Listen: The White Sangoma
Through a chance encounter on the street, a white
Afrikaans woman discovers she has a calling that takes her deep into the heart
of South Africa – and her own psyche.
Annelie de Wet was a ‘corporate princess’ with a good job
in e-commerce, a house, friends - a pretty ordinary life.
Then, one day 13
years ago, she found herself strangely drawn to a woman she saw walking along
the road in her neighbourhood – so much so that she tracked her down in four
more places on that same day.
As she did so, she felt something shift deep within her consciousness. What was happening to her? A friend suggested that, perhaps, she had a calling…..
because Annelie – a white Afrikaner – was being called to ukuthwasa – to train to become a sangoma.
Listen to her remarkable story below.
Annalie’s story moves from Rosebank in Cape Town, to Pondoland in the Eastern Cape and Kwathema in Gauteng, and then back to the suburbs.
“Annalie’s
experience is fascinating – both in terms of the course her life has taken and
what she has made of it,” says Marianne.
“But I know more than one white person who has become a sangoma and I wonder if it’s a way of white South Africans finding a sense of belonging in a country where so much is not fully known to them and from which they are excluded.”
The incidental mbira (African tongue piano) music was specially created for First Person by award-winning multi-instrumentalist, Guy Buttery.
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