Mganga wa Uganga wa Jadi

Description

Truth has never been an easy companion. It does not come to comfort nor to console. It comes to endure for generations. Men have turned their faces from it, hoping that ignoring it might reshape its burden. Yet truth does not yield. It stands where it was first spoken, unchanged by fear and unmoved by time.
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‎Among the ancient Bantu who journeyed toward the highlands of present-day Kenya, truth was always measured by what the ancestors revealed. They called upon Mulungu, the unseen power above all other gods even down to the present day, recently established religions of Christianity,Islam and Judaism. The voice of these ancient ancestors were carried through the coronated breath of their selected bloodline. Within that lineage rose a man named Chilumo, born of the Giriama people who spoke Ki-Giriama and whose homelands stretched across the burning sands north of Mombasa, deep in today’s Kilifi County.
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‎In the year 1769, that land was alive with stories of local spirits and traditional medicine, of men who could cross the thin line between the living and the ancestral. Among them, none stood as powerful and chosen as Chilumo. He was no longer just an ordinary herbalist. He was a Nganga Wa Dawa, a healer whose hands possessed both life, warnings and directions from the unseen. Yet his gifts ran deeper than this. He was also a Wagangan wa Mizimu, one who spoke with the spirits of the departed, and a Nganga wa Pepo, one who understood and commanded the winds of possession. Three paths bound in one man’s body, a rare union few would be born to bear.
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‎His shrine, the Kaya, stood within a sacred forest, guarded by an unseen presence, a gift that guided the ages of the Bantu. The roots there knew the names of those who had walked atop of the sacred ground before him, each of it’s medicines were bound with the duty to heal, to guard, and to reveal it’s properties to the selected few. From this lineage of traditional medicine and mysteries, Chilumo was called the Mganga wa Uganga wa Jadi, the healer of the ancients of days.
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‎But even sacred bloodlines come to meet the edge of it’s time. Chilumo’s son, Chango, was ambitious and was drawn to the world beyond his father’s herbs and incantations. His daughter, Sidi, possessed a unccany understanding that neither her father nor brother could name. The gift that had endured in a bloodline for many centuries trembled at the edge of possible extinction by the choice of one family heir.
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‎Before the family’s season changed, Chilumo called his son to the shrine and placed before him the Fingo, a sacred charm of protection. “When this is given to you,” he said, “you must bury it at the door of your home. It will guard this bloodline and those who come after you.”
‎But Chango did not see the importance of his father’s gesture. He saw only the burdens of traditional responsibilities and of a world he was not willing to choose, but choices always have consequences.
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‎So begins the story of Mganga wa Uganga wa Jadi. A tale of lineage, the mantle , and the fading light of a tradition that once was the umbilical cord that bound the living to the unseen. It is a story of what happens when the truth of who we are is no longer thought to be relevant.