Scarborough, Cape Peninsula, 1993
After the fire, I was camping in my white Kombi.
A friend had offered me space on their farmland outside Scarborough, on the Cape Peninsula, where a festival was taking shape, something they were calling the “Summer of Love”. I had my tent, and outside it, I was carving a wooden stump into my first djembé drum. It was slow, absorbing work. I had lost my studio. I was, in the most literal sense, starting from scratch.
Paul Henderson was renting a house on the same farm, and that is how I met him, while the festival was being prepared.
He invited me to come and see his home. So the next day I went.
What I found was not what I expected. Paul and his wife lived in a small room emptied almost entirely of furniture. A few possessions. Some sleeping mats. And in the corner, drums, didgeridoos. They had stripped life back to what mattered.
They invited me to sit down. Paul told me he was a shaman. I didn’t know what that was. Not really. The word existed somewhere in my vocabulary but it had no weight yet, no meaning.
He took some smudge, dried herbs bound together, and walked the room slowly, letting the smoke move into the corners, along the walls, across the mats we would lie on chanting as he did so. He didn’t explain this.
We lay down. Paul began.
He sang. He played bowls and chimes and flutes. He played the didgeridoo. The sounds layered and shifted and after a while, I stopped being able to tell where one instrument ended and another began, or where the music ended and something else started. What happened inside that journey I cannot fully tell you. I left. Where I went, I don’t know. Three hours passed like a breath.
When I opened my eyes the room was dim. My friend lay beside me. The mats were warm. The drums and didgeridoos were still in their corner. Paul and his wife were gone.
They had left us in their home. Door unlocked. Every possession within reach. Just gone, to visit someone, to do whatever the rest of their day required. I lay there for a moment trying to understand what kind of person does that.
A year and a half later I saw Paul again at a festival at Rustlers Valley, over Easter. We didn’t speak at length. But I saw him. A few weeks after that, Paul Henderson fell from the side of Table Mountain and died. I don’t know the details of how it happened.
His wife reached out. She was giving away some of his tools, the instruments he had used to make drums and didgeridoos. She gave me one of his didgeridoos. She gave me his djembé drum.
There was no clear reason for this. Paul and I had not been close. We had spent one afternoon together in a near-empty room while he took me somewhere I couldn’t explain. But she looked at me and she knew. She said it was very auspicious that I played the didgeridoo very much like Paul used to before his death. The instruments needed to go somewhere they would be understood.
I held those tools for many, many years. They became the beginning of my own sound journeys. My own shamanic work.
I still didn’t know what a shaman was, not properly. But I am learning more in every moment on this red road.
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