Mutwa was a storyteller (historian), painter, sculptor and author.
In his personal narratives, he wove African mythology, Zulu folklore and professed to have encounter meta-humans and extraterrestrial beings.
When he was alive he devoted most of his energy towards preserving African culture and challenging the tendency (by extension the status quo) to relegate African cultural practices and beliefs to myths and superstitions.
Both a beloved and controversial figure, Mutwa was the first to talk about chronic child sexual abuse in Catholic-run orphanages in Africa, as he was a survivor.
He also survived being kidnapped then brutally raped by a gang of miners when he was just 14-years-old.
It was the healings of his traditionalist grandfather that set Mutwa’s path to becoming the most popular Sangoma (traditional healer) in Zulu history.
Throughout his career, he gained respect as a curator of African artifacts and a spiritual leader in his country South Africa.
He had foreseen a number of historic events including the assassinations of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Hendrik Verwoerd and Chris Hani.
But he was modest about it all.
“I’m not special. There are men and women who came before me in this regard,” he once told a TV host when he was asked about his unusual gift for seeing into the crystal ball.
He had famously predicted the June 16 1976 student uprisings, but what’s not well-known is that he was gracious enough to reveal that there were other people who predicted the watershed event – peers and pupils who all lived in Soweto at the time.
Incidentally, all three were women – Lillian, Mateilari Teka and Dorcas Danisa.
He described the latter as “two of the best sangomas in the group of healers and diviners of which I am the ritual leader”.
In Let Not My Country Die (1986), he recounts Danisa’s vision in 1975.
“In the vision she saw the Virgin Mary holding a calendar in her hands, and telling her that death and conflict were coming to South Africa, and that when that happened she, Mrs Danisa, was to go out into the streets and try and save black children from getting killed. I, Credo Mutwa, was to assist her in my capacity as High Sanusi.
“It was because of this strange vision that on June 16, 1976, when the violence erupted in Soweto, Dorcas and I donned our best regalia and walked to Phefeni station where the rioting was fiercest, and tried to persuade school children to go home.
“We managed to persuade only 10 frightened youngsters to leave the place of flame and violence, and then walked back home with despairing and exhausted hearts; our mission having failed.”
But what Mutwa and his initiates believed was an act of goodwill for children would backfire tragically on him.
Some residents accused him of having advised the government to order the police to shoot the marching pupils.
His house in Diepkloof, Soweto, was stoned and burnt by angry youths.
However, his family managed to escape with their lives.
For a while they hid in the KwaZulu-Natal countryside.
However, the news of the government introducing the 30-year leasehold scheme for homeowners encouraged him to return to Soweto.
However, the situation remained tense, and for many nights the family was terrorised with bullet shots by unknown gunmen.
Though no one was fatally injured, the message was clear that they were no longer welcome in Soweto.
In 1978, a chance meeting with President Lucas Mangope would open a new chapter in his life.
The leader of the then recently declared independent homeland of Bophuthatswana invited him to settle in Mahikeng.
Here in the land of the Barolong people, he built another cultural museum on a pleasure resort named Lotlamoreng Dam.
Life History
Credo Vusamazulu Mutwa was born on July 21 1921 in Msinga, an area in the heartland of KwaZulu-Natal notorious for sporadic faction fights among local clans.
“From early childhood I grew accustomed to the sight of death in its most horrid and violent form,” he recalled.
While still an infant, he was baptised into the Roman Catholic Church at the behest of his father, a staunch Christian catechist, and was given the name Credo.
Credo is statement of faith in Latin that denotes a Christian belief in One God.
His mother, Nomabunu, was the daughter of Ziko Shezi, a royal counsellor and veteran of the Battle of Ulundi, the historic 1879 conflict with the British that ended the Anglo-Zulu Wars, and paved the way for British colonial domination in the region and other parts of southern Africa.
Because Mutwa’s mother, a Zulu traditionalist, refused to convert to his father’s religion, the couple separated shortly after his birth.
So he was raised by Shezi and initiated as his apprentice with the enviable task of carrying the revered muthiman’s medicine bags.
When he was barely seven, his father obtained custody of the boy against his mother’s wishes.
