For the last couple of days I have been reading a fascinating book by James Hall entitled "Sangoma, My Odyssey Into The Spirit World Of Africa {G.P.Putnam's Songs, 1994}.

This book tells the story of a White man from Chicago who travels to Swaziland and eventually becomes a traditional sangoma {healer}.

One passage of the book struck a chord with me:

[the traditional beliefs and practices of the sangoma] were real...
they concerned life involved with other life-people with people, people with nature, people with spirits, the old and the young together, the sick and the well together, humankind living with the knowledge that in the end we were all we had as support against powerful nature and indifferent time: men holding hands not out of love but out of reassurance that they were there for each other, women carrying the babies of other women on their backs as if they were their own, and a nation, Swaziland, that might hve been humankind in microcosm, acting like a giant family, sometimes squabbling but with its members always aware that they were part of a whole that added dignity and significance to their personal lives, and who did not act like fragmented interest groups in a zero-sum game where one person prospered only if another perished.
[pp. 220-221]

-end of quote-

With some slight modifications, I feel that this description fits my sense of the Mudcat concept. And most times, that excerpt fits my actual experiences with Mudcatters.

I'm interested in reading what others feel about Mudcat.

What does Mudcat mean to you?




Azizi