A Grandmother's Healing Creations
Plus, a recipe for some psychic chai.
Hello, wonderful witches!
In case you missed it, Kitchen Witch was featured in Substack’s “What to Read” column last week. The interview was so much fun, and I’ve made a bunch of great connections because of it. So, welcome to everyone new! I’m so happy you’re here for our weekly witchy sessions.
In today’s article, we’re getting a glimpse into the life of writer Fiske Nyirongo’s grandmother, and the unique challenges she faced by being a witch among Christians in Zambia.
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A Grandmother’s Healing Food
By Fiske Nyirongo
My maternal grandmother, Tamara Nhlema, was born in 1930. She was the daughter of an Anglican reverend, one of the first reverends to come out of the colonization of his region. By the year Tamara was born, Christianity was largely seen as the only acceptable religion, cutting out the religions Indigenous tribes practiced. But like most Zambian families, some people practiced one thing in public and another in private. They stuck with the religion of their ancestors.
I often found my grandmother visiting during the days we were having tough times in terms of sickness or stressful events. My mother was working abroad as a nurse and my grandmother would stand in for her. When I arrived home from school some days, mad at the world and my body for periods that were forever on time, I would find my grandmother with a warm smile seated outside my house. She’d have a charcoal brazier between her feet, stirring something in a large pot. Now if you ask anyone who knew my grandmother, they will tell you that she didn’t cook. So I always knew if she was cooking something, it was going to be good.
The large pot would sometimes emit a citrusy scent or a greasy scent and sometimes it would smell like a steamy hug from all the milkshake flavors you can imagine. She always had instructions on how to eat her creations. The citrusy scent was a jam; she never told us what she put in that mixture. The greasy scent tasted like Tobwa, a Zambian drink that comes from fermented maize meal and special roots. She always insisted that we had to drink this liquid. My period cramping would ease each time I drank her special drink. The milkshake scent was a porridge that I still crave to this day.
My grandmother passed on April 11, 2012. She was 81 years old. Months before her transition, she went through a public trial that was started by one of my cousins. This cousin had been having some unfortunate occurrences in her life and she sought a Christian prophet to tell her who was behind this. This prophet pointed at our grandmother. He named her as the evil source. My cousin, who is very volatile in nature, refused to ever see our grandmother again, and she never did until her funeral where she bawled like a baby.
This story is all too common for us in Zambia, with the trend of Christian fortune tellers. While others see people like my grandmother as evil, unnatural, or worse, deserving of instant death, I see the woman who hated cooking but still showed up to cook for us whenever we needed to heal our bodies and minds through food. This is who she was, not some monster of their worst nightmare.
Fiske Nyirongo is a Zambian author based in Lusaka, Zambia. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Kalemba short story writing prize. Her work appears in online spaces such as The Kalahari Review, Brittlepaper (Go The Way Your Blood Beats Anthology), The Writers Space Africa 2019 magazine Love issue, Boldly Mental, and Unbound magazine. Her first children’s title was published in Cricket Magazine’s Holiday-themed issue in 2019. She co-created a children’s book for the South African Book Dash model. Her fantasy novella, Finding Love in Betrayal, was published by Love Press Africa in 2019. She is a 2020 PenPen Africa Writers Resident.
Recipe Box
It’s been freezing here in Chicago. Like, literally freezing. We’re in the middle of a polar vortex, with temperatures hitting about -10 (that’s -23 for my Celsius friends) on the regular. I don’t know about you, but when the weather is like this, I want to hunker down with a nice spicy drink and explore the depths of consciousness. Lately, that’s looked like trying to enhance my psychic abilities—and a nice enchanted mug of chai is my drink of choice.
Psychic Abili-tea Chai
Makes 2 servings.
Ingredients
2 cups water
1 cup almond milk (for mental clarity)
8 cardamom pods (clarifies the mind)
1 cinnamon stick (protection during psychic workings)
2 star anise pods (enhances divination)
1 teaspoon dried ginger (enhances personal power)
1 teaspoon nutmeg (induces psychic visions)
2 tablespoons black tea leaves
Sugar to taste
Directions
Add water, milk, and spices to a pan. Bring to a boil. Imagine all the mystical properties of the spices seeping out into the liquid, enchanting it with psychic energies.
Reduce heat to low. Add tea and allow to steep for a few minutes.
Strain into cups and add sugar to taste. As you drink, imagine the warmth of the spices centering around your third eye. Meditate on what you want to know.
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Coming Up Next Week…
Have you ever let tarot cards dictate what you eat throughout the day? One of Kitchen Witch’s writers has, and next week she’ll tell us all about it.
See you then!