They settled on a white man’s farm in the Potchefstroom district in the then Western Transvaal.
It was in 1932 that he was first exposed to the brute force of white racism when his brother, Emmanuel, was whipped to death by the farm owner, his father’s employer.
In 1935 Credo’s father converted to the Church of Christ – Scientist.
It was founded in 1886 by Mary Baker Eddy, an American spiritual healer.
The sect forbade medicine as a treatment for the sick.
In this regard, the consultation of African healers was also prohibited.
The family eventually settled in Crown Mines, south of Johannesburg, where Mutwa senior found a job as a carpenter.
In 1943, he responded to the ancestral call to be trained as a sangoma after he was afflicted with a series of strange illnesses that Western-trained doctors did not understand.
He would prove to be a very successful sangoma and like his grandfather, he eventually achieved the status of Isanusi.
He reasoned that it was best to share the hidden wisdom of Africa with the rest of the world to forge a better understanding between different races and cultures.
Secondly, he felt that it was important to reveal the continent’s glorious past as the cradle of human civilisation.
He has accomplished these goals in a masterful way following the publication of his first and most celebrated work, Indaba, My Children in 1964.
Described by the Sunday Times as ‘a work of genius’, it’s an epic classic that incorporates history, legend, storytelling, poetry, art, folklore, and philosophy.
Since childhood Mutwa has demonstrated unusual talent for painting and sculpting.
His jobs included working at a pottery firm, and in 1954 he was employed at a curio shop in Johannesburg.
In Kenya, he was fascinated by the blacksmithing craftsmanship of the Gikuyu.
They smelt brass cartridge shell cases which had come out of the Mau-Mau anti-colonial war
He said this inspired the building of his first cultural village in Soweto which today is one of the township’s famous landmarks.
This is where his genius as a painter and sculptor was first exposed to the public.
In 1974, Credo obtained a piece of land on the Oppenheimer gardens in Soweto in order to create an African cultural village to preserve cultural heritage and his own teachings.
He created traditional dwellings imaginatively representing building patterns from across Africa, while human and mythological figures brought to life African folk-lore, beliefs and traditions as seen through his artistic vision.
At the time, as the locals were steeped in Christianity, they were suspicious of the cultural village.
Credo believed that the great unrest in Johannesburg and the popularisation of communism in the black struggle drew Africans away from their traditional roots.
Unlike most political activists, he actually supported a separation between white and black in order to preserve black traditional tribal customs and way of life.
In 1976, students partially burnt down the cultural village after he was misquoted on Afrikaans radio, as they saw the village promoting tribalism and separate development.
Parts of the village was burnt again in the mid-1980s during a strike against the West Rand city council.
A 1979 painting of an aeroplane plunging into New York’s Twin Towers is prophecy on canvas, testimony to the fact that he was indeed an exceptionally versatile creative spirit, a rare cultural treasure and a prophet who now belong to the ages.
Credo called himself a sanusi (common spelling isanuse) which is a type of Zulu diviner or sangoma.
The term stems from a more historic time and is not widely used today, even in a traditional setting.
Credo lived with his wife Virginia in Kuruman, where they ran a hospice clinic.
Credo Mutwa heralded as the “Father of Indigenous Knowledge” in South Africa was until March 25, 2021, the last living sangoma, or traditional Bantu healer, to undergo the thwasa – ancient sangoma training and initiation.
Sangoma
A sangoma is a diviner and seer, using gifts of spiritual sight, mediation with the ancestors and knowledge of herbal medicine and ritual to diagnose and heal disease.
Traditional healers are often ‘called’ to this path by their ancestors ‘through dreams and other significant experiences’ including illnesses and misfortune.
Following this intensive initiation process, Credo embarked on many journeys through African countries, including Swaziland, Lesotho and Kenya.
He wrote:
I was not travelling for enjoyment, however, I was travelling for knowledge … I came into contact with men and women of countries that I had not known before … I found myself amongst men and women possessing knowledge that was already ancient when the biblical Jesus Christ was born.
The pan-African nature of his training provided him with a vast knowledge of African folklore, mythology and culture which, he lamented, was dying.
He became adamant that he needed not only to preserve it, but to educate South Africans about this heritage, which is not taught in schools.
