WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL I used to watch my late grandmother while she prepared marula beer during the marula season, which lasts from February through March. She used to wake up early in the morning, go into the bush, pick up fallen marula fruits and carry them home in a full mealie bag. Then she would drop all the marulas under her own marula tree. I enjoyed staying next to her while she squeezed the marula fruit into buckets. She would wear her favourite blue dress and cross her legs on the grass mat and tell me old stories. Usually during the fruit squeezing my grandmother would fall asleep with the fork she used to open the marulas still in her hand. She would jerk awake and say, "Where was I?" Sometimes we would spend six hours under the tree, squeezing fruits and talking.

ALETA CHABANGU’S YARD is scattered with empty mealie bags, and trees chopped in pieces for traditional medicine. An old female trainee sits on a grass mat, wearing red and white clothes and the same colour rounded bracelet. Her dreadlocked hair is all covered with tsumani red ochre. Another young female trainee is grinding traditional medicine in a tshuri, a wooden mealie mortar and pestle. On her wrist, she has red, white and black beads and the same on her hands and legs.