Forever in My Veins

This is the extraordinary autobiography of an award-winning filmmaker who grew up in South Africa and emigrated to Hollywood. It is a rollercoaster ride, and the main interest for readers of this journal will be his encounter with African shamans and healers following his diagnosis with a life-threatening illness in the late 1990s (his documentaries also include experiences around death). He subjects himself to major cathartic herbal enemas and a drumming ceremony (femba) that puts him in touch with his grandfather partly through a condition in his foot that resonates with the grandfather's health challenge when he was alive. The shaman is seemingly taken over by a wild beast and he seems to extract some kind of toxin from the author's diseased kidney and promptly vomits. He is to receive healing from his ancestors while at the same time helping his grandfather.

The next day, his friend PH astonishes him by saying that his grandfather had spoken to him and instructed him to find a walking stick. PH had carved one only two weeks before, commenting that he also needs a blue cloth and recommending him to find a signet ring – these items turn up as if miraculously and are to be used in his ritual meditation sessions. In the West, we have almost no regard for relating to our ancestors apart maybe from All Souls Day on November 2. This gives pause for thought as healing may be transgenerational and our ancestors may be looking after us without us being remotely aware of this. He then receives another remarkable herbal treatment that completely cures him and restores his energy levels. The shamans understand the intrinsic connectedness of the web or grid of life through space and time, and penetrate to depths largely ignored and denied by sophisticated modern science. We really need to find means of reconciling these complementary ways of knowing