Conscious Conversations with Mmabatho Montse

Reparenting Your Inner Child. In this conversation we speak about healing the inner child, and how this work can be used to address the roots of internal conflict and struggle, unmet needs from childhood and the attachment wounds developed over time, and how these can be transformed into positive and productive behaviours helping us to thrive in our lives.

A touch of God is a natural therapy applied to heal the body, mind and spirit. In this conversation, we speak to Matthew Rademan, founder of Kahe Hands Massage Studios. Kahe Hands apply a Hawaiian healing approach to touch therapy which distinctively focuses on and recognises the inherent integrity of the whole person, facilitating healing for the mind, body, and spirit.

In this conversation, we speak to Bokka du Toit about Africa, its humility and wisdom. Bokka has spent decades of his life in film production, doing design work and building sacred temples in Africa. Through his spiritual journey, he has learned about African indigenous knowledge and spirituality, which is enriched by his long mentoring relationship with Baba Credo Mutwa.

Finding the meaning of connectedness through Oneness. In this conversation, we speak to QuingRa, founder of Eanna Temple of Light and Wisdom. We chat about the power of Oneness to gain insight into collective consciousness and how understanding principles of oneness can help us to live more profoundly in good health. Helping us see that everything in life is connected - our creativity and our challenges.

The soul of a family tree: Ancestors. In this conversation, we speak to Neo Mavuso Magabane, a strategy management consultant and Ngaka. We speak to Neo about Umsamo, a sacred place within a home where families and individuals communicate with their ancestors, an anchor for the bloodline, a place where everyone within the family has a place, a place of belonging.

How mindfulness can positively influence the quality of your life. In this conversation, we speak to Channelie van Staden, a spiritual guide and entrepreneur, about mindfulness. She speaks to us about the opportunity mindfulness provides us with, an opportunity to be aware, to be present, to pay attention, and that paying attention intentionally influences the nature of our life experiences...

Understanding your personal values helps you live an authentic, happy life. In this conversation, we speak to Lerato Gunguluza, a published author, life coach and entrepreneur about the importance of knowing and understanding our personal values in our pursuit for authentic and happier lives.

In this episode of Conscious Conversations with my sister Clara, we delved into the resilience required to live as a Black woman, committed to discovering her true identity and living her truth. This journey, often solitary, demands courage and a steadfast commitment to one's values. Yet, it is through this journey that we uncover the abundance and richness that the Divine offers.

In this conversation, Austen Smith and I explore ways to regain our creative energy and use our imagination to project our way into the reality we desire for ourselves and all Black communities. By reclaiming our ancestral wisdom, resilience, and veneration for the Earth, we can harness this creative force. The radical imagination entails stepping outside the confines of the now and into the expansiveness of what could be. It has been described as the ability to dream of possible futures and bring these possibilities back to the present to drive social transformation.

Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) have faced disproportionate levels of violence from state institutions, the persistent legacies of slavery and segregation, and economic injustice and displacement. For centuries, the cognitive, spiritual, emotional, and physical resources of BIPOC communities have been disproportionately depleted due to structural anti-Black racism and White supremacy. In this conversation, Rev. Diane Ford-Dessables and I reflect on hopes for collective recovery and restoration for Black communities. I continue to ask: what do freedom and liberation mean to you? What are you willing to do to ensure your sovereignty and that of future generations? What does revolution in the 21st century look like?

Settler colonialism in urban and rural landscapes in Africa has not only meant dispossession of land; it is also an ongoing system of power-use that has sought to homogenise, sterilise and decontextualise space and place. This linear way of thinking perpetuates the repression and genocide of peoples, and the exploitation of cultures, land and resources. It continues to alienate non-White people from their genealogical relations with nature and the non-visible world. While many African countries have enjoyed independence for decades, the quest for development, urbanisation, modernisation and globalisation has sustained and reproduced spatial inequality and exclusion for the majority of poor non-Whites. Decolonisation as a project has been undertaken in various ways by different actors, yet a modernist approach in urban and rural architectural design persists. It is rooted in the dominant culture, in the decontextualisation of people, space and time, undermining issues related to eco-diversity, transitional justice, restoration and diversity. This situation deeply reinforces hopelessness, fearfulness, a sense of scarcity and displacement, and an inability to imagine future cities where everyone belongs. In this conversation, we’ll reflect on our past and our hopes for a decolonised future, imagining future urban and rural places and spaces that are resilient, anticipatory, inclusive, autonomous and technologically disruptive.

