Richard Rodriquez Roodt, 23, commonly known as Quaz, is originally from Potchefstroom. He is part of the Likwid Tongue collective which hosts open mic poetry sessions at Kospotong, next to Sophiatown Restaurant in Newtown every Wednesday night. He published Orange Book, a small collection of English and Afrikaans poems in 2004.

Other poems have been featured in the Reunited Siblings Exodus Anthology 2006 and in Peo Tsa Rona, an anthology published by an international publishing house in 2007. He released a mixtape last year called Immaculate Thoughts of Za`uQ.

What do you think poetry needs in this country?

The writings of people like Zakes Mda, Credo Mutwa and many more should be integrated into our national school syllabus. Not just the poetry, but all their writings should be taught in our schools. That I think is a starting point . We have some great writers on the continent and their work is very relevant to what it is we’re facing.

read the rest of his interview on the Tonight website here.

Twenty years into the pandemic, people are looking for new ways to live with HIV, and for some alternative medicine has become part of the answer.

The TsaBotsogo Community Development and Training Centre, based in Dobsonville, Soweto, a sprawling township south of Johannesburg, South Africa, works with teachers to identify vulnerable children in the community and refer them to the centre’s trained volunteers for counselling. This year the organisation took 30 of the children to camp for a week, hoping to give them a chance to play, make friends and build better relationships with TsaBotsogo volunteers, said executive director, Kefilwe Ndaba.

“The Rolls Royce of Healing?”

The camp was where you might least expect to find talk of alternative medicine, chakras and biofields, but Amanda du Toit and a several other “energy medicine practitioners” arrived to help balance the children’s energies, she said.

The term “alternative medicine” is often used to describe practices outside the realm of your typical MD or nurse, and can include homeopathy, the ancient Indian practice of Ayurvedic medicine and naturopathy, in which healing is believed to be associated with nature.

Practitioners of energy medicine like du Toit believe physical illness is caused by imbalances between such energies in the body. They say they use physical energy, such as vibration, as well as less tangible forms of energy like “biofields”, or the subtle energy believed to be within all living things, to heal certain physical illnesses.

Using a system developed by a United States-based entrepreneur known as Master Del Pe, these women say they have learned to read chakras - the supposedly seven centres of spiritual energy in the human body in yoga philosophy - and can open and close these centres in order to balance the energies in the body.

By the end of the session, most of the younger children were asleep, while the older ones sat quietly with their eyes closed. The session involved no physical contact or verbal communication between the women and children, which du Toit said was an advantage when working with children, who might not be able to verbalise what they were feeling.

“[Energy medicine] is like the new generation of healing; it’s very effective - like the ‘Rolls Royce’ of healing,” said du Toit, who characterises Del Pe’s approach as a mix of Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. “We believe it’s the medicine of the future.”

Del Pe came to South Africa in 2006, punting free lessons in his newly developed form of energy healing geared to help those living with HIV and AIDS deal with opportunistic infections and other related illnesses.

He has returned several times since, charging roughly R1,500 (US$191) for one-day courses such as “Charting Your Seven Life Cycles”.

A very grown-up reality

According to a 2006 study by South Africa’s department of education, 15 percent of children will lose at least one caregiver to HIV/AIDS by the age of 14 years, placing them at an increased risk of poverty, malnutrition, exploitation and school absenteeism.

The South Africa government has spent more than R563 million (US$72m) since 1997 on community-based interventions aimed at, among other objectives, safeguarding at-risk children. If the country meets the goals set out in its national strategic framework for HIV and AIDS, 30 percent of vulnerable children and child-headed households should be able to access social benefits and grants by the end of 2008.

However, the psychosocial and emotional needs of children like those at TsaBotsogo are often harder to budget for and even harder to identify, according to UNAIDS case studies.

“Many of them feel like they are alone,” Ndaba said. “Some of them talk, say they know they don’t have a parent, that it is difficult to go to school with nothing in their stomachs, but some are too reserved,” she commented. “It’s not easy for them to open up, that’s why we’ve been playing lots of games, praying for them, hugging them, trying to get them to trust us and open up.”

Sophie Kekana, a counsellor at TsaBotsogo, said working with the children was challenging. “You can see from afar their needs - some are sick or hurting, others are bitter. A lot of them are poverty stricken; you can see it in the way they eat.”

“At least now they know that they are not alone, that they have mothers outside [of their families] that care for them,” Ndaba said.

Consent underlines all approaches

As the epidemics of HIV and AIDS drive on, people may be turning to new ways of caring for those affected, but child rights activists caution that the consent of both parents and children is essential, regardless of the type or style of therapy.

