Ultimately, everyone is on their own journey kwantu

“Man, jy vra te blerrie veel,” my father shouts over his shoulder, trying to keep his gaze on the road as he drives.

I am around 10 years old, sitting in the back of his ’80s Datsun, chocolate-coloured with leather seats that stick to your thighs in the summer heat. His “you ask to many bloody questions” is a refrain I have become used to from him. 

Sometimes, I like to believe my only spiritual gift is an insatiable sense of curiosity; everything else is a byproduct. Questions have, in many respects, been my guideposts in my spiritual journey. While some people generally treat having questions as a flaw, I see them as opportunities, keys that unlock unknown worlds.

This drive led me to start my podcast four years ago. I called it The Journey Kwantu. To me, Kwantu means home. I planned to follow the questions that would, hopefully, lead me to my spiritual home.

Over the years, I have interviewed many insightful healers, thought leaders and ordinary people, and as we explored questions around African spirituality and identity, it dawned on me that questions themselves reflect the level of understanding of the questioner.  I began to get a sense that many of my conversations would inevitably skim the surface of many topics because the reality was that I did not have a foundational understanding of either spirituality or culture.

This became the premise of Journey Kwantu, the book. I wanted to peel back all the layers of assumptions, social media content and the street corner culture that made up so much of my upbringing.  I wanted to take everything I thought I knew, throw it out the window, and start to lay a firmer foundation based on deep research and well-thought-out frameworks about how we, as a people, came to believe what we believe and practice today.

Where did it all start? How far back can we trace it? How did it evolve to become what it is? I wanted to tackle everyday questions that hinder us from having deeper conversations.

The process would take over a year of trying to balance a full-time job, a family, waking up every day at 4am and sleeping at midnight.

At some point, when you write a book, you begin to become acutely aware of your annoyance and disdain for yourself. As the winter chill bites — and you are buried under a blanket, hunched over on your desk, forcing yourself to type one regretful word after another — you start trying to come up with reasons why it would be sensible to quit the whole saga.

I mean, I wouldn’t want to disappoint my old man.

But the seasons change, the sun peeks through the blinds, and you are reminded that the work will outlive all your gripes, and the questions that you have wrestled with will, to some, be answers they have been praying for because, ultimately, everyone is on their own journey kwantu.

Journey Kwantu: Exploring African Spirituality and Identity by Vusimzi Ngxande is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.