Societies across the globe are built on a dominant culture – an oppressive, violent, hurtful, exploitative and destructive fear-based culture that thrives on inequalities in terms of gender, race, class and income. Dominance as a cultural construct has for centuries had a strong presence in institutions, influencing the socio-political agenda and landscape of societies. Fear as a concept, especially in relation to its opposite – love, is one of the most important and under-researched concepts of our time. Love is said to be a pattern that is life giving, regenerative, healthy and emancipatory, and fear is said to be a pattern of death, degeneration, dis-ease and enslavement. Fear-based conditioning is created when a person is hurt and does not heal that hurt, causing a disassociation from love. It’s a cause of great trauma. Fear is a dominant symptom in non-self-regulating, hurting and violent societies that have been subject to oppression and domination. In turn, like a virus, this fear infects the ideologies, myths, beliefs, values and socio-cultural context of societies. Fear and love are directly related, and so are fearlessness and liberation.

In seeking to have a deep understanding of indigenous-Black identities, human and non-human, one cannot help but think about the ramifications and the intersections of anti-Black racism, slavery, gender inequality, colonialism, erasure, of history, fractured identities, sovereignty, land dispossession and violence. These issues are entangled with the spiritual, social, political and economic embodiments and structures of the lives of Black people on the African continent and in the African diaspora, and are connected to one’s sense of place and displacement, appropriation and recovery, othering and belonging. While indigeneity in Africa and the Americas may be contested in different ways, the historical patterns of settler colonialism, cultural assimilation, identification of ancestral homelands and intensifying globalisation add to the complexity of one’s indigenous status. In this third episode of season 3 of the Conscious Conversations podcast with me, Mmabatho Montse, we speak to Greg McNeil about African Indigeneity and Sovereignty. We share our experiences and reflections about what being Black in Africa and America has meant, what we don’t know about our history and how we can capacitate ourselves to deal with the deception of colonisation and its handlers. Greg McNeil, a Ph.D. candidate at Southwestern College, Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a business owner (Coaches Korner & Empowerment Center of New Mexico, LLC), regenerative leader, healer, visionary, transdisciplinary scholar, Life Coach, Co-Podcast Creator – Art of Self Change, Performance Fitness Coach, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (with diagnostic privileges), United States Air Force veteran, hunter, and adventurer.

The world has been carved up by the great powers which have spiritually and economically dominated people, pushing them to strive for national dignity and nationhood. Ancestral wisdom and customs and traditional economics have been disrupted, and human energy and skills have been harnessed for the advantage of the conquerors and the disadvantage of the natural world. There are still people in the world today who regard anti-Black racism and White supremacy as race problems, a simple clash between Black and White. The world's wealthy few and their governments have promoted this narrative across the world, obscuring the real issues in the human crisis. This has greatly reduced the likelihood of the real problem being understood. These times we find ourselves in are no different to the times of the Bible, when men were downtrodden, with many consumed by despair – a time of moral collapse and social unrest. It’s a time when attempts are being made, in every facet of our lives, to debase God in man, and to set a limit on human beings, particularly those in bodies of colour, striving to serve their Creator to the best of their ability. It’s a time in which we perhaps should look more closely at the beauty and the sweetness of the Great Invitation and the Gift that lies within that invitation. In this conversation, I hope we can revive, restore and strengthen hope, faith and trust in the hearts and minds of our listeners.

