Credo Mutwa & the Alien Agenda: UFOs & Alien Abduction in the Eyes of a Zulu Shaman

By LOUIS PROUD—

The Zulu sangoma (a shaman or healer) and high sanusi (clairvoyant and lore-master) Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa is recognised by many as one of the most distinguished African traditional healers around today. He is, in fact, the spiritual leader of the sanusis and sangomas of South Africa. 
As well as being a successful artist, author and historian, Mutwa is also an outspoken victim of alien abduction, having allegedly been in contact by entities his people call the mantindane (‘the tormentors’), which are similar in nature to what we in the English speaking world call ‘the grays’. Stories of UFOs and alien beings make up a big part of African tribal culture, he says.

Awakener of the Zulus

Mutwa was born on July 21, 1921 in the South African province of Natal. The name Vusamazulu means ‘awakener of the Zulus’, and was appointed to Mutwa during his initiation as a sangoma. Mutwa means ‘little bush man’, and Credo means ‘I believe’. Born out of wedlock, Mutwa was considered “an illegitimate child, a child of shame.” Because his mother, who was descended from a long line of medicine men and women, refused to convert to Christianity, Mutwa’s parents separated shortly after his birth. Thus he was primarily raised by his Roman Catholic father, who frequently travelled from place to place, working as a builder.
Mutwa claims that much of the knowledge he now possesses – of art, science, medicine, engineering and so on – can be attributed to the fact that, when he was child, he was taught by “strange companions.” These “little people,” he says, some of whom were blue in colour, used to make their presence known to other children as well. In fact, “all African children used to see such things.” Thanks to the help of these beings, he says, he was often more knowledgeable than some of his teachers at school.
When, in 1937, Mutwa was brutally raped by a gang of mineworkers outside a mine compound, he experienced “a great shock and trauma,” remaining ill for a very long time. He developed a feverish condition, accompanied by nightmares and visions, which caused great pain and debilitation, and which, he says, almost killed him. It also caused him to become highly psychic, and he was sometimes able to read the minds of those around him, as well as perceive auras. The treatment he received from European doctors and Christian faith healers didn’t help at all.
Shortly afterwards, Mutwa was brought to his mother’s village in Zululand, where his grandfather, Ziko Shezi, a sangoma and warrior – “whom my father despised as a heathen and a demon worshipper” – brought him back to health using traditional African methods. Mutwa was told by his grandfather that the illness he had undergone “had actually been a sacred illness which required that I had to become a shaman, a healer.” Mutwa agreed, and, having renounced Christianity, was initiated into the shamanic path by his aunt Myrna, a fully fledged sangoma. Mutwa’s ‘spiritual sickness’ had been part of the initiatory process of becoming a shaman, and is a common aspect of shamanic traditions all over the world.
Sadly, when his father and stepmother learned that he had become a ‘heathen’, they immediately disowned him, telling him “never to set foot in their home again.” Virtually alone and homeless, Mutwa began to travel “for knowledge, in search of clarity of mind and in search of the truth about my people.” He journeyed all over the country, meeting, and studying under, a number of traditional healers. His first destination was Swaziland. He then made his way to Mozambique, and later, Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe). At the end of this not only physical, but spiritual, journey, he realised his life’s purpose – to help preserve the culture of his people, and to help mend the problems in his country, of drugs, unemployment, crime, disease and poverty. Mutwa’s first book, Indaba, My Children: African Folk Tales, was published in 1964, and is considered a classic. His other works include: Africa Is My Witness (1966), My People (1971), Let Not My Country Die (1986), and Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies, and Mysteries (1996).
Very much a cosmic thinker, Mutwa claims that many of humanity’s difficulties can be explained by the negative influence of manipulative extraterrestrial beings, particularly the mantindane, who “share the Earth with us. They need us. They use us. They harvest things from us.” It’s about time, he says, that we acknowledged the alien presence on this planet. “We are being watched, we are being explored and investigated, and we are being controlled, and yet there are those among us who refuse to accept this fact,” he explains in Zulu Shaman.

