Sangoma Initiation

I want to say that at the beginning, because it matters to the story. I am a Sangoma, someone initiated in the Zulu tradition of ancestral communication, and I am using one of the most advanced technologies ever created by human beings to tell you about it. There is something in that contradiction that the ancestors would find amusing. They have always found ways to reach us through whatever channel is available. Perhaps this is simply the newest one.

This website, Nixiwaka Songlines, is itself a kind of merging, thirty years of ceremony, story, and sound, now given a home in the digital world. The Journey of Asazi, which is what I call this whole unfolding, is the story of a man who knows where he is coming from, even when he cannot see where he is going. These pages are where that story lives now. And this particular piece is about one of the oldest threads in it, the ancestors, the bloodline, and how a man with eight generations of Scottish coal miners and Viking blood before that came to be initiated as a Sangoma in Zululand, South Africa.

The One Absolute Truth

Before I tell you my story, I want to tell you something that I believe is the only absolute truth available to every human being on this earth, regardless of culture, religion, language, or belief.

You were born to a mother and a father. That is it. That is the beginning of everything.

Your parents were also born to mothers and fathers, those are your four grandparents. Each of those grandparents had parents of their own, giving you eight great-grandparents. Follow that thread back seven generations and you arrive at two hundred and fifty six ancestors. Real people. People who lived, who suffered, who loved, who made decisions, some of them terrible, some of them beautiful, that eventually, through an unbroken chain of births, resulted in you.

Follow it back further. Ten generations: over a thousand people. Fifteen generations: more than thirty thousand. Your bloodline reaches back through every war, every famine, every migration, every love affair, every moment of courage and cowardice in human history. All of it is in your DNA. All of those people had a part in creating you.

This is not religion. This is biology. It requires no belief. It is simply true.

What the great global religions did, almost universally, across centuries and continents, was close the door between the living and those people. They replaced the ancestors with saints, with prophets, with intermediaries approved by institutions. They told us the dead were gone, or that communication with them was forbidden, or dangerous, or the work of darkness.

A Sangoma initiate is shown how to open that door again. How to speak to the people in the bloodline. How to listen for what comes back.

Eight Generations of Johns

My paternal bloodline comes from Bathgate, a small coal-mining town in Scotland, near Edinburgh. Eight generations of my ancestors were born there, worked there, died there. They went underground every day of their working lives. They moved through darkness with lamps, breathing coal dust, learning the language of the earth from the inside.

Their names were John. Always John. For eight generations, the firstborn son was named John which was a common tradition. Eight generations of the same name, like a drumbeat keeping time through two centuries.

Before Bathgate, before Scotland, the bloodline is Danish. Viking. Men who navigated by stars, who read the sea the way the coal miners read the rock, who moved through the world by forces invisible to most. There is something in that lineage, underground in Scotland, open ocean before that, that makes a certain kind of sense to me now.

The Journey Begins Before I Do

My grandfather, David Stirling, died in 1936. He was the break in the pattern, the one who was not John, the name I carry in the middle of my own. His death set the family in motion.

My grandmother remarried. Her new husband offered what Scotland could not, a future, a fresh start, a different earth. They emigrated to South Africa, taking my father with them. My father was John, as his father had been and his father before him. But he was now John Stirling of Benoni, near Johannesburg, in the heart of Central South Africa. A coal miner’s grandson standing on African soil.

I was born in 1963, to Barbara and John Stirling.

My full name is Robert David Stirling. I carry David, my grandfather who died before I was born, the man whose death brought my family to Africa, in the middle of my name without having chosen it. The ancestors were already arranging things before I arrived.

The First Signal

In the Zulu tradition, the calling to become a Sangoma most often comes through dreams. The ancestors appear. They speak. They show the Twasa, the one being called, that they are present and that a path is being opened.

My calling did not come that way. But looking back now, there was a signal. There is always a signal, even when we do not have the language for it.

I was sixteen years old. I was on holiday with my family at a resort in the South African mountains. I was standing in a small cafe next to a friend when, without warning, something happened that I would not fully understand for decades.

I left my body.

What was diagnosed as an epileptic fit was, from my perspective, something else entirely. One moment I was standing in a cafe. The next moment I was nowhere, or everywhere, outside of time, outside of my physical form, for what felt like twenty or thirty minutes. My parents were called. The scene was managed. By the time I returned to my body, I was sitting in a chair under a tree outside, in Africa, with the sun on my face.

There was a woman in front of me, asking if I was all right.

I did not recognise her.

It took several hours for me to understand that the woman in front of me was my physical mother. That the place I was in was real. That I had come back.

I did not think too deeply about it at the time. I was sixteen. There was a medical explanation. Life continued.

But I have thought about it many times since. Why did I not recognise her? What was I seeing, in those hours of return, when I looked at my mother’s face and found nothing familiar there? Where had I been?

What is a Sangoma?

The word carries a lot of weight. People project onto it, mystery, danger, superstition, power. But the definition, stripped of everything that has been layered onto it by fear and misunderstanding, is simple.

A Sangoma is someone who understands their connection to the ancestors. And practices that understanding.