Our vision for Season 3 is centred around people of colour in Africa and the Diaspora. People of colour continue to suffer from the effects of structural racism and White supremacy. This structural discrimination and the subsequent stigmatisation have inflicted multiple traumas on people of colour that have developed into degenerative, fear-based ways of existing, causing a disconnection between relatives, community, the land and ancestral wisdom. In this season’s Conscious Conversations, we hope to give listeners tools to increase their self-awareness, shift the beliefs they hold about themselves, shift their values to reflect a philosophy of Ubuntu, and find out how to use their resources to recover, transform and restore themselves, their families and their communities in a regenerative way that will nourish their whole being and strengthen their connection with our Source. This conversation is hosted by Thebe Montse. Thebe is a communication, media and marketing consultant with a depth of experience across public relations, brand communications, marketing, and advertising. Thebe’s worked with clients across the public and private sectors to deliver results for their businesses, brands, and communities. Thebe leads his own consultancy Endurance Africa and holds a BCom PPE degree from the University of Cape Town.

The African continent is rich with diverse cultures, indigenous knowledge systems, and technologies. Our culture involves our social behaviour and norms, our languages, knowledge, beliefs, traditions, arts, capacities, and habits. Over decades, we have seen the deliberate alienation and marginalization of African cultural values and traditions by the designs of colonialism and apartheid, which have resulted in the misrepresentation and disorientation of some of the most fundamental aspects of our African culture. In an era of rapidly changing technologies digital solutions become critical for the application of holistic and knowledge-based approaches to societal problems. In this conversation, we speak to Russel Hlongwane in an effort to identify the key touchpoints we can engage with in reclaiming and restoring our history and cultural heritage; finding pathways to expand our reach and digital presence, and preserving Africa's rich cultural heritage. Russel Hlongwane is a cultural producer based between Cape Town and Durban, South Africa. His work is located at the intersection of Heritage/Modernity and Culture/Tradition as they apply to black life on the continent and the diaspora. His said practice includes cultural research, film, creative producing, design theory, curatorship, writing and performance – often taking the form of installation. He has curated exhibitions and art platforms locally and abroad, and his artistic work has been shown extensively across Europe and Africa. His experimental film, Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud’ received the Jury Prize (2019) at the Sharjah Film Platform.

African people were uprooted from their long-standing indigenous agricultural way of life which involved maintaining a harmonious relationship between communities, nature, and traditional religious practices. These practices involved ceremonies, festivals, and rituals in alignment with the cycles of the seasons. Embodied, enacted, and reinforced in these traditions were sacred values communicated between communities and mother earth. The community rituals often included agricultural rituals designed to persuade the gods and ancestors to deliver rains, and successful harvests, and to guarantee healthy livestock. Through colonisation and urbanisation, African people were removed from their way of life, adversely affecting their ability to nurture and protect natural resources in order to ensure food production and sustainability at a local level. In this conversation with Dr Pama, we aim to gather insight into how the abandonment of African traditional religious practices among Africans has negatively impacted our abilities to connect with the earth, nurturing a symbiosis between communities, nature, and God. Dr Bonile Pama, known to many as Baba Songindaba, is an agricultural economist and a business strategist by training with an MSc Agric, MBL and PhD degrees.

Astrology in Africa, as in other societies, has for many years been considered a form of divination that involves forecasting earthly and human events through the observation and interpretation of the Sun, the Moon, the fixed stars, and other planets. According to ancient practices originating from Mesopotamia, astrology shaped the perceptions and particular practices of society; informing their understanding and experiences of the world. Astrology has for many centuries been considered an important form of intelligence, helping humanity know the truth, explaining cosmological alignments around the time of birth of people, and foretelling events, at times preventing negative foreseen events from taking place. Due to the marginalisation of peoples, and ancestral and societal trauma, much of this intelligence has been suppressed. As a result, many people suffer from low self-worth, esteem and disempowerment. In this conversation, we speak to Makhosi Maïlé Moon about how understanding astrology and one's personal astrological DNA can help individuals and communities heal, shifting their energies from powerlessness to self-empowerment. Maïlé Moon (Makhosi Ngonakame) is an Evolutionary Astrologer, Healer, and Musician. She has been working with cacao and sound as well as rose medicine for the past 8 years, living in between the Mayan lands of Guatemala and the mountains of Europe.

