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19th July 2012: Its been three weeks since I started using southern African psychoactive spiritual medicines called ubulawu, as part of my training process to know African traditional healing —and I can say its been one heck of an unconventional initiation….
As a background, I am an ethnobotanist with university training in botany and medical anthropology.
I have had a life-long calling to healing: including the use of medicinal plants, the knowledge of which I gained through self study of nature, books, making and using my own herbal medicines as well as learning from local traditional healers throughout my life. I am currently apprenticing with a Northern Sotho healer named Mama Maponya in Johannesburg, to learn traditional southern African medicine.
The Sotho are one of a number of Bantu language speaking tribes occurring in southern Africa. These groups originated from central Africa and migrated southwards. Traditionally, the Bantu people cultivated fields (a main crop being Sorghum) and raised cattle and supplemented this with by hunting and gathering wild foods. Some of the core beliefs of the Bantu people are that of the principle of community (Ubuntu) and the role of their deceased ancestors, around which many rituals are performed.
In southern Africa there are two main types of traditional healer-doctors: the herbalist (Inyanga in Zulu), and the diviner (Isangoma: Zulu). The diviners like shamans are the spiritual specialists, and use divination to communicate with their ancestral spirits to diagnose their patient’s misfortunes or medical conditions. Both the herbalists and diviners use psychoactive plants as spiritual medicines in their practice and give these under guidance to lay people who use the ubulawu’s to dream and make connection to their ancestors.
Psychoactive can be defined as any substance that can alter our behavioral functioning, be it perception, emotions, cognition on the whole. Many common substances are psychoactive from milk to sugar through to caffeine, opium and psychedelics, each having their own particular effects.
Until recently southern Africa was often considered to be poor in psychoactive plants. Yet the research I have done since 1998 has helped to revitalize this field of ethnobotanical research and I have show that a multitude of plants are used for various psychoactive uses: for relaxing, stimulating, dreaming etc.
Ubulawu are traditional African preparations made mostly from the roots of a variety of herbs and creepers, and sometimes the stems or bark of certain plants that are chopped or ground and left in water that is churned with a forked stick to produce foam. This plant infusion is washed with, the foam eaten or the liquid is drank and vomited with. Vomiting or emetic medicines feature in many ancient systems of healing to clean the body and mind. Using the medicine connects you with yourself, and your ancestors through dreams and they often have mild and subtle psychoactive properties.
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