Healer in the Borderlands: Positionality, Lineage, and the Calling of isiNtu

 

The question of what it means to be a healer in contemporary Southern Africa is inseparable from questions of lineage, belonging, and ancestral coherence. For those of us born out of wedlock, the matter is not abstract but profoundly personal. Our very lives are entangled with ancestral negotiations, contested rights, and the spiritual re-ordering of kinship. My own positioning as a healer must therefore be situated within this paradoxical space: a life born of fractured genealogies, yet consecrated through early initiation into the sacred work of ukwelapha kwesintu.

My maternal line carries both Sotho and Tswana ancestry. My mother herself was born out of wedlock, which meant that the full ritual authority over her life was retained by her maternal family. My maternal grandfather, though Sotho by origin, did not transmit ritual custodianship because he had not ritually integrated my mother into his lineage. Her mother’s family, Tswana by heritage, therefore bore the primary responsibility for her ancestral grounding. Already, then, one sees the way in which the fracture of wedlock birth reverberates across generations, reconfiguring custodianship in ways that both preserve continuity and expose vulnerabilities.

On my paternal side, the dislocations were even more pronounced. My father himself was born out of wedlock, to a Coloured mother and a Nguni father whom he never knew. Raised by a Coloured stepfather, his own life embodied the complexity of hybrid genealogies in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa: fractured belonging, occluded paternal ancestry, and the precarious stability of a lineage reordered by necessity rather than ritual. For him, the absence of a paternal line was not merely social but spiritual; it meant living without the full coherence of ancestral recognition, a wound that has haunted our bloodline.

Against this background, my own birth represents both a repetition of generational dislocation and an opportunity for ancestral correction. To be born of parents who themselves were born out of wedlock is to inherit a compounded fracture of lineage. From the standpoint of isiNtu, such circumstances demand heightened ritual vigilance: the maternal family assumes custodianship, yet the paternal presence lingers as an unresolved claim, a shadow that can disturb spiritual balance unless ritually reconciled. This precarious inheritance was neither chosen nor ignored; rather, it became the crucible through which my calling as a healer was forged.

I was initiated into ukwelapha kwesintu at the age of thirteen. To undergo initiation so young was not a matter of ambition but of survival. Symptoms that in a biomedical register might be categorised as psychosomatic or psychiatric were, within isiNtu, interpreted as ancestral summons: dreams, visions, and afflictions that signaled the presence of a calling. In many ways, the very fractures of my lineage heightened my susceptibility to ancestral encounter. If isiNtu teaches that misalignment breeds affliction, it also teaches that affliction is often the doorway to vocation. My early initiation thus marked not only my personal healing but also my conscription into the work of healing others who live at similar crossroads of lineage, rupture, and spiritual longing.

This process of initiation illuminated a powerful teaching about ancestral embodiment: that our grandmothers and grandfathers are not only remembered but carried on and within the body. It is often said that the grandmother from the maternal side rests upon the left shoulder, while the grandmother from the paternal side rests upon the right. The maternal grandfather stands behind us, guarding the past and its wisdom, while the paternal grandfather faces us in the front, guiding our forward path. To live with fractured lineages, then, is to live with a complicated arrangement of presences—sometimes heavy, sometimes silent, sometimes insistent. In my own journey, there have been moments when the weight of one shoulder has pressed harder than the other, when the silence of the paternal line in front has felt like both an absence and a provocation. Healing, for me, has meant learning to negotiate this uneven gathering of presences, to listen to the voices that come from behind and beside me, while also acknowledging the shadows of those who should have stood before me but could not.

From an epistemological perspective, my positionality unsettles the binaries of legitimacy and illegitimacy, purity and hybridity, tradition and modernity. Scholars of African religion such as Mbiti (1990) and Mkhize (2004) remind us that African personhood is always embedded in a web of kinship and ancestral relations. Yet, as more recent decolonial thinkers (e.g., Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Ratele, 2022) argue, colonial disruption has rendered such webs increasingly fragile, producing new forms of identity that must be lived in the “borderlands.” I inhabit precisely such a borderland. My healing practice emerges not from a single, uncontested lineage but from the negotiation of multiple ancestries—Sotho, Tswana, Nguni, and Coloured—each with its own silenced histories and unsettled claims.

This is not a weakness but a site of epistemic possibility. To heal from within fractured genealogies is to understand viscerally that wholeness is not given but crafted, not inherited but struggled for. It is to recognise that resilience is less about continuity than about the capacity to inhabit discontinuity without surrendering to despair. My practice as a traditional health scientist therefore draws on this intimate knowledge: that to guide others through ancestral misalignments, one must first have lived within them, negotiated them, and survived their disorientations.

In this sense, my biography and my vocation cannot be disentangled. To be a healer born out of wedlock is to embody both the problem and the solution. It is to carry, in my very bloodline, the tensions that isiNtu seeks to resolve through ritual, covenant, and ancestral realignment. And it is to testify that even in the midst of dislocated kinship, the ancestors still call, still consecrate, and still make healers of those whom society might deem illegitimate.

Ultimately, my story is not a deviation from isiNtu but a radical expression of its resilience. IsiNtu does not romanticise the fractures of wedlock births, yet it provides pathways for coherence and healing when those fractures occur. My life as a healer is evidence that these pathways remain open: that the ancestors do not abandon the dislocated, but rather summon them, heal them, and transform them into vessels for others. In this lies the paradoxical gift of being a healer born out of wedlock: I am not merely an inheritor of broken lineages but a restorer of ancestral coherence for myself, my family, and my community.