African people have for many years lived having to suppress who they were, whether it be through the expression of their languages, traditions (enforcement of Christianity), culture (dance, song, style)... simply, their way of Being. There exist deep connections between Black South Africans and Americans because of our shared long history of racial segregation and white supremacy. Where entire societies were structured against the Black community, which meant no economic, social, or cultural power. The cultural legacies of this history have influenced how the stories of black people have been portrayed in the media, which has often meant "being inferior" and unacceptable. While institutionalised racial segregation ended in 1964 in the United States of America, and in 1994 in South Africa - we see how media, ideology, and popular culture continue to portray Black people as inferior, with certain stereotypes that propagate controversial and misconstrued images of what it means to be Black. In this conversation, we speak to Joy Donnell about how we, as black people, can reframe the narrative around what it means to be black by telling our stories in an authentic way, ultimately redefining what it means to be black. Joy is a producer and writer dedicated to creating media that builds cultural legacy. She believes in owning your power and for Joy, power is owning your voice, image, narrative, influence and intentions. Joy’s work actively combines publicity, content strategy, and media to build legacy and expand awareness.

Family constellations as an area of research can be found in modern psychology and in the indigenous ancestral reverence practices of the Nguni people. Family constellations is therapy based on the belief that energy, both negative and positive, can be found in familial bonds and can manifest as patterns of mental health concerns, illness, and potentially destructive behaviours within families. In this conversation, we speak to Ryan Klette about how constellations can be applied as a key intervention in resolving issues around identity crisises, anxiety, and depression in individuals and communities.

Dr Baba Buntu is a Community Scholar and Decolonial Practitioner. He is also the founding director of eBukhosini Solutions, a people-centred company specializing in African-Centered Education. As a Pan-African educator, writer, researcher, mentor and counsellor, Baba Buntu has more than 30 years of experience in conceptualizing and implementing programs on cultural literacy, social/epistemic justice, innovative entrepreneurship, youth empowerment and indigenous knowledge – particularly suited for African applicability. Dr Buntu’s areas of expertise include research, training facilitation, counselling/therapeutic processes, and curriculum development. In 2010 he initiated the SHABAKA - MEN OF AFRICA; a platform for activity-based mentoring of Black Men in a process of self-knowledge, restoration and empowering their role within the African family and community. He mentors young, emerging leaders and has designed train-the-trainer programs for entrepreneurs and community organizations. Based in South Africa and working across the different provinces of the country Baba Buntu has had several international working engagements in parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas. His articles have appeared in academic journals and anthologies published in South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria, Norway, the UK, and the USA. He holds a Doctoral and a Masters Degree in Philosophy of Education from UNISA.

Quality education is said to promise highly developed and empowered individuals who can explore the peculiarities of their environment to obtain expertise and knowledge that will lead to innovation and advancement within a society. The word education is often referred to in the context of deliberate effort to equip the unequipped with facts, knowledge, skills and competencies that will enable them to function as adults in a specific society. For decades, education in Africa has been disseminated through different colonial entities, such as missionaries, merchants, and governments - each with their own purpose. While African countries have been liberated from colonial rule for many years, the legacies and biases of colonialism on the education systems and its sub-components such as the curriculum and research fields continue to influence local knowledge systems, philosophies and perspectives. In this conversation, we speak to Yandiswa Xhakaza about the relevance of local knowledge, culture and spirituality in reframing and implementing educational change in Africa to build a continent that is more representative of itself.

African culture is vast, vibrant and colourful. Africans are known for their warmth, vibrant culture, traditions, religions, food, art, dance, and music among many things. While it has been decades since African countries gained their independence from colonial rule and oppression, the legacies of colonisation continue to permeate society through different institutions and economic structures, which have had a major role in the unprogressive and unproductive ways and forms of being African people have taken up. In this conversation, we speak to Thebe Ikalafeng about the ties that continue to bind us as Africans and the ways in which we can be more deliberate in uniting the continent and its people, reimagining solutions that steer us into collective action, rebuilding an Africa alive with possibilities for all who live on it.