A World Ruler by Aliens

The late, great John E. Mack is among one of the first UFO researchers in the West to interview Mutwa. He has also been interviewed by the Australian UFO researcher Bill Chalker, the author and historian Zecharia Sitchin, as well as the controversial conspiracy theorist David Icke, who once called him “the most amazing and knowledgeable man it has been my privilege and honour to call a friend, a genius.” Supposedly, many of Icke’s speculations about ‘shape-shifting reptilian aliens’ – whom he believes to be the true rulers of this earth – have been confirmed by Mutwa. According to Mutwa, when he talks about extraterrestrials and other topics of this nature he often feels “caught between, on the one hand, Western thought, including the Christian religion, and African thought, which accepts these things without question.”
Mack first met Mutwa in 1994, during a short trip to South Africa, the main purpose of which was to investigate the Ariel School incident in Zimbabwe. “Credo seemed a noble, even regal figure with his colourful robes and heavy metal adornments of the sangoma, which seemed as if they ought to weigh him down,” writes Mack in Passport to the Cosmos. During the interview, Mutwa spoke a great deal about his traumatic alien abduction experiences – experiences that Mack, a world-renowned expert on the subject, found difficult not to take seriously.
Mutwa views the world as a mysterious and frightening place, controlled by alien forces that possess far more knowledge than – and are intellectually and technologically superior to – humanity. Some of these beings, he says, are wise, benevolent and wish to help us. But the same cannot be said of the mantindane, who are just as selfish and power-hungry as humans. They preserve humanity, he says, in order to protect their own self-interests, because they are “obsessed with self-preservation… This wish to play God over lesser beings is with us and with them. Throughout the cosmos vice is the same.”
Some of these beings, says Mutwa, have covertly and profoundly influenced all human cultures and civilisations for millennia. They have aided our evolution and helped us survive by providing us with knowledge – of science, farming, medicine and so on. “Throughout Africa we are told that these mysterious beings taught human beings many things,” writes Mutwa. “They taught human beings how to have laws, knowledge of herbal medicine, knowledge of arts and knowledge of the mysteries of creation and the cosmos as a whole.”
Some of them – the mantindane in particular – are “part of the Earth,” and should not be considered foreign. “We and the mantindane are one and the same stupid race,” says Mutwa. “Far from these creatures being aliens, they are our future descendants. I am sure of this.” Out of all the different types of alien beings that have been in contact with humanity, the mantindane are apparently the most important to Africans, who fear them greatly. Mutwa described these entities to Mack as troublesome and “parasitic,” claiming that they “instil superstition, sow discord, and may even cause disease.”

A Difficult Life

Given the fact that he has led such a difficult life, it is perhaps not surprising that Mutwa’s world view is less than optimistic. Over the years, he’s been a victim of violence on a number of occasions, and has lost many loved ones. In 1960, his fiancée was shot dead when South African police open fired on a crowd of people to which she belonged. In addition, his first-born son was knifed to death by a group of black activists, “murdering people under the banner of the mass democratic movement.”
During the Soweto riots of June 16, 1976, Mutwa was attacked by a group of thugs who stabbed him repeatedly. “I could feel the knives going into my body,” he says. “The thing that always helps me happened then. I split into two, and so I escaped the pain.” Looking down, he saw his own body, a “bloodied mess that looked like me.” He was apparently pronounced clinically dead. On another occasion, Mutwa was almost burnt alive when a group of thugs doused him in gasoline. In Africa it’s widely believed that when a person is killed in this manner, their soul is destroyed along with their body, preventing them from reincarnating. Mutwa remembers this incident as one of the few times in his life when he felt genuinely terrified.
Unbelievably traumatic though these experiences must have been, nothing compares to Mutwa’s 1958 alien abduction episode – assuming it actually took place, of course. The incident has been detailed in a number of books, including Passport to the Cosmos, Bill Chalker’s Hair of the Alien (2005), and Mutwa’s semi-autobiographical Zulu Shaman (also known under the title Song of the Stars).

