by Linda Tucker
Credo Mutwa is a sanusi, the highest rank among the African medicine people. But I soon realized that this extraordinary man had earned his enlightenment through indescribably relentless suffering, and nothing, apparently, could break that tragic pattern. Credo also grew up in the Apartheid regime. As a boy, he witnessed his uncle beaten to death in a vicious racially motivated assault by a white farmer. Credo experienced equally brutal treatment from his own people. Like many other young Zulu warriors, he went to work in the mines, but there he was brutally gang-raped by his fellow workers. This was the ultimate humiliation in Zulu culture, intended to destroy self-respect, pride, and any vestiges of manhood. He was in desperate need of support, but instead of receiving sympathy for his acute suffering, Credo was rejected by his direct family, and then his community, which had recently taken to Christianity and regarded Credo’s rape as his own sin. Even the Christian priest expelled him with the same reasoning. He barely survived the shame and humiliation. Clinging to life, Credo lapsed into a three-year illness that kept him bedridden, during which time his first shamanic extrasensory experiences and healing abilities started to manifest in earnest.
Things seemed to turn around when he finally found love. He was ready to commit to marriage. But then his beloved was gunned down in the streets during the infamous 1976 Sharpville Massacre by the Apartheid police. Bereft, Credo continued with his work as an indigenous healer and medicine man, misunderstood, scorned, and persecuted.
He was never a political figure. As a prophet and initiate under many African wisdom keepers, he upheld ancient knowledge ahead of his times. But higher wisdom was not good enough for the political saber rattling of the times. In the midst of South Africa’s violent struggle for independence, Credo’s private house and sacred temples were burned to the ground by a crowd of angry black youths demanding that Credo take sides in the political uprisings. Most devastating of all, his dearly beloved son, Innocent Mutwa, was murdered. Innocent was to be Credo’s successor, and he’d been lovingly initiated into the ways of lion shamanism by his father. His merciless slaying was a deliberate premeditated attempt to destroy Credo’s shamanic lion lineage. Credo’s first daughter died young, then his second. I was with him at the time he received the news that his wife, Cecilia, had been murdered while in the hospital. He showed me a shocking X-ray showing the knitting needle that had been driven into her gut and womb. But he refused to agree that any further action should be taken against the perpetrators. He seemed resigned to the continuation of a cursed existence that would affect not only him but also his loved ones. Credo himself was beaten and tortured by an incensed mob of his own people—some five hundred strong—and to save his life against all odds, the sanusi had to summon starforce—the blinding power of White Lion light—to dispel the hordes. Now in his eighties, Credo still bore scars of human brutality on his body. He had survived countless assassination attempts on his life, and it was little wonder that he continued to prophecy his own death, since it was now clear to me he wished for nothing more than to be relieved from a lifetime of suffering. The gods simply wouldn’t let him go.
Credo was also misled by people acting as agents, bodyguards, even publishers. He once signed with someone posing as a literary agent, giving away the right of ownership to all his written and spoken words, whether historical, current, or future. Though this crass deception wouldn’t stand up in any court, it revealed Credo’s vulnerability to such manipulation and his continued relentless victimization through similar acts. He informed me that much of his material had been taken by other parties and deliberately buried, as if they had vested interests in preventing truth and salvation from coming to light.
Over the years, the feelings I had on first meeting Credo—that somehow I’d known him for many lifetimes—grew to deep love and respect. But there was never a moment when I didn’t ache for him and the pain he’d had to endure without relief in order to fulfill his mission for humanity. It seemed to me he carried the karma of Africa on his shoulders. But when I came to know him and understand him better, I realized there were aspects of his own personal karma with which he apparently still had to deal. Understandably, he was a deeply troubled man, a man who no longer appeared to know friend from foe. It seemed to me this great prophet was more comfortable with dark, depraved, and dishonest treatment than loving kindness. He allowed the dishonest agents to control his work, the vultures to pick his brains, the assassination attempts on his life to go unchallenged. The greatest tragedy of all was that he recoiled from unconditional love because he feared it would evaporate before his eyes, and all he could trust was his repeated firsthand experience of interminable suffering. He was more comfortable in the presence of evil because it was familiar. Consequently, there were many times in visiting Credo when I had to share his space with dark entities, hosting intangible evil, because he wouldn’t expel them.
