Ann Mortifee was born in Zululand. While she’s been in Canada most of her life, the first 10 years were spent on a sugarcane farm where she was surrounded by the Zulu and Xhosa peoples.
“My grandfather had been in Africa during the Boer War. He had stayed on and had become a farmer. It was in KwaZulu, then called Zululand and I felt I owed a debt on behalf of our family,” she explained.
“Apartheid was a terrible thing. In fact that’s why my father left South Africa.”
The family moved to Vancouver, but Ann still felt connected to the land of her birth.
“Gosololo had been my nanny, and I loved her. She was like my mother. She understood me in some really basic way that my family didn’t. I wanted to do something for Gosololo. I never was able to find her. I did everything I could when we went back to Africa, but they had no record. People were scattered all over.”
“I did a tour with Harry Belafonte. We had much in common in terms of our concern about apartheid. I had felt I owed a debt on behalf of my family and race with the Zulu people. I started writing a new musical called ‘When the Rains Come,’ and it was to help bring an end to apartheid. That started one of the most unbelievable experiences of my life, because I ended up with the head Sangoma of the Zulu nation.”
“The Sangome is the head spiritual leader or shaman.”
When the Rains Come is about a white girl named Emily and a black boy, named Kenyali, who are brought up together on a farm in Zululand.
AM: “It’s-semi autobiographical. They are under the watchful eye of a Sangoma there. I named the Sangoma after a dream I used to have. In it she says, ‘my name is Eskówe. Do not forget my name. It is Eskówe.’ So I called the woman in the play Eskówe.'”
“The boy and girl are separated at a certain point. Emily’s sent off to England. Kenyali goes to Johannesburg. In his later years, he becomes one of the top working leaders of the African freedom movement.”
“The play is about how they come back together 20 years later, and they’re both still wearing the talisman that had been made for them by Eskówe, the Sangome in the story. They realized that’s why they never were with anyone else.”
“They really loved each other and they could never marry because of the ‘Immorality Act’ in South Africa. If they were ever found together they’d both end up in prison. Then it would impact the work he’s doing, and the work she’s doing. She became a poet/journalist and is writing stories and sending them out into the world.”
“So they decide to get married in the ancient way of the Zulu and then never see each other again until South Africa is free.”
“Emily is offered her freedom because of her father’s political connections. She says, ‘but what about Kenyali?’
“Her father replied, ‘you know we can’t do anything about Kenyali.’”
“And she said, ‘well then I’m not leaving prison. I’m going to stay here until he’s free.’”
“At which point I’m writing the song and weeping. It’s about how she’s seen a better way and it calls to her night and day.”
“Man is not separate and apart. We beat as one. We are one heart and I as one will live my part. There is no other way for me.”
“So I’m writing this and singing it, and someone comes into my studio and says, ‘Anne, we just heard that Nelson Mandela has just been let out of prison.’”
“So I went out on my balcony in the pouring rain and lifted my arms to the rain and said, ‘Nelson, you’re welcome. I knew that somehow, I was one of the many people dreaming of a better South Africa.'”
“Several months later, I’m at the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver. Bill Millerd, the Director, the Director of Costumes and lighting etc, they were all there. Ed Henderson, who wrote the arrangements, and I, sang through the whole thing.”
“At the end of it, I say to them, ‘I’m never writing about anything except South Africa until they dismantle Apartheid.’”
“Suddenly we hear someone running up into the old rehearsal hall and she burst in and said, ‘We just heard on the CBC, they are dismantling Apartheid.’”
“The very words I’ve just said!:
“I go, ‘Oh my God, this is really incredible!’ The powers that be have my full attention. We set the date for opening night. We hired a cast and we went to rehearsals. The day that the show opened and as I was standing in the wings waiting, South Africa had its first free election.”
“My work was magnificently obsolete on the day that it opened. I realized that there’s something about collective energy that happens in the world, where if enough people are dreaming deeply about something, negative or positive, they bring it about.”
“That changed my life. Like, I really saw it. Years later I went back and I rewrote it. I was in Fyndhorn, a community in the north of Scotland, doing concerts and workshops there, where my godmother lived. I was in the bookstore, and a book fell at my feet. I went, ‘okay, this is for me. So I picked it up, and it was written by Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, head Sangoma of the Zulu Nation.”
“I took the book home to my room and I stayed up most of the night and I come across this statement in the book that Credo Mutwa has said, ‘We Zulus believe the stars are holes pierced in the floor of heaven by the hooves of oxen being led to and from the hills morning and night.’”