“[Alternative medicine] might be perfectly harmless but my concern is: ‘how would you explain something like this to children’s mothers?’” said Noreen Ramsden, materials developer for the Durban-based Children’s Rights Centre.

According to Ramsden, administering alternative therapies like energy healing without informed parental consent reflected a certain element of manipulation, and threatened to undermine a parent’s right to guide their children’s upbringing.

TsaBotsogo’s Ndaba admitted that energy healing was not originally on the programme, and was therefore not explained by teachers to caregivers at the time they obtained consent for the children to go camping.

Helen Meintjies, a senior researcher at the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town, agreed with Ramsden, cautioning that the danger of manipulation was very real when working with people who were unwilling to say ‘no’ in the face of something they viewed as a favour.

“Consent issues apply across the board when working with children, regardless of the activity, and that means kids must be informed [of the activity] in a way that’s understandable,” Meintjies said. “Don’t underestimate the importance of kids understanding what they are entering into.”

This report was originally published on PlusNews.

In the article with the title “Great Zulu Shaman and Elder Credo Mutwa on Alien Abduction and Reptilians: A Rare, Astonishing Conversation,” by Rick Martin, Credo Mutwa raised the question “If these aliens are from a far away planet, why are they able to impregnate women?” Credo Mutwa indicates that he had been abducted by the same aliens that appear to be consistent with the “Archons” documented by John Lash in Metahistory.org. Credo Mutwa also indicated in this article that he experienced telepathic transfers of information from these aliens.

Based upon the testimony of his self-represented terrifying telepathic encounter, Credo Mutwa suggested during his interview with Rick Martin, that “these so-called aliens don’t come from far away at all. I believe that they are here with us, and I believe that they need substances from us, just as some of us human beings use certain things from wild animals, such as monkey glands, for certain selfish purposes of our own.”

Read more »

One of the South African film industry’s most anticipated events, the 5th North West Film Festival (NWFF), is taking place from the 14th to the 23rd September 2007 across the North West Province.
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The theme of the festival is Ke Ya Rona (Setswana for “It is Ours”) and its primary objective is to encourage people to take ownership of the industry either as active audiences or film makers. The Festival aims to ‘edutain’ using film as a medium.

The Festival takes place within National Heritage month, and it will showcase films with a Proudly South African focus to celebrate the country’s heritage. These films include; Karen Slater’s From Nkoko with Love, Vincent Moloi’s A Pair of Boots and a Bicycle, Jioty Mystry’s I Mike what I Like, Rudi Steyn’s Baas van die Plaas, Khulile Nxumalo’s The House of Credo Mutwa and Teboho Mahlatsi’s Sekalli sa Meokgo.

read the full story on the Filmmaker South Africa website…

It did not require some extraordinary insight to predict the utter failure of the July 2007 Accra summit of Africa’s heads of state – not so much the indifference shown to the vaunted theatrics of the so-called “continental union government” performance by Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi but the assembly’s deafening silence over the ongoing Arab-driven genocide against the African people of Darfur. This failure is indefensible. Just as the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide (post-European occupied Africa’s foundational genocide which the Arab/Islamic World, in concert with Britain, the former Soviet Union and the Nigerian state executed, resulting in the murder of 3.1 million Igbo) and the subsequent genocides in Sierra Leone, Rwanda and the Congos, African leaders have yet again failed to confront and halt another mass slaughter of an African people. Just as in all the pre-Darfur continental genocides of the past 41 years in which 15 million Africans were murdered, the world appears, yet again, to watch at the sideline as another nation of Africans is being systematically destroyed by an African state run by a ruthless minority Arab/islamist hegemonic grouping. A total of 200,000 Darfuri have so far been murdered.

Despite Gaddafi’s pre-summit boisterous campaigns across Africa to publicise his “union government” ambition, the Arab nationalist, who has turned his country into some religio-dynastic fiefdom since he seized power in 1967 after a coup d’état, has obviously scant democratic credentials to present to the current frenetic African discourses geared to the reworking and transformation of Africa’s debilitating sociopolitical spaces of dictatorship, militarism and genocide. Africa’s strategic goal in these early decades of the new millennium, it should be stressed, is to dismantle its extant genocide-states and create extensively decentralised new state forms of organic coherence that not only halt the slaughtering of four decades but also embark on the construction of African-centred polities of advanced civilisations.

