Dancing with the Kalahari Shamans

Collection: Dance

This article is a transcript from an Interview that Ben Cole did with me after our transformative experience in the Kalahari Desert. Together with his wife Caroline Carey and our guide Caspar Brown, we were so fortunate to spend three weeks on a small grant from Coventry University. This conversation happened right after we left the village, and if you prefer to go straight to the video, you can see the 'otherworldly' inspiration in my eyes...

Not all Ben’s questions are audible so I’ve deleted some on the video, but included them here in the transcript.

What was your intention for this journey?

Basically I feel, in the West we’ve lost a lot of knowledge on how to be well. And my quest, if you like, was to find, in other cultures where they might still have that knowledge, find some inspiration that we can bring back to patients with chronic long-term conditions in terms of managing their health and well-being. 

What did you think that the doctors of Namibia were going to teach you?

I was aware very much, that it is part of their whole cosmology, the environment, their community, their way of looking at life. So I was, to be fair, already sceptic from the beginning how much we could find that we could translate back to western cultures. But what I was hoping to find was the mechanism of the dance. What is it, when people start shaking, start dancing , in community but perhaps also solo, what that would generate in terms of life force. 

So what was it like, going all the way to Namibia?

Very unknown. I’ve been to Africa a few times, but never this far South. So even arriving in Namibia was completely new, the landscape was new, the feel in the air was new. Then we traveled via Waterberg up to the North to Tsumkwe, which was the place we based ourselves around, visiting a few villages around there. It was just like a wide-open eyed journey for me. Like ‘what’s this, where am I, what’s happening here’?

And how was it to join the first dance?

It was interesting, I got a bit of stage fright when we finally organised the dance. It took a while to get all the healers lined up and the payment structures organised and stuff. When we finally got everything organised, it was like: ‘Oh my God, what am I going to wear, how am I going to move? Huuu how does this work?’

But actually I did a sort of calling, around lunch time. Casparo played some guitar music and I called on my spirit support, and really felt the spirits I work with come with me to dance. And again, it was like a journey into the unknown. 

The campfire was built. There was a lot of discussion where the campfire should be, where the dance would take place. So when it’s actually there, the fire is built, you’re fanning it, putting wood on the fire, the village is gathering. Looking out, the women are in a semi-circle, then there is the healers, then there is the fire, they get their healing force from the fire. And there were a lot of youngsters and people who didn’t actively take part in the dance but were very present for the ceremony, on the other side of the fire. It really felt like a well held container, in which everyone, whether they participated or didn’t participate, they really had a role, a presence.

What did you feel the doctors were doing while you were in the dance?

My sense was that the women started to generate through their songs, the power through which the doctors could start shaking. The shaking generated the power in themselves, the life force and vitality. There were different ways of raising the power, so the shaking was one, but also their connection with the fire, their connection to other healers, and the energy raised by other people who were dancing, by holding the hands of their wives that was really touching. So different ways the healers were gathering energy. When they had enough they would go to someone and touch them and heal them. And then I think they ran out at some point, and they had to replenish, shake again on their own or touch the fire again.

What was it like for you to step into that, having those twelve women focus on you, singing, and the doctors touching your forehead with their hands?

You raise a lot of different things there. I felt the women, it really touched me to be the focus of 12 people singing for you, for the group, but focused on you. And I really got that, that healing is a group thing. It’s not an individual thing as we often think in the West: ‘oh, I’m ill, I need to go sort myself away from the community and I can come back when I’m right again’. It’s really a collective thing, that really touched me.

And then, it was interesting, I’m used to shaking, but as Caroline said at some point, for us it’s often a shaking of letting go, letting go of something that’s ready to be released. And here it felt like a shaking to get the engine going, like a motor firing up. There were moments where I thought: ‘oh am I doing it right, am I shaking in the ‘correct’ way?’ And then I just let the thought go and let my body take over, that was another part to it. 

And then how the doctors touch you was interesting. They touched you on the sides, on the front, on the back, on the hips. They had this, I don’t know what it was made of, but something they prodded in your belly button, which hurt quite a lot, for a few days after actually, and I still don’t know what it physically did. Their explanation was that it aligned the arrows or the needles inside of my stomach. 

That was again a sort of curiosity of letting it happen, ‘okay, there is now some’… yeah it really felt like the energy of the elephants around us. So the healers were snorting, they were tapping your calves with their legs and it felt like the tusk going into different places in the body, and the head butt, in the back and in the front. Yeah, I felt like I was in a herd of elephants. 

