringer of ancestors. carrier of intentions.
whose smoke smells like a shower of wet soil, tree bark, fenugreek, leather, camphor,
and memories of rural Xhosa women at the end of a day of plastering the floors of the
huts with the dark olive-green adobe of cow dung and garden soil.
silver coins.
for the ancestors who came by sea and brought coins to this land.
mine are rusty from being immersed in water. the yellow stains my fingers and smells of Brasso copper cleaner.
one stick of Palo Santo.
a sweet and woody South American bath for the aura.
one nip of old buck, one nip of brandy, one cup of milky tea, one glass of coca cola
for the ancestors to sip on
apples and tennis biscuits
they may be gone but they still like treats
I take the 7.10 am flight to East London.
An hour and 15 minutes later, I am home and hungry.
The east wind of the Indian Ocean is sweet.
As the second daughter, it is my turn to stop my life to take care of my mother.
We start our days with coffee in bed.
It takes longer to set the tray the way my mother likes it than to make the coffee.
Her tray cloths have their own drawers.
I choose the floral English Rose tea set on this first day,
accompanied by a gold spoon.
I put two sachets of Canderel sweetener on the saucer, warm up the milk and serve her.
Repeating small tasks helps me metabolise my feelings.
Like swimming.
Tuesday.
My mother never knew her mother.
My grandmother died when my mother was a baby.
But I've been talking to my grandmother for years,
something my mother was educated against as the grandchild of Methodists.
We kneel together in front of the altar we have built together
and begin to speak aloud to Zuziwe, her mother, my grandmother.
We ask her to ask God and the others for healing and strength.
I leave her alone to speak in private
and I wait in the middle of the living room,
unsure what to do next.
I enter the kitchen to find Sis Nontsebenzo
cooking her beef stew again,
and I watch her intently before asking her how she makes it:
You start by boiling the meat in water first, always. Then you add your diced onions and your robot peppers: green, yellow and red. After letting the pot simmer, add some Worcestershire sauce and "leave it alone", she insists. You can add beef stock cubes if you like but you must finish it off with ''Top Class Spice Mix".
Aunty Manapo adds white pepper, tomatoes and chicken spice to hers.
*
since moving to New York, i’ve been trying to figure out how to transpose, if that’s possible,
my spiritual life in South Africato this new place. when i left SA, as is custom, i reported to my
ancestors that i am leaving home and going to another land. in fact my family members gave me a send off
at our main homestead outside Butterworth. there was a sheep slaughtered, i did a medicine bath in the
kraal at 5am with my sister and the way was lit for me. person after person, celebrating the end of my film project, which
they knew very little about, and wishing me success overseas, gave me an instruction: “ntinga ntaka ndini”, which is a form
of congratulations and a command to carry on that means “dare to fly you darstardly bird, dare to fly.”
i flew overseas and didn’t realise that i was leaving behind a life build so securely on a knowledge system and cultural
and spiritual practices that were so normal and commonplace and effortless, until i didn’t have the security of belonging to
a community of shared values and practices.
i took for granted how easy it is to sacrifice a chicken or sheep to offer it to your ancestors in South Africa. you can
do it in your back yard and the laws protect you. you may have a village home where that is just the norm. that even if
the police showed up, they would understand the protocol and join you in your celebration or ritual accordingly because
the police are us. it’s easy to burn candles at the river or the beach. or to burn mpepho in private or public. i’ve never had to think of the
logistics of this until now.
from having to declare the mpepho at customs (they were really nice about it. it has to be dried and you can say it’s for religious reasons)
to not having an easy time burning it inside because of smoke alarms everywhere, to being scared that someone is gonna go “Ma’am” the second
you light a candle at the river. what river? i spent the first few months looking for a river to greet and introduce myself to because this is important to do as umntu wherever you are. first i went to prospect park and found a nice lake there, but remembered that an elder had told me that it has to be flowing water that has life in it that you can regard spiritually as an entity. then i went to central park and did manage to light a candle at the water there, though the wind kept blowing it out and too many tourists were coming near me to take pictures of the beautiful scenery. then the day before my wedding, i tried to go to the ocean to pray but it was too cold and windy and it just felt like too much of an effort and maybe it’s not necessary.
finally, after my ancestors via my healer chastised me for not introducing myself to the ancestors and custodians of this land (the Lenape), i went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens, which are absolutely stunning and my favourite place in New York. there, i found a flowing body of water. beautiful. but there was a gate in front of what i learned was the Bronx river and i couldn’t get in. plus there were cameras all over so i couldn’t jump over the fence. but i stood at the gate thinking and decided to leave and return the following week with candles, some mpepho and sage and i was just going to jump over the gate and apologise after. so the following week i returned with said candles in my backpack and i decided against the sage and mpepho because this is America and you can’t say “ahhh come on baba” to the authorities and hand them twenty bucks. i jumped over the gate and sat on a rock praying that no parks ranger person was going to come and tell me to leave. it was an overcast day in october and there were a few people walking around the park but i felt safe. i sat there, lit the candle, greeted the water and its keepers and told them who i was and that i would like to make this my home. the sound of the water was divine. i could hear birds and a gentle breeze kept blowing yellow leaves onto the ground. nothing happened. i sat there for an hour, jumped back over the gate and walked around the grounds. i then met a girl who was also walking on her own and she was looking for “The African Garden”, which is an African American historical garden with vegetation historically eaten by black Americans. it was underwhelming when we found it but i enjoyed the chat with that beautiful stranger, and felt proud that i, the new girl in town, had shown her the way to the garden. i go there as often as i can.
since then, i have been meditating on how to change some of our traditional rituals to suit new conditions.
do we always need to spill blood? can impepho be replaced with the local plant?
what if there is no ocean or flowing river? can you do a ritual in your kitchen or living room?
what do the locals do to connect with their ancestors?
can you make something up to speak to the same thing the rituals were speaking to?
so far, i created a candle ritual at my altar here at home,
and i’ve asked my guides for local guides to show me how do people
do things like cleansings, rooting and tie breaking.