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To all South African Family and Friends of Africa! This posting is a little late but I’m publishing this information anyway to raise awareness on this issue…Ramon Thomas, webmaster

I do not usually send out petitions but in this case I am sure you will forgive the intrusion:

Mpumalanga are in the process of drafting a Witchcraft suppression bill which will make the practice or admission of witchcraft a criminal act in Mpumalanga !!- you might think it is not your province or not your problem! BUT if Mpumalanga do it, they open the doorway for other provinces to do the same! They also open the doors for innocent people to be incriminated and even killed by mass trial/mobs.

This affects ALL traditional Crafts and most Importantly the SANGOMA’S.

What you can do to help:

The deadline for objections is 13 July so please do not delay. We need all Pagans or persons practising Traditional Crafts (Sangomas) OR who identify themselves as ‘Witches’ (or even those who don’t) to lodge PERSONAL objections against the bill. No group petitions PLEASE. We want a large quantity of individual mail being submitted against the drafting of the bill!

This Bill is in direct contravention with the South African Constitution and Bill of Rights , which allow religious freedom to ALL!!

We need to get as many objections as possible so please take the time to send a mail and also pass this along to all Africans, Traditional healers, Pagans and Witch-friendly folk.

To make it easy for you - BELOW are address details and a template and email address for submission of your Objection (just add your personal details and tweak the wording if you like)

Witches are NOT what the story books claim them to be! Nor are they Christian Hating or evil people! DO the right thing!

SAVE YOUR TRADITIONAL HEALERS! SAVE YOUR ANCESTRAL RIGHTS! STAND UP AND DEFEND YOUR AFRICAN AND SPIRITUAL HERITAGE!

Warm Blessings
Jacqui

On Behalf of NDUMA (Sangoma and Traditional healer)
http://www.myspace.com/sangomaliz

_____________________________________

Send your mail to : bbongo@mpg.gov.za

Subject: Witchcraft Suppression Act - OBJECTION

E-mail content :

Office of the Premier
Mpumalanga Provincial Government

For attention: Advocates B. Thomas and H.M. Mbatha and L. Pretorius

With reference to: P.15/5/15 Comment as an Interested and Affected Party: Mpumalanga Witchcraft Suppression Bill 2007.

I, INSERT NAME HERE, hereby formally object to the proposed Witchcraft Suppression Bill on the following grounds:

1. Any bill that provides for the suppression of Witchcraft is in direct contravention with the South African Constitution and Bill of rights (which allow religious freedom to all)

2. The proposed bill will criminalise members of a recognised and established religious minority

3. It denies the members of this minority religious community freedom of religion and belief

4. The bill will create a threat to the dignity, and well being and safety of Witch/Wiccan religious communities throughout South Africa

5. The bill will misrepresent a Witches worldview and belief system and will create discrimination and division within communities

I respectfully request that this bill is not passed with the current wording - and that alternate solutions are found to deal with the issues at hand.

Regards

INSERT NAME
aka INSERT : Pagan / Traditional healer Name
TELEPHONE NUMBER:
ADDRESS (POSTAL IS FINE):

THERE are no sacred cows on Afro-centric artistes Divided Kingdom Republic’s new effort, the double album Kudakwashe/Munyaradzi. The Zimbabwean-born rappers, pioneers of hip hop in their homeland deliver a scathing no-holds barred full frontal attack on just about all forces propagating strife on the continent: from sycophant Western powers, the G8 to corrupt African leaders.

Following hot in the footsteps of their impressive debut offering , Rhythm and Prose in 2005, Mcs Kudakwashe Musasiwa a.k.a Begotten Sun and Munyaradzi Nota take a new approach to producing rap, a lighter way to enlighten, and some of the sharpest double entendres and wordplay ever recorded in hip hop and hereby leave an indelible mark on music history.

To start with, the duo who produced most of the tracks on this double cd, takes a bold decision to ditch the predictable and overused technique of computerised melodies and sampled bass lines for live guitar riffs, thumping traditional ngoma (drums), rattling hoshos while the Mbira yevadzimu dominates prominently.

The set is then completed by the compliment of kicks and a skanking drum machine to retain a hip hop flavour, already catchy before the addition of the often satirical but mostly blunt yet clean political compositions.

The genius in this record is the Chitauri theme which threads throughout the album that is famously attributable to Zulu Shaman and best-selling fiction author Credo Mutwa.

Click here to read the rest of this story from the Association of Zimbabwean Journalist s website.