Caught by the God of the Mountains

It all started in the bush, in the sacred Inyangani Mountains of Rhodesia, while Mutwa, at the time a sangoma apprentice, was busy searching for a particular type of herb, which he planned to use as medicine. All of a sudden the temperature dropped, says Mutwa, even though it was a very hot day. He was then engulfed by a bright blue mist, which, he says, “was swirling all around me, getting between me and the eastern landscape.” A moment later, he found himself in what looked like a mining tunnel lined with silver-greyish metal.
The next thing he knew, he was lying on a table of some sort. His boots and trousers were missing. He was approached by a group of grey-skinned creatures, with “very large heads, very thin arms, and very thin legs.” He wanted to flee, but could not move, as his arms and legs were paralysed. “I just lay there like a goat on a sacrificial altar.” On closer inspection, he noticed that the creatures were short, “about the size of African Pigmy.” They looked, he says, identical in appearance to the ‘gray aliens’ (or grays) commonly reported by abductees in America and other Western countries.
Mutwa noticed that what appeared to be the creatures’ eyes were actually black, goggle-like covers. Their ‘real’ eyes were “round, with straight pupils, like those of a cat.” At least one of the creatures – the one closest to him – had a potent and very unpleasant odour, “a throat-tightening chemical smell, which smelled like rotten eggs, and also like hot copper [sulphur].” Mutwa was then subjected to some kind of operation on his left thigh, which caused him to scream out in agony. An abundance of blood flowed from the wound. Next, one of the creatures stuck a silver, pen-like object up his right nasal passage; then yanked it out. “The pain,” he says, “was out of this world.”
The pain subsided, however, when one of the creatures – who was bigger and taller than the others, and who possessed an air of authority – placed its hand on Mutwa’s forehead. Mutwa could ‘sense’ that the creature was female, despite the fact that ‘she’ lacked breasts and other feminine characteristics. Staring at Mutwa intently, it projected visions of destruction into his mind. He saw cities being destroyed by floods, fires and other natural disasters.
One of the creatures pushed a small, black tubular instrument into Mutwa’s penis. As soon as the instrument was withdrawn, Mutwa’s bladder opened, and he urinated straight into the creature’s chest. It then “staggered away like a drunken insect, and left the room.” A moment later, two other creatures entered the room, one of whom appeared to be a large, metallic robot. Its eyes were bright, seemed to move, and seemed to change colour. The other creature, which was naked, had pink skin, blue eyes, high cheek-bones and looked almost human, yet its body was swollen and strangely out of proportion. Something about it reminded Mutwa of a doll, for it looked and felt “totally unnatural.”
The creature mounted Mutwa “like a crazy Zulu girl,” and proceeded to have sex with him. But the experience was not at all pleasant – much the opposite, in fact. The creature’s body was cold, bony and lifeless, and Mutwa felt as if he were making love to a machine. To make matters worse, it attached something to his penis that made him ejaculate “too much.” It then left the room, leaving Mutwa alone with the tall, female creature. His penis “was burning as if I had put it in scalding water.”
Gripping him violently by the head, the creature forced Mutwa off the table he was laying on, and he fell to the floor, landing on his hands and knees. He was then led roughly from room to room. One of the things that most captured his interest, and which, he says, is still “haunting my dreams,” was a collection of huge cylindrical objects, filled with greyish-pink liquid. They contained “small editions of the alien creatures floating round and round, like disgusting little frogs.”
Mutwa witnessed other human beings being “tortured” by the aliens, one of whom was a white man, “smelling of sweat, urine, excrement and fear.” As Mutwa walked past him, they looked deeply into each others eyes. Incredibly, Mutwa claims to have run into this very same man about two years later, while delivering parcels in the city of Johannesburg. He was working at a curio shop at the time. The man asked Mutwa where he had seen him before, to which he replied, “in Rhodesia, in a certain place underground.” As though the realisation was too much to bear, the man turned away and walked off quickly down the street.
The next thing he knew, Mutwa was once again in the bush. His mind was hazy, and it took him a moment to realise that something terribly wrong had occurred. He felt a pain in his left thigh, as well as his penis, which was starting to swell. He noticed, moreover, that his shorts and trousers were torn, and that his boots were missing. Clinging to his body was the god-awful stench of the place he had been earlier. Coating his skin was a fine, grey powder. He began to stagger home, making his way along a bush track.
Mutwa eventually encountered a group of locals, who guided him back to the village, where his teacher, Mrs. Zamoya, informed him that he had been missing for three days. She believed his story straight away. She told him that he had been “caught by the God of the mountains,” and that many other people had similar experiences. He was lucky to have returned alive, she said, “because many people have disappeared in that part of the land, never to be seen again…”
While staying in the village to recover, Mutwa was bathed every day, so as to wash away the tiny droplets of blood that continued to ooze from the pores of his itchy skin. He found a scoop mark on his left thigh, about a half-inch in diameter, which remains there to this day. Most unpleasant of all, however, skin started to peel off his penis. It also developed sores. This condition did not go away completely, he says, which is one of the reasons his first wife left him. Mutwa was eventually taken to Mrs. Zamoya’s ‘Solace Mission’ in western Rhodesia, where it took him several months to make a full recovery.