I spent several years studying with this great luminary, and returned time and time again from Timbavati, first to Soweto to receive his tutelage, and then to the base of the Magaliesberg Mountains in the Valley of the Kings, where he relocated. Historically, wherever he had set up camp and tried to establish his healing centers, decorated with colossal artworks that he himself had constructed of car parts, monumental pieces of wood, and glass-inlay concrete, Credo had been hunted down and forced to relocate. Repeatedly, his temples had been vandalized. But, for this period in his life, in the shadow of this great mountain, he seemed settled.
Very possibly because I had Maria Khosa’s blessing, Credo felt safe in sharing with me his knowledge of the White Lions. Perhaps too he felt he could trust my heart, where others had failed him. Over time, and through many return visits, Credo confirmed Maria’s belief that the White Lions hold a secret that could save humanity in this time of crisis. They are the guardians of the human soul, and they invite us to reawaken our own souls in order to protect our planet—and ourselves along with it. The question that haunted him most, as it did me, is why people were killing these rare and holy animals.
He said he himself had visited the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve, eager to witness with his own eyes a legendary White Lion in the flesh, but he learned to his grief that they were no more. He said he had demanded of the landowners, “Where are your lions? Where are the holy children of the sun god?” But he never received a straight answer. He quaked to think of the consequences to humanity if we continued to destroy God’s most sacred creatures.
As Credo and I worked together, day by day, this great man entrusted me with the secret knowledge about the stellar origins of the White Lions, with the instruction that I was to be the carrier of this knowledge to the world: the “enlightenment bearer.” His information from the oral records corroborated the findings to which I’d been led by Ingwavuma, my own spiritual lion guide, in my many excursions into national libraries. These revelations had to do with a great celestial master plan unfolding at this time—one of profound consequence for our precious planet and all life upon it. And more and more I came to see not only how important this knowledge was, but also how urgent.
It had been indicated to me through my searchings that the White Lion origins date back to a “creation moment” that took place on this planet, which coincided with specific stellar alignments. Credo corroborated this. He said that the White Lions originated from the star Sirius, and the Orion constellation (the lion-hero formation known as Matsieng), most specifically the central star of the belt of Orion known as Mbube, meaning “lion.” Most significant of all in the starmap on Earth was the red heartstar of the Leo constellation, Regulus, the epicenter of the mystery of the White Lions’ origins on Earth. Mind-boggling as these concepts were, I knew in my heart they stemmed from a profound truth, and my heart, along with my God-given instinct, was the only barometer I was prepared to trust now that I had committed to my true calling of White Lion Guardian.
Credo came to recognize me as the Warrior Lioness Queen, his own counterpart, as if from some distant p
ast life in which he and I were wed and united in one mission. It was deeply compelling but profoundly disconcerting when he summoned me to take up my spiritual armament once again.
He said, poignantly, that he was history while I was the future. And he called on me to sharpen my sword and assegaai (spear) of the spirit … to sharpen the gifts God gave me—that I might help liberate mankind from mental imprisonment. He also urged me to “sharpen my natural powers of prophecy,” that innate power I shared with the animals I so loved. According to Credo, the present day is the most important time for humanity—the “time of catastrophes and miracles.” I could feel his bitter frustration and loneliness at having been branded a fool despite his lifetime’s service to the truth. Yet underneath all the agony, I was relieved to make out a glimmer of hope when he reminded me that “a prophecy does not have to be fulfilled. It only comes about if we are blinded into believing that we can do nothing about these warnings.”
