South Africa, dusk
After the fire, my studio was gone and my livelihood was gone. I was uncertain of the next step.
A friend named Warrick invited me to a sweat lodge. Warrick was living in a shack on the slopes of Table Mountain. He had built the lodge himself, bamboo poles bent into a low dome and covered with old blankets, with a small fire on the slope of the mountain. Nothing fancy, only enough for five or six people to get in there together.
I had no idea what a sweat lodge was. I brought a bag with beers and meat for the fire. I had grown up cooking meat on the open fire out under the stars and drinking beer, and I was totally naive. It was not something anyone would bring to a sweat lodge, but I didn’t know I was going to such a sacred event.
Table Mountain, a dome of bamboo and old blankets
I didn’t have any deep experience of great heat inside the lodge, or any visions. Even so, it opened my mind to a new reality, and it changed my life.
When it was over, Warrick did a card reading for me with the sacred Sweat Lodge cards. He drew four cards: Niyan, the Spirit of Man; Pita, Fire; Skan, Motion; and Tob Tob, the Eight Directions of the wind. From that reading he chose to give me the name Niyan. In the Sweat Lodge cards, Niyan is the pathfinder, the forerunner of new ideas, the one who goes ahead of the tribe.
I carried that name for seventeen years, from 1993 until my friend Yawa Bane renamed me Nixiwaka in November 2010.
The next sweat lodge I attended, I built myself. It was at Rustlers Valley in 1995, and I ran it. I don’t know exactly how a man who brought beers and meat to his first ceremony became the one holding the space for others, but that is how it went, and from then on I never really stopped.
I learned by doing. I learned about the African tradition of the sweat hut, the I-sifutu, from the people of this continent. I means sacred, and sifutu means sweat ceremony.
Then in 1997 a Lakota medicine man came from the United States to Rustlers Valley. His name was Tim Sekeya. He ran two ten-day sweat lodge workshops, and I became his firekeeper, the one who tends the stones and feeds the fire. For those twenty days I watched and listened and worked, and the Native American way came together with what I had learned from the African tradition.
Since then I have built many lodges, in South Africa, in Brazil and in Costa Rica.
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