“I went, ‘oh my god!’ I had written a song that was about the Sangoma sitting with the two children in the night, and she’s telling them that it is the small things you do in a lifetime that create all the difference. It’s not the big things, it’s the small things, the day by day behavior and kindness you show. I had tried to think of an idea of how she could say that, and I had written
(CC BY SA, 4.0 International License)
“The stars are holes within the floor of heaven. through which you see the power of its light. When the world around you grows so full of darkness, we can look to them to guide you through the night. Each morning in a world so far above us, A boy and girl heard oxen to the hills. And when day is done, and darkness falls around them, they heard their oxen home to the crowd. Though seasons pass, their journey never falters. The hooves of oxen beat into the dust,and they wear away the very floor of heaven, through which you see the stars that shine above us.”
– from the song ‘The Stars Are Holes’
“When I came back to Canada, I asked the editor in New York, ‘Do you know how I can get in touch with Credo Mutwa?’”
“He said, ‘no, but here’s the number of the publisher in South Africa.'”
“So I called the publisher and he said, ‘well, this is very strange. Mutwa’s never been to my home before, but he’s here for lunch. Would you like to speak with him?’ So I end up in a conversation with Mutwa and he said, ‘you come to South Africa. You find me and together we will go to Spirit.'”
“I took my son Devon out of school and off we went.”
“That started about four weeks of looking for Mutwa everywhere I went – and I couldn’t find him! Finally I just gave up and said to Devon, ‘come on, let’s go to a game reserve.'”
“I ended up having an encounter in the middle of the night. I was recording the African night sounds and this elephant came out of the bush. I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to get out of our houses at night time. Anyway, I was sitting on the ground and these elephants were walking past and I was so enraptured and the matriarch turned and walked toward me and I didn’t get up. I just sat there as she came closer, she was so beautiful. All fear left me. She came in no more than 10 feet away from me. I was looking up into this ancient being’s face and she lifted her trunk and started to wave it. I didn’t know what else to do so I lifted my hand and waved back. I was in tears. It was so beautiful. We were like that for … it felt like an eternity, but it could have been five minutes, four minutes and then there was a moment when the conversation was over. I lowered my hand at exactly the moment she lowered her trunk, and she turned, walked away to where the others were, and continued away into the night. I just sat there for a long time knowing it had been a visitation. And I went back to the room where I was sleeping with Devon in a little round mud hut.”
“I dreamt about the same thing, this elephant walking toward me in the night, but beside her was the old Zulu Sangoma that I used to dream about when I was writing the musical, ‘When the Rains Come.’ She just walked up, and said, ‘Anne, go to Shamwari tomorrow. Go to Shamwari tomorrow.’ I woke up and wrote down the word Shamwari.”
“So in the morning I asked the warden, ‘do you know what the word Shamwari means?’”
“He said, ‘yes, well, Shamwari is a private game reserve about an hour from here.’”
“I said, ‘you’re kidding! Can I go there?’”
“He said, ‘well, you wouldn’t get a room. They’re booked up three, four years in advance, but you could probably call them.'”
“So I called and they’d just had a cancellation. Devon and I went for the night. Now I’ve been asking everyone, ‘do you know Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa?’ Everybody knows him, but nobody knows where he is. So we’re out on a game drive. Devon’s up front with the game warden and his son. I’m sitting in the back, and I see a piece of paper that says, ‘if you’re interested in a Zulu healing village, ask your guide about it.’
“So I told the warden, ‘excuse me, I’d be interested in this healing village.’”
“He replied, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a man named Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa.”
“And I said, I’ve been looking for him for four weeks.”
“That’s one of his healing villages.”
“I head off to the healing village the next day and that starts an unbelievable experience where I was put through a couple of tests.”
“One was to choose a goat that was meant for a ceremony to heal me, because I had suffered from migraine headaches for 30 years. They were really debilitating and a woman said, ‘we can heal it. It’s an ancestor who wants to be with you. She wants to speak with you and through you, but you’re not letting her and it’s causing pain in your head.’”
“So, I said, ‘okay.’ we went off into the bush in my cousin’s Mercedes Benz that I was borrowing. We’re bouncing over the hill and I’m going, ‘oh dear God, don’t let the axle break, or me destroy this beautiful car.’”
“There were three Sangoma women with me. We stood on the top of a hill, and they said, ‘one of these goats is for you and the spirits have told us which one it is, but we cannot tell you what it is.’”
“I said, well, ‘how will I know?’”
“She said, ‘that’s for you and the spirits to decide.’”
“So I went down into the 50 or so goats that were there, started walking around. I was thinking, ‘is there a radiant light? Is there something I should know?’ I was feeling very inadequate.”