Upon receiving this wisdom, I asked humankind’s oldest, most soul-searching question: “Can we humans control our destinies?”
And he replied, “Of course we can.”
Before long, I came to agree. This is the truth that the White Lion messengers bring us. We should not forget that we as individuals and as humankind can make a positive difference and thereby determine our future.
Credo had been subjected to deeply awe-inspiring initiations, in the time-honored tradition of lion shamanism. Buried up to his neck in sand and left out in the open bushveld, he was left vulnerable, with lions and other predators free to come to sniff at his exposed head. Had he shown fear, he would not have survived the ordeal. He held his faith, though, and the predators left him be. This was the same story as the tales of Daniel and the lion, and Androcles and the lion. The role of the lion shaman is to trust his lionheart and befriend the lion, thereby gaining the support of Nature’s most powerful creature.
It was the same lesson I’d come to learn through integrating my terrifying dream experience into real life. Clearly, this lifetime was not the first time I’d been required to shoulder the lionhearted responsibility of being the White Lion’s guardian. Many of Credo’s initiations seemed familiar to me as I started to access my own residual memories dating back to Egyptian times, and even further back to what seemed the earliest times on Earth. For this reason, Maria informed me that I would not be required to undertake all the same techniques as Credo’s in my present life. According to her, I had passed these initiations in previous lives.
Still, there were other initiations that Maria shared with me, which were less onerous than Credo’s and more celebratory, but dangerous nonetheless. One ritual entailed laying out stone crystals she and I found embedded in the Timbavati soil so as to create a circle formation, with four axes pointing to the cardinal points: north, south, east, and west. I was required to spend the whole night lying in the center of this circle, alone, under the stars, with the elephants silently passing by, like massive shadowy presences, and a male leopard rasping in the near undergrowth. Somehow, in the middle of that sacred circle, in the middle of the bushveld, under the limitless African skies, I felt completely and utterly protected. I feared for nothing. I knew that I was on the side of Nature, and Nature was on my side. Maria’s two simple rules—love and respect—held sway. I had no reason to doubt this timeless wisdom for a moment. It was these gentle, loving initiations from ancestral times that would equip me for the most challenging obstacles that lay ahead, not with regard to Nature, but to humans.
During my apprenticeship, there was one unforgettable occasion when I traveled from Timbavati together with Maria in order to spend the whole day and evening with Credo. It was his eightieth birthday, and we laid out eighty candles in sandbags in his healing garden among his monolithic stone sculptures and lit these lights to glimmer under the stars. Being with Credo, the occasion was more somber than festive. I observed it was important for him and Maria to have time together, and much was shared between them of an intensely private nature that I took care not to impose on. I had no way of knowing that this would be the last time they would see each other. Later that night, Credo summoned me and took the opportunity to forewarn me that my long-term battle to save the White Lions would see casualties along the way, and I shuddered, knowing that he was unlikely to be wrong.
The next day, I returned with Maria to Timbavati, feeling burdened rather than uplifted by Credo’s wisdom. One evening, shortly afterward, I was delighted to be invited out on a game drive by a friend who owned a guest lodge in the region, only to overhear game rangers say that Ingwavuma had been marked as the next trophy. Apparently, a photographic identikit had already been made up on him, as if he were a bandit to be hunted down for bounty. Immediately, Credo’s words about casualties came back to haunt me. In my newly appointed vocation of White Lion Guardian, I found myself at odds with Timbavati’s mercenary trophy-hunting policies like never before. Knowing Ingwavuma to be a winged lion of God returned to Earth to protect humankind at a time of ecological and psychological crisis, and to guard the higher plan of humanity at this time, I agonized over my impossible task.
If the White Lions are the guardians of the human soul, as Maria and other great lion shamans of Africa had taught me, then to kill the father of the future White Lions for money is contemptuously disrespectful not only of Mother Nature, but also of our own destiny. The only appropriate response to Mother Nature, with all her miracles of creation and wonderment, is one of loving awe. Instead, the ignorance and crude materialism of placing a price on the head of her most precious creature is a grim index of just how degraded our value system and consumer culture has become. It was clear to me that devaluing Mother Nature in this way could bring about the most serious consequences.