Afterwards, how did it feel over the next day, how was your energy?

The day after I was so grumpy. I don’t know, I felt like, I don’t know what happened, but something happened, and I had a sore belly button for a few days. That did worry me a bit. I never knew my belly button could be that bruised.

From the first dance I don’t quite know how I felt, but the second time we danced I felt very soft and very aligned afterwards. So maybe it was also necessary to do it more than once, to get into the feel, to surrender to what’s happening. Maybe the first I was a bit too much on the alert, kind of like ‘what’s happening?’ I don’t know if that affected the type of healing. But I felt strange, a few days after that, while I felt really connected and organised and sorted after the second dance we did.

Let’s talk about the second dance, because it was different. There was somebody who was ill who was being healed as opposed to us healthy westerners, just describe how different the second dance was.

So, first of all, we were in a different village, but we were working with the same three healers. Two of them belonged to that village. The other one was from the previous village we danced who we brought in. My sense was that there was a much stronger support for the healers, as if the healers in the second village, no sorry, the people in the second village had more experience somehow, that they knew how to support the doctors. There were three or four other men who really kept a very keen eye on the doctors and if they only showed the slightest sign of going into trance, or rigid, or falling they would come up and really hold the doctor, make sure he didn’t fall in the fire or something. There were two other people who we later learned were in training to become doctors, and one older man who I think had been a doctor before. He didn’t participate in the healing, but he did participate in the shaking, which raised energy, or seemed to raise energy. So I think there was a lot more support for the healers. 

And then there were the two sick women actually, who really needed their attention and their support. It almost felt that that too, like the women singing and the doctors healing is connected, also the power that the healers had and the presence of someone who needed the healing, that also felt that it raised their power again. So there is an actual need for the dance to happen, for the ceremony to happen. There were ‘smaller’ healings happening in the first dance, I think, but this was really, really the focus of the evening. Again I felt that was really knitting together and addressing the balance of the village and the issues that were alive in the village at that time. So the woman that was really weak and in a lot of pain, the healers explained that she was carrying a lot of jealousy for the whole village, which made her ill. 

So do you think it’s a medical doctor, or do you think they are spiritual or emotional therapists, or osteopaths, or acupuncturists, what kind of medicine do you think this is?

Well I wouldn’t put any western labels on it, or other labels on it, but I feel it’s a shaking medicine, this one is definitely, not so much the Giraffe dance. But I feel it’s a combination of both spiritual and physical. I’m now getting a bit confused between the Giraffe and the Elephant dance.

Let’s talk about the Giraffe dance, because that was very different. How was that with Kuntabu (the healer)?

He is spoken of very well by everyone we met. There was this ‘wow, this is the last Giraffe-dance healer’. So I felt a lot of… he carries the torch, in a way, for that particular medicine. And as I understood, both the Elephant and the Giraffe dance are part of their mythology and the culture and I think, if I remember right, they were the animals that first became human, so it’s medicine that goes back a long, long time. And it feels very different to the Elephant dance. Basically it’s a circle of women, sat around the fire, around which the healers dance. And to me that, of the three dances we did, felt most like the community celebrating. There were little healings happening again, but there wasn’t an obviously ill person to receive the healing. It very much felt like raising the energy, again the exchange between men and women, women singing, men dancing mostly - although the women did join in later. That felt like the knitting together of the community at its strongest.

And I would like to say more about what you asked before, in terms of the spiritual or physical. I remember Kuntabu starting, when we asked him this question, he started to explain ‘well, we can cure stomach pain or headaches or if someone was ‘witched’’, they called it. So the ‘witched-thing’ is already in the more etherical, spiritual realm, but the others are very, properly, physical, physical ailments. Or the woman that, in the second elephant dance, she was very tired, she had a lot of pain, she couldn’t walk very well, those are very physical, but then again healing the jealousy of the culture that is more in emotional or maybe spiritual terms. So I think it’s a fusion of both. I was interested, we asked this question to various healers and what I understood was they can take away the cause of things through this type of dance but then sometimes it might be necessary to a western clinic to take away the results of it, or the pain, or the symptoms of it. In that way it was really working together somehow, the traditional and the modern western medicine.

What can we take away from this approach and use in the west?