“I was about to turn around and say, ‘I really don’t know how to do this’ and as I turned my hands shot out and grabbed the horns of a goat. The women up there start singing and dancing and giving thanks. Then the goat was in the back seat with the women, we’re driving back and I was going, ‘wow, how did that happen?’”
“‘That night we went into a house they call the House of Mystery. They were about to start the ceremony for me. The young granddaughter said to me, ‘my grandmother’s ancestors don’t like white people very much. She will be there, but if they feel uncomfortable, she will leave. Suddenly I was feeling very ‘white,’ and very out of place.”
“They started to play the drums and suddenly the grandmother ran out. I felt I owned a karmic debt on behalf of my family, who had grown rich on the backs of the Zulu. The shame of my race and family came over me in a flood as she went frantically out of the room to get away from me. All the shame of my race came over me. I flashed through all that had happened to the Indigenous people and was continuing to happen all over the world, whether it’s now in the Amazon, across North America, Australia. My whole body began to shake and the sweat started pouring out of me.”
“Suddenly this voice came into me and said, ‘this is what you came here for.’ It was the voice of the Sangoma that I heard in my head, when I was writing my musical.”
“I leapt up from a sitting position on the floor and I joined the women dancing. I knew all the words and I knew all the steps. I just fell right into line. The grandmother came back into the room when I started to sing. We all danced and we sang for hours and hours and hours till dawn the next morning. I won’t go through the whole of the ceremony because it doesn’t feel like it’s necessary, but it was very, very powerful and very transformative on a lot of levels for me. I felt so close to these six Sangoma women. The next day we feasted on the goat and the next day we went walking in the hills together.”
“When I was getting ready to go home the grandmother handed me a piece of paper and on it was the phone number of Credo Mutwa.”
“So, I picked up Devon. We had an incredible journey going home. A lot of strange things happened. We get to my cousin’s house. I know I’m not going to be able to see Mutwa because our plane leaves the next day or two days now and I called the number and he wasn’t there.”
“I said, ‘but would you give him a message for me?’”
“She said, ‘no, no, no, no. I give you another phone number.’”
By this time Mortiffee had to return her cousin’s car, but it turned out that Mutwa was only 15 minutes from where her cousin lived.
AM: “I went over and spent the day with him, and at the end he said, ‘tell me about the Sangoma of your dreams. What does she look like?’”
“And I said, ‘well, she’s interesting, She’s got a black eye and a white eye.”
“Which eye is white?”
“I said, ‘it was the right eye.’”
“And he said, ‘what do her legs look like?’”
“They look like the trunks of a tree.”
“And what is her name?”
“I said, ‘her name is Eskówe.’
“‘What???”
“Eskówe.”
“He asked me three times, and then he said, ‘That woman is my grandmother. She had a cataract in her right eye, which turned it completely white. And she had elephantitis, which made her legs look like the trunks of a tree. Her name, it was Eskówe. She told me someone was coming to see me. I just did not think it would be a white woman,’ and he laughed.”
“I sent him all the money from ‘When the Rains Come,’ and all the money from the CD ‘Into the Heart of the Sangoma.’ It went into a hospital in Zululand.”
“I became really interested in how art impacts the collective unconscious, in quantum physics, and how manifestation happens
“so much of what comes out of Hollywood is tragedies, like tsunamis and fires and earthquakes and so forth. Hollywood is impacting that collective unconscious, that Einstein and Carl Jung talked about, with the movies that it makes. if you’re thinking that it’s all going to hell in the basket, well, hello! We’re seeing a lot of that.
“Our dreaming makes a difference. What you think and feel on a regular basis. are the stepping stones towards your future and that you have to be very conscious about what you’re thinking, because it creates habits, and then your habits become your personality.”
“If you want to have a wonderful life, you have to dream a wonderful life. If you want to see a change in the culture, start with yourself. Dream of a better life for the world and live a better life for the world. So that’s really what my work has led me to.The most important thing for me is how to create a wonderful life. Right now I’m looking into my life and saying, ‘where to now, Saint Peter?’”
Music credits:
- Opening: clip from the song ‘Healing Journey,’ song and lyrics by Ann Mortifee, from the album ‘Healing Journey’ (1994)
- ‘Africa’ – from the album Into the Heart of the Sangoma (2005)
- ‘The Stars Have Holes’– from the album Into the Heart of the Sangoma
- ‘Numkumbulwana’ – from the album Into the Heart of the Sangoma
Links to the other interviews with Ann Mortifee
Visit Ann Mortifee.com
Top image credit: composite consisting of (l to r): Ann Mortifee and Edward Henderson working on the musical score for When the Rains Come; Publicity photo from When The Rains Came – all photos taken from Ann Mortifee.com
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