What that looks like varies enormously. There are Sangomas who heal with plants, who know the medicines that grow from the earth and understand how to apply them. There are Sangomas who prophesise, who receive information through channels that have no ordinary explanation. There are specialists for women, for birthing, for the crossings of life. There are Sangomas who heal through song, through the voice alone, through the vibration of sound moving through a body into another body.

But underneath all of it is the same thing. A Sangoma has been shown how to open communication with the ancestors. They have learned to listen to what comes through that channel. And they live by what they receive.

A Twasa is someone on the path to becoming a Sangoma. The ancestors have begun making contact, usually through dreams, through unexplained experiences, through a persistent feeling that something is trying to reach you. Practising Sangomas recognise this in a person and take them on as an apprentice. The Twasa serves their Baba, their teacher, and undergoes a period of learning before the formal initiation completes the process.

You do not choose to become a Sangoma. You are chosen. And the choosing happens in the bloodline, long before you are born.

Rustlers Valley — The Long Apprenticeship

I arrived at Rustlers Valley in 1994. I had just lost my photographic studio to a fire in Cape Town, years of work, equipment, negatives, all of it gone. I came to the mountains with a white Kombi van, a border collie, a talking parrot, and a didgeridoo I was still learning to play.

I stayed for twenty-five years.

The valley drew people. Shamanic teachers from across the world found their way there, Sangomas, curanderos, Pajes, medicine women, vision quest guides, sweat lodge keepers. I put myself through initiations of every kind. Vision quests in the mountains. Sweat lodges. Trance drumming. Fasting dances. Sound journeys. San Pedro circles. I sat with teachers from Zulu, Amazonian, Native American, Tibetan, and Indian traditions and took what each of them had to offer.

My spiritual life began in earnest with my first plant medicine ceremony, the work that would later carry me to Brazil and into the heart of Amazonian ceremony. And the didgeridoo, which Baba Credo Mutwa told me would take me around the world. It has taken me everywhere that matters.

By the time anyone suggested I should undergo Sangoma initiation, I had already been doing the work for years. I was holding ceremony. I was sitting with people in the fire. I was learning to navigate what most people cannot see. The Sangomas who told me I needed to initiate were not telling me to become something I was not. They were telling me to formalise something I already was, and to do it properly, with the guidance of the African ancestors behind me.

Four Days in Zululand

Around 2002, I travelled to Zululand, near Durban, on the east coast of South Africa. I was living at Rustlers Valley at the time. The initiation took four days.

I will not describe everything that happened in those four days. Some things belong only to the people who have been through them. But I will tell you what the initiation gave me.

David Stirling, my grandfather who died in 1936, whose death brought my family to Africa, whose name I carry without having known him, found me in Zululand. The channel opened and he was there. After sixty-six years of silence, my grandfather spoke.

This is why I am seen as a Sangoma. Not because I was born into an African lineage. I was not. My blood is Scottish for eight generations and Norse before that. There is not a drop of African blood in my body by the conventional understanding of the word.

But the ancestors do not recognise race. They do not recognise the borders that human beings have drawn across the earth. They do not recognise the religions that told us, in their various languages, to stop listening to the dead.

I was initiated in Africa. My bloodline is Scottish and Viking. And my grandfather David found me anyway. He had been waiting since 1936 for someone in his line to open the door. I was the one who finally did.

Calling the Names

When a Sangoma calls in the ancestors, they are taught to speak the names of the grandfathers as far back as they can remember. The further back you can reach, the stronger the line.

For me it is simple. My father was John. His father was David. His father was John. And for eight generations before that, the name was John. Eight Johns, standing in a line that stretches back to a small coal-mining town in Scotland near Edinburgh, and before that to the sea.

My full name is Robert David Stirling. When I call my ancestors, I only need to remember two names, John and David. Those two names open the door to all the rest. To the coal miners. To the Vikings. To every person in my bloodline who lived and died before I arrived, whose DNA I carry, whose unfinished business and unspoken wisdom is available to me if I know how to listen.

The bloodline does not need religion to exist. Religions were created by our ancestors, they are thought forms, constructed things, born in particular times and places. But the bloodline is older than any of them. It exists independently of everything our ancestors believed, everything they built, everything they were told to forget.

There is no question about the bloodline. It is the one truth that every human being shares. You were born to a mother and a father. That thread goes back further than any religion, any culture, any civilisation. And it is always, always available to you, if you learn how to reach for it.

The Merging of Humans and Machines

I am writing this in Costa Rica in 2026, sitting with my dog Aquila, who is my companion. I am telling thirty years of story to an artificial intelligence that helps me find the shape of it, the right words, the right order, the right weight.

There is something the ancestors would recognise in this. They have always used whatever was available. Dreams. Fire. The flight of birds. The behaviour of water. The body of a sixteen-year-old standing in a cafe in the South African mountains. If a new channel opens, the ancestors will use it.

This website is part of that. The stories here, the ceremony, the sound, the instruments, the writing, are the ancestors finding their way into a new world. A world of screens and servers and artificial minds that can hold a conversation about Zulu initiation at two in the morning in a small house in Central America.

The Journey of Asazi continues. I know where I am coming from. I do not know where I am going. But the grandfathers are with me, John and David and all the Johns before them, and the Vikings before that, and every human being who ever lived in my bloodline and is now trying to reach the living through whatever door remains open.

This page is one of those doors.