Click here toNiall Campbell is also known by his traditional name Phokojwe (The Jackal) and is traditional doctor nyanga (medicine man) and a Ngaka ua diKoma, a Doctor of the Law. He has also been the subject of numerous documentary films and interviews and is widely regarded as one of the top experts in Natural Lore and Ancestral work. Along with his brother Colin he works with the wisdom traditions of Southern Africa, specifically those that are based on our relationships with the ancestors and spirits of nature and African knowledge systems. The below article is a chapter in the book The Other Side: Journeys into Mysticism, Magic and Near Death by Sarah Bullen (published 2024 Johnathan Ball Publishers). ******** There are many books written about him, or ones he features in and perhaps one of the most celebrated is the book by award winning, internationally published journalist Sylvia Vollenhoven titled Keeper of the Kumm Ancestral Longing and Belonging of a Boesmankind. In the book she details her work with Niall as her sangoma guide in which he takes her out of a long, nameless illness though process of working with her long-ago ancestor, //Kabbo. He works with clients from all over the world, many who travel to his home in Botswana or Cape Town to work with him in deeper immersions in nature, for men’s initiations and he works with both traditional and urban people to re-establish some of the deep understandings of ancestors and nature. For many years he was widely known as a doctor of initiation up in the bush of Botswana, taking people through the sangoma training and initiation process of twasa. His work with the indigenous communities and in the wilderness started as a child when he would take lengthy trips with his father into the desert and deep into the Tsodilo Hills in North-western Botswana. His father Alec Campbell was a famous and influential figure in the history of Botswana. He ran the Department of Wildlife and National Parks and was its director for several years, help to found both the Botswana National Museum and the Botswana Society. He published nearly 100 articles, books and reports and was widely regarded as an expert on minority and indigenous issues in Botswana, especially those concerning the San. Alec spent a lot of time in the bush, and Niall and his older brother Colin went on trips with him. Niall was fluent in several of the local languages and grew up with the herd boys on his farm and in the surrounding areas. But from the age of nine, Niall was plagued by strange and vivid dreams. It was the start of a run of bad behaviour. He hated school and was in endless trouble[GM1] there, he was also being kept awake by vivid dreams, visions and petit mal seizures. When he was 12 he was walking alone in the wild when he was gored by a bushbuck on his farm. In the sudden attack the buck’s lethal horns ripped his abdomen open, perforated a bowel and put him in hospital with a lengthy recovery. His father was a personal friend of the Mbukushu and Ju/'hoansi (San) residents at Tsodilo and on his next long trip he took Niall to his friends for a healing dance to find out what was causing these troubles. The cause of the trouble with Niall, said Old Man D/ao, was the bush ancestor, the one called Mbwawa or Shimbu, the jackal. Old Samotjao was adamant. The Basarwa could not cure this affliction. Only the Hambukushu knew how. There he was initiated as a medium for nature spirits of the type which inhabit hills and caves. These spirits, appearing in the form of predatory or carnivorous animals play an important role in traditional society by regulating the interaction between humans and nature. Mr Samtjao Mareka of the Hambukushu people conducted the initiation. “Maybe it was just the way of my teachers, or maybe it was the way of traditional culture in the 1980s, I’m not sure. There wasn’t much more explanation than the simple statement, “ke Badimo” “ It’s the Ancestors.” Niall and his brother Colin spent a lot of time at Tsodilo. This was a region his father particularly loved and where he spent large amounts of time working with him in the land. In August each year the government Landcruiser and their red Toyota Hilux would be loaded to the brim with everything that was needed for a three-week excursion. His father would be busy with his work at the Museum, archaeology, anthropology, and later, documenting Tsodilo’s rock art. Niall would go as a general helper on the digs or as an interpreter. But a lot of the time was spent with Samotjao, asking endless questions, hearing endless stories of the hills, the animals and the Badimo (ancestors) who lived in the bush. When he was 14 Niall became apprenticed to Hosea Mashudu Chaoke, a Venda/Shangaan traditional healer from Zimbabwe. He spent five years learning diagnostic divination and treatment from him. Learning to be a traditional doctor was not how he expected to spend most of his teenage years. Living and working in the bush and learning ‘doctoring’ made him different from his peers at school. “Under my shirt there were beads and amulets. And in the bottom of my rucksack there was a little tin of “emergency” herbal medicine. He learned divination and herbal medicines,sickness, treatment and ritual. He was later to go through lebollo, now called men’s initiation. “I learned secret things, and things that concerned Badimo, the ancestors. But I also learned a huge amount about nature, the bush, animals and plants. More than anything, I learned how culture is shaped by natural environment, and what beauty there is in experiencing people connecting deeply with the many layers of nature.” At the same time of his training Niall fell in love with a girl at his school. But not long into their teenage love affair her family left and moved to another country. They kept a telephone relationship going but that was to end. “Her father told me that she would not be coming to the phone anymore and I must stop calling her. That was the first time that I started to really know what depression was all about. I was filled with heartache and pain and suffering. I see that kind of as the beginning of a particular spiral into something.” The