VUSAMAZULU CREDO MUTWA

When I was initiated for the first time in 1937 into the mysteries and knowledge of Mother Africa I was ordered by my teacher, who was my aunt, to go outside and fill a small clay of pot with water. Then she said to me, "Look into the water---what do you see?" I was caught in a trap because an initiate is not supposed to have an ego. An initiate is not supposed to refer to himself. I said, "Aunt, I see a person in this water." She said, "Who is that person?" I did not dare say it was me. I said, "It is the person I know who is the son of my mother, the only son." And she said, "Yes, you are in this water, and the water is in you. Until you know that, that you and the water are one, you must not even drink the water, you must not even think about it, because you have cut yourself off from it." . . . Honorable ones, our people believe many strange things regarding water. They believe that water is a living entity. That water has got a mind, that it remembers. The reason why a lake forms where it is, the reason why a river flows through where it flows, is not because it happens to be the right place for water to flow---no! It is because in that place where the river flows, there is an energy, an invisible spirit that moves like a snake, under the ground through the fine sand and which moves in the direction opposite to the one down which the river flows. If this great fire snake, as we call it, this unseen energy, if it dies, then the river dies too. We are told that lakes form where they form because there is an agreement between the water and certain types of rock. . . . Ladies and gentleman, many, many times in Africa, when I started fighting to preserve what I thought was sacred, I was often snarled at, ridiculed and even beaten up as a superstitious heathen. But I was only preaching what my grandfathers had preached. I was only preaching what our mothers had taught us: that water is sacred. It is the life-blood of the great mother. It should not be damned or in any way interfered with because if that is done, the water dies.

-Credo Mutwa, "Keynote Address", Living Lakes Conference, Lee Vining, California, October 2, 1999.