Written by You do not choose to become a sangoma.
This is the first thing to understand, and it changes everything that follows. In a world saturated with spiritual paths that are selected, enrolled in, practised at chosen intervals, and adjusted when they no longer feel right. The sangoma tradition begins from the opposite direction entirely. The ancestors choose. The person resists, suffers, searches for another explanation, exhausts every alternative. And then, eventually, they surrender.
The surrender is called ukuthwasa. The word derives from the Zulu for the light of the new moon. The first thin sliver of light appearing after the dark. It is the beginning of the return. And it begins, always, with an illness that Western medicine cannot cure.