spiral continued through his high school years as his training progressed. At the same time his teacher Madala Chauke moved away. Niall had become a traditional healer already and his visits to him had become fewer after the five years of training he had done with him. But the move meant it was too far for Niall to walk for visits and they tailed off. The teacher was also ill and finally, his liver had stopped working and he died not long after his move. Niall had several clients at the time, but he wasn’t that interested in his traditional healing path at that time. He didn't do much of the practice and he would only see [GM2] his clients if they asked. “ It was just something there in the background and I just wasn't that into it. Nothing was important to me at that time. I didn't really have any interest in anything.” He found himself increasingly hanging out with some people who were living a very fast lifestyle. They drank a lot of alcohol took a lot of drugs and got into trouble regularly. When high school ended his school friends moved off to university. Niall didn't get in, and that was not unexpected for me. Instead he drifted into doing odd jobs with a friend in Gabarone. [GM3] “We could both weld, and fix things, having both grown up on farms. By that time I was depressed angry unhappy and didn't believe that there was anything good going to happen with my life.” So he stayed with those friends as they had a similar outlook. They hung around together getting drunk most of the time. Eventually he got a job in a factory. “I put on a dark green overall and a pair of gumboots every day and I sat and attended to a machine, and I smoked cigarettes. I got a paycheck at the end of the month, and would blow the paycheck in the first two week, mostly on alchohol.” “My loser friends were doing loser things out there in the world and we came together when we had money, and we drank it.” “I felt I looked back on that time of my life and there's a grayness. I see all the imagery as if it's an overcast day there's nothing bright, there's nothing sunny. I remember a lot of depression and frustration. But you know frustration has a certain energy to it. I didn't have much energy. I wasn't motivated. I wasn't doing anything.” He was caught in this lifestyle for the next few years from high school until 1994 when he was 24. All his other school friends had now left university and were moving up in the world and he was caught in the same life. Everything was about to change that year. It was the long weekend of Easter, and all his friends went away on a fishing trip. Niall had to work overtime and could go, and so he bought himself two bottles of brandy and a huge amount of Coca-Cola for the three days alone. “We called it Spook and Diesel [GM4] and it was the fuel for our lifestyle then.” On the Friday he started with first bottle and spent the weekend drunk, and in a stupor and hating everything. It was on Sunday morning that he started on the next bottle of brandy. “By midday and I stopped adding the coke and I was drinking it straight out of the bottle.: It was an incredibly hot day and Niall took his bottle of brandy and walked out of his back door out onto the farm. “I could just walk out into the bush and into the wild. I was drinking brandy; I was walking, and the sun was beating down on me and it was hot. I also was in a state, and I wasn't used to states because usually I was just morbid and depressed. But the was an agitation to me. I had an energy about me which I wasn't used to, and that energy was anger. I started swearing and looking upwards. Niall was swearing and swearing at God. Swearing at God is something that you don't do easily - especially if you grew up in a Catholic household he did. “It comes with a lot of brandy, and it comes with a lot of frustration.” One of the things he screamed up to the heavens was: “Just kill me, because I know then I already know that you're an evil God that you're bad God I don't know why you made me. Just kill me.” The next thing he remembers was falling in slow motion. He doesn’t remember hitting the ground, nor what happened next, but he does remembers coming to. “Everything was different. I opened my eyes and even the light was different. I felt held like I've never been held before. I felt so safe and so contained and so loved. I felt that nothing was wrong. I registered this total surprise in myself. Everything was shining and from that moment everything changed. Everything shines in my life, even now. From that very moment everything's glows.” “I looked in front of me there was a blade of grass and it's was the [GM5] most beautiful thing I had seen in my whole life. I'm lying on the ground in a heap. It's dusty, it's a hot day and I am out there in the Bush somewhere and I'm looking at this blade of grass. Over there there's a little bird singing and the sweetness of this little thing whistling in my ear was so beautiful. I'd never heard such music in my life. I listened and I looked and in myself I knew some things: I knew everything that there is that is necessary to know. That there was nothing wrong. There's nothing to fear. That I'm held. That I'm loved That I'm created out of absolute pure love and that I'm held in absolute pure love and everything around me is held in the same way. I saw that there's not one thing or the other thing. “I knew that there's not one thing or the other.T here's no right there's no wrong.T here's not up and not down. It was the most beautiful place ever, and it was really in the hands of the creator, and it was really like being born again.” “Years later I would learn this is called nonduality, but I had in that moment the total experience of nonduality,” he tells me. Niall stood slowly up and looked around. The almost empty bottle of brandy was on the ground and even though he had drunk most of the bottle of brandy it had now no effect on him, and he was totally sober. “I walked back in this beauty and this daze. Daze is not right because I was more conscious than I've ever been conscious before. I was so conscious, so present, so precisely participant in this world. “When I looked at everything