This website is the UNOFFICIAL website about Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa. Please take your time to read through this website, especially the biography section which is very detailed, and published in baba Credo’s own words. We established this Credo Mutwa website in 2004 by Ramon Thomas, a South African with a passion for history and education.
My reason for putting this website together is to consolidate and compile all the information about Credo Mutwa I find from across the Internet into one place. I met baba Mutwa in April 2008 and have spoken to him every few months since 2003 on the telephone. After meeting him, his wife and fellow Sangoma, Virginia Mutwa, gave me an autographed copy of their new book, Woman of Four Paths: The Strange Story of a Black Woman in South Africa.
You can also find out more about his work at the Credo Mutwa Cultural Village in Soweto.
Celebrating the life of Credo Mutwa in 2018
Early life
His father was a widower with three surviving children when he met his mother. His father was a builder and a Christian, and his mother was a young Zulu girl. Caught between Catholic missionaries on one hand, and a stubborn old Zulu warrior, Credo’s maternal grandfather, his parents had no choice but to separate. Credo Mutwa was born out of wedlock, which caused a great scandal in the village, and his mother was thrown out by her father. Later, she was taken in by one of her aunts.
He was subsequently raised by his father’s brother and was taken to the South Coast of Natal, near the northern bank of the Umkumazi River. He did not attend school until he was 14 years old. In 1935, his father found a building job in the old Transvaal province and the whole family relocated to where he was building. In 1937, he experienced a great shock and trauma when he was seized and sodomized by a gang of mineworkers outside a mine compound. After this, he was ill for a long time.
Where Christian doctors had failed, his grandfather, a man whom his father despised as a heathen and demon worshipper, helped him back to health. At this point, Credo began to question many of the things about his people that the missionaries would have them believe. “Were we Africans really a race of primitives who possessed no knowledge at all before the white man came to Africa?” he asked himself. His grandfather instilled in him the belief that his illness was a sacred sign that he was to become a shaman, a healer. He underwent initiation from one of his grandfather’s daughters, a young sangoma named Myrna.
Quote: Credo Mutwa: “I wish to appeal to the world. First, I am not a quack or a charlatan or a sensationalist. I am an old man who has seen much. I wish the world to know that there is a faint ray of hope that emanates from South Africa.”
This section contains a short autobiography of Credo Mutwa. It was originally published on a website which does not exist anymore. For a more detailed biography, go here.