Mail & Guardian reviewers examine meaning and myth in Mmatshilo Motsei’s The Kanga and the Kangaroo Court

wen Ansell About 55 000 rapes were reported in South Africa in 2005/06, along with close to 10 000 indecent assaults. Many of the latter may also have been rapes: of men, or with bottles, knives or guns — prevailing legal definitions did not permit the “rape” label for those. If you are part of the majority population (according to Statistics South Africa, 51% of us are female), South Africa is a dangerous place to live.

Just how dangerous, was highlighted by events inside and outside the court where one particularly well-publicised rape case was heard in March last year. Jacob Gedleyihlekisa Zuma, deputy president of the ANC and former deputy president of the country, was on trial for the rape of a young woman identified as “Khwezi”. The court acquitted him. But, throughout the trial, mobs of supporters, many of them bussed in from Zuma’s base in rural KwaZulu-Natal, menaced the complainant, her family, legal team and supporters. Their chant — reproduced on a particularly ill-judged Sowetan front page that the photo-burning mobs then brandished as a placard — was “Burn the bitch!”

Women and men picketing for a fair trial faced a barrage of abuse. It sometimes seemed as if every passing hand was making gestures of throat-slitting or pistol-firing in their direction. The verbal and ideological violence continued long after the verdict. (Rapes, of course, had never stopped.) Calls for South Africa’s next president to be a woman met such gender-specific vitriol that Thenjiwe Mtintso, South African ambassador to Cuba, coined the term vrou-gevaar (women peril), in parallel to the swart-gevaar (black peril) psychosis infecting the supporters of apartheid.

The Zuma trial let loose the stink of some odious aspects of life. But it also highlighted a still-unsecured front in our liberation war: the struggle for gender equality. And if “Burn the bitch” was the literary expression of the enemy, Mmatshilo Motsei’s book sounds the clarion call back to battle.

It’s a battle of ideas and behaviour; a battle against, not of, violence. In 200 meticulously researched and passionately (but also wittily) written pages, Motsei examines the gender images and self-images men and women create and hold, where these images come from, and how they are expressed in behaviour.

Though the Zuma trial is the anchor for her argument, she considers many broader issues, including patriarchy in religion and popular culture, and the impact of globalisation and militarisation. She debunks — tragic that it must be done so repeatedly — the myth that women “ask for it”. And she kills the canard that African cultures are inherently sexist, drawing on authorities to the contrary from gender studies academic Molara Ogundipe to traditional healer Credo Mutwa and veteran Alexandra community leader Drake Koka.

Please click here to read the rest of this story…

A South African endemic medicinal herb, with the botanical name of Sutherlandia frutescens may hold the key to the treatment of HIV and Aids it has been reported in many places including the BBC news site, and by Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa, who in recent years has become a good friend of controversial author and speaker David Icke.

Credo Mutwa, however, got the name slightly wrong and refers to it as Suderlandia Fructosate, and this has led to very many enquiries on message boards online where people have been trying to track the herb down. Some botanists also refer to Sutherlandia frutescens as Lessertia frutescens, which confuses matters further.

Sutherlandia frutescens is also known in English as cancer bush and balloon vine, and it grows naturally throughout the dry parts of southern Africa, in Western Cape and up the west coast as far north as Namibia and into Botswana. It is also found in the western Karoo to Eastern Cape and has been cultivated as an attractive garden flower.

Sutherlandia Frutescens, sub-species Microphylla has been undergoing clinical trials to assess its immune-boosting properties and evidence suggests that this plant can improve the quality of life of thousands of people suffering from HIV and full-blown Aids.

The South African San people who know it as “Insisa,” use Sutherlandia frutescens as an energy booster and an anti-depressant, whilst Afrikaners call it the “Kankerbossie” or cancer bush, because of its properties in treating people suffering with internal cancers.

Phyto Nova, a company specialising in herbal remedies first started researching the bio-chemical properties of Sutherlandia frutescens and they were so convinced it could be used to help HIV and Aids sufferers, that they contracted farmers to plant acres of the herb as a safeguard against over-harvesting of it in the wild.

The Phyto Nova company has been manufacturing and supplying high quality Sutherlandia frutescens tablets, gel and powder.

originally published on Enjoy France website here.

You may also be interested in reading this detailed write-up on the Sutherlandia treatment here.

Dr. Moira Gunn talks to the chief of a rural South African village, Chief Advocate Mdutshane, and a South African government scientist, Dr. Makhosandile Rebe, about genetically modified crops in South Africa. And on Bio-Issue of the Week, science journalist David Ewing Duncan reviews former President Clinton’s keynote speech. This edition of BioTech Nation was broadcast from the BIO2006 conference in Chicago.

Download interview with Chief Advocate Mdutshane and Dr. Makhosandile Rebe here.