Hello, (talking to a little bug), I love your red feet. I really have a sense of a palette, almost, of different colours or different tastes, which is the importance of community, the importance of looking after each other, the importance to know that when you’re ill it’s not just your burden to carry, it’s a collective thing. I’m really moved by what I’ve learned about the ancestors here and the way of looking at death and dying. In the west it’s often like the fear of dying alone, or the fear of being forgotten. In that sense, if we have a different way of looking at a continuation of life after death, in whatever form, I don’t know what kind of form, but parts of us live on in some way and are remembered, that it might help us accept our mortality and therefore make the burden of ill-health, not easier to carry but to give it a different place. So community, a different way of looking at living and dying, and the life-force of the shaking. I was touched, every time we asked the healers ‘what do we need to stay healthy’, is ‘dance every day’. I was really moved by that. I don’t think that we need to take this home and say ‘everyone needs the shaking medicine’, but I do think the message of, reinforcing the message of movement and exercise is good.

Yeah, it’s great to know that 40.000 year old religions see dance as the healthiest way. So is there something like the healthy shake? (This was an inside joke about the project title)

Yes, I still think it’s healthy to shake. And another thing I really understood in the very brief time we’ve been here is that everything, everything we do has an impact. For example, when the people here make a knife, that they do ceremony, I think five times the amount of time that it took to extract the materials from the tree, or from the ground for the metal or something. It isn’t just about taking, ‘oh, I buy the next thing, I want this, I buy it from a shop and I ‘have’ it’, it’s actually about the reciprocity of what has it taken to make this. You enter into relationship with the objects you have around you in your life as well. There is a different way of respecting them. I always remember, I spent a few weeks in the monastery of Thich Nhat Hahn in southern France and he said treat even the dishes as your friend. Treat them with respect - sorry I think there is a bug in my trousers - so the empty plate that has carried your food, thank it because there was food for you to eat this day. Wash the dishes with the same respect, so if the doorbell rings, say ‘sorry dishes, I will come back to you, I’ll just have to answer the door’, but there is a relationship between you and the dishes. One of the things I also like, what you call it, where the water disappears in the sink, the plug, where there is some food gathered, that’s the kind of ugh-thing to do at the end of the day, clean that and put it in the bin, but there is something that is left over, and there was food for me to eat, there was some rice left over, and I have that abundance in my life. So yes, the cultivation of gratitude, for food in the fridge, a roof over your house 

What happened in your body while dancing?

It’s still formulating in my head so I might need a bit of time, but it’s about the experiences in the body when dancing. It felt like the motor being fired up, the engine being fired up. But there were moments when the shake started from the hips, and I felt a vibration in the whole body but actually my torso was really still and calm. There was a moment where it felt like there was a real spaciousness inside, like I felt somehow hollow inside while connected to the whole, I don’t know, world around somehow and still the shaking went on and that was a really exquisite moment of stillness within the shaking. So I was really intrigued by that, and if that is what the doctors are getting at, do you know what I mean? So that happened in the first evening. And the second dance at Duinpos it was much easier to reach that place. And I felt there was only once, but I think, the healers, in that moment, put my hands on someone else. So I was a bit like ‘oh’. They recognised I was in another space, maybe that’s the space from which the healing happens. And what I’m curious about is, what are the ways, culturally, to get to that place, and if this is the only way to reach that place, which I don’t think it is, but it was nice to access it through this specific medicine on this specific land and starting to get to know that place. And I’m really curious to learn from other cultures as well, if healing happens from a similar place like that and then especially how dance triggers that, reaches that space.

Talk a bit more about what you mean by ‘that place’.

That space of shaking in stillness and that space of connection in that hollowness, that emptiness.

So there is a hollowing, an emptiness inside through the shaking, are we channeling something from our ancestry, what is there on another dimension than just shaking like animals shake to release stress. Do you get a sense of other dimensions?

It felt like, and that’s actually the first time I’ve ever experienced it like that, it was an emptying so that there was a real pure other energy coming through. I don’t know what type of energy, if you call it spirit, or divine, or god, or healing medicine. It was something… Almost like the spaciousness allowed that other substance to come in, and I think that’s the substance that allows the healing to happen. 

Is that what the Bushmen call n/om?

I don’t know if I’m the right person to say that after only three experiences, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that is what they’re talking about. That that’s the n/om.

The small print...

• The trip was made possible by the Early Career Research Grant I received from Coventry University . 

  Our team included:

• Ben Cole - interviewer, cinematographer and photographer of all above images. Find him on Instagram, or listen to him talk about the experience here.

• Caroline Carey - medicine woman, author and conscious dance teacher and founder of Middle Earth Medicine.

• Casparo Brown - permaculture specialist and community engagement. Find him on Facebook!