WeeklySA_AdminDIAGNOSIS: Heather Linn’s memoir takes off veil of secrecy around the art of traditional healing practice
By Edward Tsumele
When a few months ago, books publicist Janine Daniels casually mentioned to me that there was a book coming out this year about the life of a healer based in Cape Town, and whether I was interested in reviewing the book, without hesitation, I said yes. For a good number of reasons.
This is because I have a particular interest in the art and science of healing, the healing that happens the traditional way, practised by mainly, but not exclusively by the successive generations of Africans as they healed the afflicted and the tormented in their communities.
I looked forward to this book also because of a personal interest in the subject of healing as a whole, but the type that uses the healing power of spirits or herbs, or a combination of both. For the longest of time, I always wondered what could have happened to the development of this kind of healing If, our ancestors had the literary knowledge and the ability that modern, Western trained doctors have, who are able to write books and articles about their art and science of healing, that they publish in books and peer reviewed journals.
This personal interest is connected to my own family history in relation to healing. When I was five or there about, I lived with my maternal grandmother who was a healer. She used a combination of spiritual sources to diagnose and come up with a remedy, mainly herbs needed to heal the afflicted. In XiTsonga, we call such people with the gift and calling of the calling on high spiritual powers to heal vane swikwembu –literally meaning they have spirits.
But a non-literal meaning is that they have God-spirits. And, indeed, my childhood memories of people who would come to my grandmother’s homestead, emaciated, extremely thin with life literally ebbing out of them, would a few weeks later, months, and even years, leave the homestead full of life and looking forward to a fulfilling life again. In appreciation, they always promised to come back.
And come they did, and they would shower my grandmother with various gifts, from cows to sheep, and even goats. I became a beneficiary of some of those gifts simply because she was my grandmother who adored me. Loved me. I, however, do not remember her charging for her services, but preferred that her customers pay her with whatever gifts they deemed fit. (I could however be wrong as I was too young to know what discussions were taking place behind the scenes. I therefore cannot say with absolute certainty, what was the nature of the transaction that took place between them).
That was my mother’s side of the family. But on my paternal side of the family, well, my clan, their healing gifts throughout history, is well-documented. Mostly orally, passed from generation to generation. But, yes, even in books (well, find the book with the totems and take note of the clan name of Mahlaule, Mapengo, Khovani). For example, my late father Makhuva, was the last of his line who did not practice medicine beyond his rudimentary knowledge of a few herbs, and you can blame that on the “modernising” influence of Johannesburg where he spent most of his youth and young adult life working as a migrant worker. This I know because I lived in his life time. His father Xirhilele is said to have been a great healer. He is my grandfather.
Xirhilele’s father’s father, Tsumele, my great grandfather, whose name is today my surname, is said to have been even a greater healer at the services of humanity. Several generations of the Mahlaules before them, healed Africans in their communities afflicted by disease, way back before modern Western medicine was part of modern humanity.
Now back to the Cape Town based healer Heather Linn. It is because of this history and my background and proximity to the art and science of healing as a five-year-old child that I looked forward to reading her memoir No Gold without Dragon: Wisdom Teachings of a Quantum Healer, published by Sacred Dragon Publishing. The 356-page book with a recommended price tag of R420 is now available at bookstores.
Published on the 103rd Edition