He wrote a play called uNosilimela, worked on a graphic novel, and created a website and two living museums – KwaKhaya LeNdaba in Soweto and Lotlamoreng in Mahikeng.
Here visitors can see some of his countless sculptures and artworks.
In many, there is a recurring figure of a woman, whom he called Ma in Indaba, My Children.
This is the depiction of the goddess of creation, known to the Zulu people as Nomkhubulwane.
He frequently exalted the spirit of women as life givers and spoke against the abuse of women.
With no formal training, his art became an expression of his wish to share the oral tales and symbols of traditional African spirituality.
Through these various works, he allowed people to trace their roots, philosophy and ubuntu bethu; the humanity of aBantu.
Ubuntu here refers to a specific humanity accessible only to aBantu; an assertion that foregrounds the African worldview.
At the time of his passing Credo received little financial gain from his writings as his royalties were owned by others, according to the Credo Mutwa Trust.
This was not his only challenge.
He acknowledged that in his writing about African spirituality, he was risking being called a traitor by his people for sharing its secrets.
In 1980, his son was brutally murdered and his wife was raped, after being unjustly accused of working with white men under apartheid.
With his work easily exploited by conspiracy theorists, he was at times ridiculed as a false prophet.
He was largely neglected as a cultural figure by the South African state.
To maintain his safety, he retired to the small town of Kuruman in the North West province.
uMkhulu was a revered sanusi, loosely translated as ‘one who lifts us up’. Isanusi, according uMkhulu VVO Mkhize of Umsamo Institute, is a healer who reveals that which is hidden, such as mysteries erased by history, and who tells us about the future.
Credo Mutwa Spoke About Africa’s Chitauri Aliens.
His journey into the world of Extraterrestials began after falling severely ill in his teenage years, and orthodox Western Medicine failing him, then his grandfather brought him back to health by taking him to recieve treatment from a Traditional African Healer.
The episode ignited a spiritual awakening, and at this point Baba Mutwa began to question many of the negative stereotypes and portrayals of African Spirituality perpetuated by Missionaries.
His grandfather instilled in him the belief that his illness was a sacred calling, which meant he was destined to become a Sangoma.
He subsequently went through and passed his intiation as an African Spiritual Healer which involved an intriguing incident where he describes an Alien abduction in the sacred mountains of Zimbabwe as part of his initiation.
The Chitauri Ancient Astronaut Aliens Of Africa
Baba Mutwa provides extraordinary insight into the History of Alien intervention in Africa.
He chronicles Africa’s most ancient times in which Africans did not use speech but instead used Telepathy to communicate with each other and nature.
According to Credo Mutwa, these Telepathic abilities were diminished when speech was introduced by a species of Reptilian Alien beings he calls the ‘Chitauri’ or ‘The Talkers’, who according to the Ancient teachings of African Mystics arrived to mine Gold in Southern Africa.
This Ancient Tradition also records how humans were altered by the Chitauri so they could use speech and learn to use the Technology brought by the Chitauri Aliens as labourers on the Chitauri Gold mines.
The most striking aspect of this tradition is how similar it is to the Annunaki Alien Ancient Astronaut Theory proposed by Zechariah Sitchin although there is no traceable contact between the African Mystic Tradition and the ancient Sumerians in recent history.
Baba Mutwa’s body of knowledge and wisdom on the history of Alien involvement in Africa is worth considering, particularly because it was passed onto him as part of his Spiritual Training and Initiation as an African Traditional Healer.
This means the idea or concept of Aliens is not foreign to African knowledge and understanding, which would not be surprising taking into account other traditions elsewhere in Africa such as that of Mali’s Ancient Dogon Tribe that also record Africa’s ancient encounter in the past with Extraterrestrial ‘wise Teachers’ from the Sirius Star system and the Akans of modern Ghana who were led by aliens and transmogrified gods to their present location 1,222 years ago.
Mutwa died at Kuruman Hospital in the Northern Cape hospital early on Wednesday, 25 March 2021 at age 98 following a period of ill health.
At the time of his death, Mutwa was living with his third wife Virginia in Kuruman, where he ran a clinic for people with Aids.
