Credo Mutwa was born in the then Zululand on the 21st July 1921. According to Mutwa’s writings when his father met his mother, he had just lost his wife and children “in a terrible influenza epidemic, which had spread through Southern Africa, killing thousands of people in the years 1918 and 1919”. His father was a widower with three surviving children. Mutaw’s father was a builder and a Christian, and his mother a Zulu Woman who practiced the ancient religion of the Zulu people and as a result “the white missionaries forbade my father from marrying my mother until she became a Christian”.
Mutwa writes that “Caught between Catholic missionaries on one hand, and a stubborn old Zulu warrior on the other, my mother and father had no choice but to separate”. As a result of the religious and traditional disputes Mutwa did not attend school until he was 14 years old, this was also because his father’s building profession which prevented the family from staying in one place for a longer period. As a result of his father’s work Mutwa writes about a horrific experience I his life:
“In 1935, my father found a job, a major building job, in the Transvaal and he brought us all from Natal to join him where he was building. I attended school on and off in different schools, and then, in 1937 I went through great shock and trauma, when I was seized and sodomized by a gang of mineworkers outside a mine compound. This caused me to be ill for a long time.
And although I was taken to white doctors, I could find no help until my father’s brother, the same one who had taken me away from my maternal grandfather decided to take me back to my mother’s village in the hope that I would find help there. And I did”.
It is after this experience hat Mutwa realized his calling of becoming a traditional healer, after he had been told by his grandfather that he has a spiritual journey he was take.
“It was here that I began to question many things that I never questioned before. Where our ancestors really the savages that quiet missionaries would have us believe they were? Were we Africans really a race of primitives who possessed no knowledge at all before the white man came to Africa? These and many, many other questions began to haunt my mind. And then one day when he was sure that I was fully returned to health, my grandfather told me that the illness that had been troubling me for so long, had actually been a sacred illness which required that I had to become a shaman, a healer. And when the old man said this to me, I readily agreed to undergo initiation at the hands of one of my grandfather’s daughters, a young sangoma named Myrna”.
If a strange thing was happening in the place that I happened to be, I became one of those who were summoned to that place to help using Africa’s ancient wisdom and knowledge in that situation. I found myself amongst amazing and strange people. I found myself amongst men and women, possessing knowledge that was already ancient when the man Jesus Christ was born. I heard stories from the lips of storytellers that went back to the remotest of the remote times. Stories that very few had ever heard before.
In 1975 Credo Mutwa got permission and funds to build the first living museum, which he described its purposes as “the preservation of my people’s knowledge, religion and culture”.
Following the murder of his son by black political "activists" and the second burning of his village, Credo moved away from Soweto and developed a cultural tourist village in Lotlamoreng, Mahikeng, (known at that time as Bophuthatswana). Here he supervised the building of small cultural villages, each representing the traditional cultures of the main South African tribal peoples
“I am a sculptor, who has created large sculptures in various parts of South Africa. I am a painter who has painted pictures that were afterwards stolen from him, by exploiters. I am the writer of books, whose books fill the pockets of others with money, and nit his own. That is Credo Mutwa”.
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