The Calling – Part 4
Anele returned home that night, but everything felt different. The walls of her small room, once familiar, now seemed to hum with an unseen presence. The candlelight flickered in strange patterns, casting shadows that felt alive.
She sat on the floor, the clay figure still warm in her hands. The old fear crept in—the fear of being different, of stepping into a path she couldn’t fully understand. But deep within, another feeling had taken root: certainty.
The next morning, she found Gogo Thandi waiting outside, seated on a woven mat, grinding herbs with a stone. The scent of burning impepho filled the air.
“Today, we begin your training,” Gogo Thandi said without looking up.
Anele sat beside her, heart pounding. “Training for what?”
“To become what you were always meant to be,” the old woman said, handing her a bowl of ground herbs. “You have been called as a healer.”
Anele’s breath caught in her throat. A healer. A sangoma.
She had always admired those who carried the gift, who walked between worlds, but she had never imagined she was one of them.
“How do you know?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Gogo Thandi chuckled. “Because the ancestors do not waste time. You heard them, felt them. And now, you must learn to serve them.”
Anele felt a weight settle on her shoulders—heavy but not burdensome. It was the weight of responsibility, of destiny.
For weeks, she trained under Gogo Thandi’s watchful eye. She learned the meanings behind dreams, the songs that called the spirits, the rhythms of the drum that opened pathways between worlds. She spent hours in the river, learning to listen, to read the movements of the water, to understand the messages hidden in the ripples.
But it wasn’t just learning—it was remembering. Every lesson felt like something she had known before, buried deep in her bones.
Then came the test.
One evening, Gogo Thandi handed Anele a white cloth and a bundle of herbs. “Tomorrow, you will go alone to the sacred mountain. There, you will ask the ancestors for your name.”
Anele shivered. Her name? The one given by her parents had always felt incomplete, as if it belonged to only a part of her.
At sunrise, she set out, walking barefoot over the dry earth, the wind whispering around her. The journey was long, the path steep, but she didn’t stop.
At the mountain’s peak, she knelt, laid out the herbs, and closed her eyes.
“I am here,” she whispered, just as she had at the river. “What is my name?”
The wind stilled. The earth beneath her hummed. Then, a voice—clear as day, deep as the ocean—spoke.
And when Anele opened her eyes, she was no longer the woman who had begun the journey.
She had been named.
She had been claimed.
And now, her true work would begin.