The Mother Project is EMANDULO Wellness village is a sanctuary for indigenous knowledges, practices and ecologies located in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa.
The germinating seed project is a learning journey leading to the Mother project called EMANDULO Ecobrick Project which is an ongoing story after we launched it in July, the germinating funds allowed me to invite four young men from my village in the Eastern Cape who are ambassadors of the the project, who after the learning journey will spread word on the project and begin a clean up campaign around the village and collect plastic and waste to use for building the ecobrick which is going to be our way cleaning up the villages which do not have a waste management program at all. EMANDULO is a sanctuary for Indigenous knowledge systems, a space for preserving traditions and customs of our people before slavery/colonisation/apartheid. These are traditions that were the glue or connection between man and nature. The space will put in ecological systems that protect and preserve our traditional medicines for future generations, heal the land, its inhabitants and its indigenous foods. As a healer and a custodian of the land it is my ancestral duty to awaken the land, initiate a learning/unlearning process for my people to revisit indigenous knowledge systems going very far back in order to heal ourselves and the land.
The four day unlearning journey was to shift the minds of the young men and those who were part of the event on waste management and preservation, it was also to speak to something much deeper inside of them hence the first day of the project which was music meditation journey led by Mama Seipati’ Hopa, she a healer, an indigenous music practitioner, she played various instruments along with us to awaken our core/ consciousness which was very powerful. Then the second day was held at a small scale indigenous farm in Soweto, we revisited our lost foods, remembering the soil and the forgotten art of foraging for lost foods. We built a fire pit using recycled bricks and stones, cooked and shared our intentions on healing the land by planting our indigenous grains.
The main event was Sunday, the ecobrick workshop was held in the city of Johannesburg where waste thrives, we cleaned and collected a waste (plastic especially) this was an in-depth dive into why plastic and what is the solutions are and encouraging our four young custodians of the importance of this project. Each one created their own ecobrick to take home and make more to drop off for when I head down again to the village to lay the first stone.