Of all the lions in Timbavati, why my lion? Why any lion?
Horrified, my first approach was to assess any immediate practical action I could take. I had the option of approaching Timbavati’s executive committee and making a plea for my lion’s life, but I knew they’d never accept my rationale about the spiritual importance of the White Lions, let alone my belief that Ingwavuma was carrying the secret code. What proof did I have? As to my unlikely claim that Ingwavuma was my own spirit guide and guardian, they would dismiss me as insane and show me the door. What other measures could I take? It struck me that I could have an urgent court interdict served to prohibit the hunt. But trophy hunting in Timbavati Private Nature Reserve is legal in South Africa, so I had no case. My best strategy would be to approach the landowners directly, singly and one on one, appealing to their hearts and conscience. Timbavati Private Nature Reserve was owned by some fifty-nine private titleholders who had combined their properties into one centrally managed conservancy, almost all of whom lived elsewhere in South Africa and abroad, not on site. Those individuals whom I knew stayed permanently on the reserve were vehemently pro-hunting, so it would have been detrimental to ask them to intervene. I had no doubt there were other landowners who were morally upstanding citizens, and who would have been appalled to learn of a hunt of the proud male who commanded the females of several prides in these territories—a lion that these very landowners must have enjoyed viewing in all his majesty many times over the years. And why? To raise money for the reserve that could equally be raised through the many wealthy landowners reaching into their own pockets for a joint contribution. These were the people to whom I would appeal. It was imperative that I access their names and addresses, even if timing and resources made it impossible to travel and meet with them in person.
Without explaining my reasons, I immediately made a courtesy call to the warden, requesting the landowners’ names and addresses, but despite my desperate pleas, he was absolutely not divulging. After this failed attempt, and with a sense of rising panic, I was left weighing my options on a scale that was tipping dangerously toward disaster.
Among the techniques of lion shamanism that Credo had shared with me during my apprenticeship was his method of prote
cting lions from being hunted. He told me that while visiting the Timbavati Private Nature Reserve some years back, he’d been angered to discover that the dominant lion was due to be trophy-hunted. In order to protect this magnificent beast from being shot as a trophy, Credo had cast a very powerful spell. He then publicly announced that he’d placed a curse not only on the trophy hunter but the trophy hunter’s entire bloodline: proclaiming that “anyone who shoots this lion would be killed by his own bullet—and his family blighted unto the sixteenth generation.”
Despite all attempts to discredit him, Credo Mutwa still commanded such suspicion and awe in South Africa’s white and black communities that word soon got around the bush telegraph, and the hunt was immediately called off. In recalling his success, Credo informed me with some amusement how the gung-ho trophy hunter packed himself off back to the States with his tail between his legs. It was a brilliant scheme, and I might even have remembered Credo’s account with humor if my present situation weren’t so critically serious.
Could I summon the ways of the wizard to sabotage this plan? True, Credo’s method had worked successfully. But what if the trophy hunter had failed to take Credo’s curse seriously? What if he’d gone ahead and shot his prize, only to meet with some indescribably gory death when his own gun was turned against himself—by accident, or through murder? Much as I detested the actions of such an uncouth individual, could I live with myself for bringing about his bloody end, as well as the demise of his whole progeny? My answer was that I couldn’t.
I decided to track down Maria to seek her urgent intervention. Returning to her village, I felt sickened, as if I’d unearthed a plot to murder my own father. I felt desperate and powerless, having failed to identify any further practical steps toward a solution. But now that I had returned to Timbavati’s Lion Queen, there was one last recourse open to me: to apply the enlightened principles that Maria herself had taught me in order to place a prayer of protection on my dearly beloved lion.