“I plan to retire around five years after I die.” – Warren Buffet

Death has visited the family next door, and typically of many Afrikan communities, we are subjected to a few nights of religious singing, call it drumming and chanting. The living Spirit of the dead is literary celebrated and ushered into the interstellar space by the singing of hymns, the reading of scripture and the preparation of the living for our own impeding deaths. We are extolled to live righteously and never to forget that we are essentially impermanent, mere visitors of the earth and that our home is beyond all this.

But the drumming tells me a very different story. There is sublime supplication and something mystically ancestral about the bellowing throb of Afrikan drums. Being in Harare, one hears that the drumming is similar to that of the Nguni/Ngoni sangoma’s rather than the typical…