Twin from Another Tribe: The Story of Two Shamanic Healers from Africa and North America

Imagine you’re born to into a family where your mother is a Mexican Catholic and your father is a white, practicing Buddhist, growing up as a young boy in the Southwest where people call you a "coyote," or half-breed. Your own racial ethnicity makes no sense to you in a world more racially divided as ever. Coming into this world was even more turbulent because as a baby you nearly died from a staph infection. Your life is marked from then on with tragedy and suffering: poverty, poor education, homelessness, the death of your beloved father and teacher from alcoholism. You spend years living in your own personal hell, having abandoned your Christian roots but not yet ready to accept your true calling and fighting off the "spirits" you see and hear all around you. But through the chaos and from a very young age you know beyond all shadow of a doubt that your purpose here on Earth is to become a healer, and one day you finally find your way out of the darkness. Meet Michael Ortiz Hill. Now imagine you’re born in a poor village in Zimbabwe and nearly die from a naval infection. When you’re a young boy your father is murdered by women in the village deemed to be witches. Your family, struggling through poverty and political persecution, is forced to pass you from home to home in the hopes that you’ll find both work and some means to an education. While the country you’ve always known as home is being torn apart by the South African apartheid, you’ve grown to be the best teacher the region has seen, but there’s no escaping the government and you unwittingly become part of the British South African Police. This journey has also taken you away from the strict Christian upbringing you know in your heart is not the way you were meant to worship God. Soon you learn to listen to the spirits of your ancestors and answer the call to become a healer. Meet Mandaza Augustine Kandemwa. This is the shared story of Michael and Mandaza, two men who have answered their call to be peacemakers and healers while the world is being ravaged by war, death, and disease. It is also a story of surrendering to this call and being initiated by the ancestral spirit world. And, perhaps most importantly, it is a story of brotherhood in the deepest sense: Two men from different worlds who share the same destiny and have come to call each other "twin brother." This is not simply a story about breaking racial divides, it is the memoir of two contemporary shamans, uniquely told in parallel to one another, each sharing his own story of how he became a sacred healer, or nganga, in traditional Bantu African medicine and came to know the other as spiritual twin. Together their shamanic work spans the globe: one twin working among the poor in South Central Africa, and the other interweaving Western medicine and shamanism as a registered nurse at the UCLA Medical Center.

232 pages

About the author: Michael Ortiz Hillis an author, registered nurse and practitioner of traditional African medicine in the United States and among the Bantu people in Zimbabwe. Born in 1957 to a Mexican Catholic mother and an Anglo Buddhist father, his life always involved moving between different cultural communities. Taught Buddhist meditation by his father as a teenager, Michael ultimately received formal training in the Zen and Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhist traditions. His father died when Michael was twenty and over the next 30 years he brought his Buddhist practice to bear on hospice care for people with life-threatening diseases and underwent training as a registered nurse. During this time Michael practiced as a lay monk, spending much of the time in complete solitude refining his meditation practice. His first book, Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage (Spring Publications 1992), examines the themes of death and rebirth that traditional rites of initiation share with the apocalyptic dreams of contemporary people. It is also an effort to understand the path of compassion during a tumultuous age. In 1992 Michael was in Los Angeles at the bedside of a dying friend when the city was consumed in the civil unrest following the Rodney King verdict. This led him to apply the insights he gleaned from examining apocalyptic dreams to racial, specifically, white people's dreams about black people and black people's dreams about white people. To do justice to the dream life of African Americans required a serious study of the African (predominantly Bantu) world that gave birth to black American culture. Early in his research, Michael began noticing African patterns in dreams of African Americans. After four years of preparation, he journeyed to Africa in 1996 where he met the Bantu tribal healer Mandaza Augustine Kandemwa and through Mandaza became the first non-African initiated into the ritual tradition anthropologists recognize as the headwaters of what was to become African American culture. This time of study and initiation resulted in Michael’s collection of essays known as the Mapatya Trilogy. The first, Capable of Such Beauty, looks at the shape of the "white self" as revealed in white people's dreams about blacks and describes Michael’s own breakdown of that "self" as he submits to the African rite of initiation. The Village of the Water Spirits—which was published by Spring Journal Books in August 2006—is based on a series of interviews with Mandaza that interpret the racial dreams of black Americans, offering a compelling picture of the African shape of the African American soul. Gathering in the Names—the final essay in the trilogy co-authored by Michael and Mandaza—was first published by Spring Journal Books in 2002 under the title Gathering in the Names: A Journey into the Land of African Gods and is the culmination of Michael’s and Mandaza’s work together. Quest Books/The Theosophical Publishing House released the book in January 2007 as Twin from Another Tribe: The Story of Two Shamanic Healers from Africa and North America. It is the dual autobiography of these twin brothers (mapatya) as they journeyed faithfully on the same path toward their calling to shamanic healing, emphasizing the struggle the two overcame to become medicine men (ngangas) and share in the healing of two worlds: Mandaza amongst the poor in South Central Africa, Michael as a shaman and registered nurse at UCLA Medical Center. Michael is currently married to the novelist and feminist thinker Deena Metzger and has one child and two grandchildren. They live in the Santa Monica mountains of California with their wolf Isis. Michael's work has been featured on NBC’s "Mysteries of the Millennium" and Canadian Broadcasting’s "Man Alive."