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72 pages

English

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Nwelezelanga, The Star Child travels a magical and spiritual journey that merges the ancestral realms with contemporary realities. It is a story of an ancestral spirit that is born through Nwelezelanga, who is tasked with the purpose to pass messages from beyond; a divine responsibility to children of the star. The birth of Nwelezelanga was foreseen by the wise ones of the tribes and hidden in folktales and abstract proverbs. However, forces of black magic and the underworld had clandestine intentions to interfere with her divine destiny and will undignified death upon her birth.‘Absolute-truth’ reveals that there is birth within death.The story explores how forces of the upper- and underworld, light and darkness, the known and the unknown unravel to determine her destiny. ‘Magubeni handles the sacred subject in a way that neither slants nor meddles. For this reason, when African traditionalists learn of Magubeni’s book they will be nervously curious but will discover that they needn’t have been. It will be a rare gift for the scholars, and we ordinary readers will not remember our lives before Magubeni happened.’ – Thando Mgqolozana, author of A Man Who is Not a Man, Unimportance and Hear Me Alone

Sujets

Littérature Africaine

Littérature

Novela corta

South Africa

Nouvelle, Quebec

Nouvelle

Littérature

Littérature sud-africaine

Littérature Sud-Africaine

Informations

Publié par	Blackbird Books
Date de parution	01 août 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781928337263
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0749€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Nwelezelanga

Nwelezelanga
The Star Child
Unathi Magubeni

First published by Blackbird Books, 2016
Second, third and fourth impression 2016
Fourth impression 2017
593 Zone 4
Seshego
Polokwane 0742
South Africa
www.blackbirdbooks.africa
© Unathi Magubeni, 2016
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-928337-26-3
Also available in print.
Cover artwork © Sindiso Khumalo
See a complete list of Blackbird Books titles
at www.blackbirdbooks.africa

Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Acknowledgements

Part one

One
I have many names ; my mother calls me ‘Nwelezelanga’ because of my golden hair. Some call me ‘ Mhlophe ’ because of my fair, almost-ginger skin. One wise old woman of the tribe calls me ‘Mehlomadala’ because of my big round eyes that reflect oceans of untold stories. The village girls who like to taunt me just call me ‘that albino girl’.
I’m thirteen years old; however, that’s a distortion on its own. I’m young yet old; I’ve experienced the cycle of birth and death many more times than I care to count. I’ve donned and shredded many skin colours in my lifetime. I’ve lived the lives of many; the lives of the poor and the healers of Bantu and served the divine purpose in countless ways. I have also visited this world before as a baobab tree and stood tall for over a hundred years exuding all the wisdom in the known world. I’ve made short visits sometimes as a carefree butterfly showing off the innocence from beyond. One of my favourite incarnations was when I was a bird and would cross the oceans with my own kind, reflecting the endurance of the immortals. On occasion, I have visited this world in less glamorous roles such as in the form of a worker bee and worked all my waking life giving the world the sweet honey of my hard labour.
I spend most of my time suspended in the hills of my humble village. I watch the clouds, looking for messages from beyond. I watch them morph into countless symbols speaking the language of the gods. I struggle to decode some of the messages. I have to be patient; there are hidden secrets in the eternal knot of existence. Many think I’m crazy and find my favourite pastime an excuse for being lazy.
‘Uhlala njalo ugcakamele amalanga,’ they mock, calling me a ‘lethargic turd’.
‘She is crazy that one,’ the village women gossip with their eyes.
‘The heavens are not going to fall any time soon,’ the young girls my age tease.
They don’t know any better; I’ve tasted immortality and bathed in its deep ancient waters. I’ve swum aeons on end in the stream of eternal bliss. I have gone beyond all mortal emotions and painted the path in the unknown with colourless light. There are only stories of joy and profound peace in this foreign land; freedom is the essence of our existence in the world of the spirits.
I don’t have many friends and am an outcast of sorts; the situation is exacerbated by the fact that I do not attend school. I’m frowned upon by my peers. There is one old woman, Nomkhubulwana who is my friend. She is kind to me. She’s aged yet a dancing spirit of a child lights up her face. She tells me stories of the land; stories of growing up in the village of Dingilizwe. She comes with me up the hill sometimes, picking wild berries along the way. We have many things in common; we were both sent by the great spirit of Qamata to this land of the walking dead to satisfy earthly desires and pass messages from beyond. We have a purpose to serve; a divine responsibility to each one of us, children of the star.
Along the cycle of birth and death, I somehow got tired of the pitiful physical existence and begged the all-knowing one for a permanent residence in the world of the spirits and my wish was granted. I have spent many folds of lifetimes in the land of the holy ones before being born again in this lifetime. All the words and emotions would fall short to describe the profound serenity of the spirit world we call home. I can be silence, light or nothing in a few moments. I can be as carefree as the wind, defying all space and time with no birth in sight; we play games in multidimensional realities. The enlightened ones visit us for a while in the land of the divine before being summoned to earthly missions. We have fun knowing that the call to duty can fall at any moment.
My call came and I was ready to serve; for some strange reason I missed the confined and predictable world of the walking dead. It has its unique charms. The all-knowing one summoned me to listen to the prayers of the woman who would be my mother. She wept as she knelt on top of Mount Ntabankulu.
‘Bless me with a child, my lord, and I will be forever grateful,’ she cried. ‘What is the use of a wife if she can’t bear children?’
I felt her pain.
‘Grant me just one child, oh all-knowing Qamata, and I promise to give her all my love,’ she begged and prayed until her mouth was dry; I was born ten moons later.
The hut was dark and humid; my mother lay like a log on the reed mat, half-dazed after four hours of hard labour. The little clothing she wore was rugged and soaked with sweat. Birth is such a sharp shock even for me, the one who has been borne by women of different creeds.
‘You should get rid of this thing, Nokwakha ! ’
‘What?’ my mother gushed forward in astonishment.
‘Get rid of this thing this moment!’ the midwife screeched.
My mother sat upright, steaming with wild fury; a baffled look was written across her face as she stared with contempt at the old wrinkled woman.
‘This is a bad omen; you’ve given birth to an albino. This is the devil incarnate; get rid of this thing at once,’ she screamed.
‘This is my child!’ My mother snatched me from the midwife’ s arms.
‘We should drown this ghost of a child in the nearest river,’ the midwife whispered the words with much tenderness this time around. ‘The ancestors have warned me countless times to look out for an albino child who would be born in the first moon of spring,’ she trembled with fear.
‘This girl, I was told, would bring confusion that would lead to the demise of our tribe; she would bring nothing but illusion and we will all jump willingly down the mighty high cliffs of Zambezi to our deaths. The ancestors said she would make false promises to the whole tribe about receiving a gift of immortality in the everlasting life,’ the wide-eyed old woman narrated.
‘But this is my unknowing child.’ My mother’s maternal instinct was having none of it.
‘The departed ones told me that I would recognise her by the mysterious round hairy black birthmark on her left shoulder blade and I should snuff the life out of her on the spot.’
In an instant, my mother flipped me around to see the birthmark; she stared at it like a lost soul and words refused to come out of her mouth. A bolt of lightning outside induced a loud screech from the base of her gut. She cried like a woman who had just lost a child; buckets of rain fell at that moment and dark heavy clouds hovered in the sky.
‘We should get rid of this evil child,’ the midwife continued in her persuasion.
The mighty roar of the heavens induced fear in the two women and after some time my mother finally relented under the midwife’s spell and agreed to get rid of the unwanted child and so they plotted a plan of action moving forward. The midwife grabbed the little child by the right ankle and neatly wrapped my whole body with an old cloth and they left for the mighty Umfolozi River. They crawled in the thick tall grass to shy away from any prying eyes. The rain came pour ing down and gallons of water quickly filled the river. The wrinkled woman didn’t think twice about throwing me down the flowing river to my death; they returned home and never looked back.
A portal to the land of spirits momentarily opened up; a radiant luminous colourless light of emptiness spoke of blissful serenity and deep peace, calling me to the land of origins. I could hear the children of the star giggling and playing the games we used to play and for a moment I wished I was among them. The access to the spirit world opened very briefly; however, my attachment to the almighty purpose made me resist the call to be completely spirit. The two women didn’t know that I was under the direct protection of the all-knowing Qamata with a calling to serve. They didn’t know that I had one foot trusted in the land of the holy ones and the other in this contemptuous life suspended between birth and death.
I was rescued by a middle-aged woman, who found me on the banks of the flowing river. She had been fasting and praying for rain for nine days near the Mpelazwe waterfall. She had only asked for rain to nourish her dying crops but got far more than that. She took me to her home and tried to resuscitate me. She fed me different concoctions to bring me back to this world of form; I remained unconscious. I kept hearing the voices of angels; sons and daughters of the supreme; friendly faces of those I spent most of my time with. I could hear them laughing and making sounds so pure they made my heart melt and almost convinced me to answer their call; they were so near yet so far. I knew I had an earthly mission to serve; a call to honour the commands of the high one.
The two women thought that death was final; they didn’t know that it was merely a figment of their imagination. There is no end for a spirit. The soul is in a state of becoming; a continuous state of learning and development. It does not need the physical body to s