I understood it. I understood how the Bush works. I understood where each bird fits, where each plant fits and where each micro detail belongs.” He walked back to his cottage holding the bottle of brandy. He threw it in the bin and sat on the sofa and just marveled. Later that day he went to his parents’ house for dinner. His mother looked up at him surprised. “What happened to you?” she asked. “I had a good day” he said. “It was an amazing moment, and I didn’t’ need to share anything I felt an immense love for them, for the place where I lived. The next day was the same. On the Tuesday he went back to work. Everyone asked the same thing. “What happened to you?” He laughed it off and said, “I had a good weekend. I don't know what happened to me.” But he did know. An epiphany is a word used to describe a divine revelation, a sudden insight or awakening. For many Christians, Epiphany is associated with spiritual growth and discovering their true identity in God, but it can take any form. This was one. He remained in the state for weeks and then slowly started to come down come out to just ordinary life, but he was different. There is a clear line between before that event and after that event. “My life is in two clear parts, and everything changed that day. Before that event was a grayscale twilight and after that event everything was in color. During that event it was like the ancient or the medieval illuminations on paintings where they used gold to highlight things like auras. I never again believed I was not clever. I suddenly got brains. I was always the kid at the back of the class, a bit of a Dumbo. After that, things made sense to me. I could see the patterns and understand things.” Things happened fast next. He rapidly got promoted in at work. “I think my attitude completely changed I was there for a reason I was interested in how the things worked; I was interested in learning things.” His healing practice was packed, and people were flying from all over the world to work with him. He also started to try and understand what this experience was. He started by reading scripture. “I read scripture to try and see what I meant, but I couldn't find it there. I talked to people who are well versed in Christianity, and I couldn't find it there either.” Somebody told him it sounded more like it's an enlightenment experience and so head read the Eastern masters. It was ‘almost but not quite’. Then a friend suggested Buddhism may have some answers and he tucked into her library. It was after he had exhausted these books that he found a little pamphlet in amongst all the books. The pamphlet started with a particular Buddhist sutra called the Prajna Paramita Sutra. It's known to be the Heart Sutra and the definition of enlightenment. As Niall read the first few lines that whole experience in the bush came back to him and he felt a visceral and physical re-encounter with what had happened. The sutra talks about non duality and the state one can be in when one is not attached to this world. It just made completely makes sense. “I knew exactly what that was and as I read through the rest of the pamphlet it talked about a Tibetan Buddhist practice which is called Dzogchen and he set his sights on studying in Tibet and joining a monastery.” At that time Niall’s traditional medicine practice was incredibly busy and one of his clients sent Niall a gift. It was a ticket from Botswana to Kathmandu and a bus ticket to Lasa in Tibet. And so he sold up his goods and went to study Buddhism. “Did you find that connection there?” I ask. “Even that wasn't the answer. It gave me a lot of meaning but it wasn't the answer, it was part of the journey,” His life was taking him forward. After he came back from Tibet he was offered a job in the Canada and US where he worked closely with Cree and Algonquin traditional healers and lived and worked in Innu and Inuit communities in Labrador. He would return to Africa years later. His work in indigenous communities and with older knowledge systems has taken him to ancestral homelands and forgotten wilderness, from the Amazon Basin to New York City, the sacred sites of Venda and remote Ethiopia to Russia. It has taken him to the Altai Mountains, consulting with indigenous elders in relation to eco-mapping work and traditional shamanic knowledge. But what he does know is that this part of his journey started that day in the wilderness. From that Easter Sunday his life just went from strength to strength. “I am interested,” I ask. “Surely in your work as a sangoma you access these trance states and often use them to do your work. How was this particular experience so different?” “Being in trance is totally different. In that you are in a dream-like state and very often you don’t remember anything that happened. It is inviting another spirit into your body and a part of you disappears to allow that. But this was the totally opposite and in fact it was the most clearly I have ever seen.” Another part of his ongoing spiritual journey was a deep interest in Christianity, and he started to explore the concept of Jesus to find that ‘love’ he had felt on that day. Niall studied and moved through the ranks of the Zionist or Apostolic Churches, otherwise known as Churches of the Spirit. “Being Catholic I realized that there is a political God who we follow. There's a community God, who we follow. There is also the God of the scripture, who we follow. Yet beyond that there's a much bigger God. Where it touches on this is where it says, ‘God is love.’ “That was the God that I met there in the bush that day, and that's the God that I've been with ever since. I don't need to go to church. I don't need to practice the Buddhism. I follow my path as a traditional healer, and I do my rituals and my ceremonies because they keep me grounded. I keep myself good with my ancestors.”
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AuthorNiall Campbell is a sangoma, a traditional doctor nyanga (medicine man) a doctor of traditional ceremonies as well as institutions as well as a Ngaka ua diKoma, a Doctor of the Law. Archives
January 2025
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