The ‘Sky Gods’

It would appear that the alien abduction phenomenon is alive and well in Mutwa’s homeland, just as it is in many Western countries, for he claims to have met numerous abductees like himself. During his long career as a sangoma, Mutwa has been approached by countless African women who insist that they have been impregnated by the mantindane and other alien beings. In each case, the pregnancy has mysteriously terminated, as though the foetus has been stolen. Because, says Mutwa, many of these women have been accused of committing abortion – which, in Africa, is regarded as an act “worse than murder” – it has been his job to “convince the family of the woman’s innocence, to try and heal the terrible spiritual and mental – as well as physical – trauma that the woman has undergone.”
According to Mack in Passport to the Cosmos, many African tribes believe that the mantindane and other alien beings harvest sperm and ova from unsuspecting human victims. The Masai warriors, for instance, fear that the mantindane are able to drain a man’s semen, which is why they go into battle wearing codpieces to protect their genitals, whereas the women of the tribe wear certain ornaments to protect themselves from being sexually molested by these entities.
“Once a mantindane has dealt with you,” says Mutwa, “you become afraid of making love to a woman…These beings scar you for the rest of your life.” Flawed though the mantindane may be, Mutwa points out that they are “part of us, part of our lives,” and that “they are moved by a desperate need.” Mutwa calls the mantindane “solvers of great problems.” Their technology, he says, may be “several million years ahead of ours.”
Whether or not one accepts Mutwa’s claim that the mantindane and other alien beings are sexually compatible with human beings – or that such entities actually exist – it cannot be denied that these matters are a very big part of African tribal culture. The “sky people,” or “sky gods,” says Mutwa, have visited Earth for thousands of years, arriving from the heavens in “magic sky boats.” The Pygmies, the Kalahari Bushmen, the Ovahimba of Namibia, the tribes people of Zaire, and of course the Zulus – all of them accept the existence of extraterrestrials, and even believe that humanity is descended from such beings.
The stars are revered by Mutwa’s people, who consider them more important than even the sun or the moon. The word ‘Zulu’, in fact, means ‘people from the stars’. It is from the stars that much knowledge and wisdom has originated, they say. The people of Botswana, explains Mack, “call a star naledi, which means ‘light of the spirit’, and have carved in wood, painted on rocks, or even scratched on metal ‘the so-called UFOs,’ the ‘magic vehicles’ in which the mantindane and the star gods of the various tribes travelled.”
In addition to the somewhat sinister and repulsive mantindane, Mutwa speaks of another significant alien race – one that UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists in the West call ‘the reptilians’. “Some say that these creatures were like crocodiles, with crocodile like teeth and jaws, but with very large round heads,” he says. Anyone who’s read Robert Temple’s impressive and scholarly The Sirius Mystery (1976) would be familiar with the enigma surrounding the Dogon people of Mali, west Africa, who possess advanced astronomical knowledge of the Sirius star system, and who claim that they gained this knowledge, many thousands of years ago, from the Nommo, a race of advanced reptilian or amphibian beings who hail from Sirius (more specifically, Sirius A). Throughout Africa, says Mutwa, these mysterious, reptilian gods are known by other names as well. “In West Africa, in the land of the Bumbara people, these amphibian or reptilian sky gods are known as Zishwezi… In West Africa again, these creatures are called the Asa, which means the mighty ones of magic…”

Fact or Fiction?

What, then, are we to make of Mutwa’s claims? Was he really abducted by alien beings? Or was his story a fabrication – either completely or partially? And what about his people’s beliefs that we are “descendants from gods who came out of the skies thousands of years ago,” and that these beings “share the earth with us,” and exploit us? Should this information be interpreted literally?
According to Mack and Chalker, both of whom looked deeply into Mutwa’s story, these questions are difficult to answer with a simple yes or no. The truth may lie somewhere in the middle, they say. In Passport to the Cosmos, Mack points out that Mutwa and other indigenous people with whom he has discussed the UFO phenomenon and other related matters, do “not sharply distinguish material or literal reality from mythic truths.” He adds, moreover, that certain ideas of Mutwa’s, “like the dominant role of the mantindane and other extraterrestrial or star beings in human cultural history, seem related to tribal myth and legend.” Chalker is of much the same opinion as Mack. “‘Oral material’ like Credo’s is very difficult to judge,” he says.
Given the kind of life he’s lead, it’s a miracle that Mutwa is still alive to this day. Now eighty-six or thereabouts and suffering from diabetes and asthma, his health is continuing to worsen at a rapid rate, and it’s fair to assume that he probably won’t be alive for very much longer. He claims that the ‘alien knowledge’ he has divulged in recent years, which he once pledged never to reveal, was supposed to be reserved for initiate sangomas like himself only. He decided to ‘break ranks’ and ‘reveal all’, however, because he lacks a successor onto whom he can pass his unique and sacred knowledge – knowledge he has earned during a lifetime of initiations. Plus, he insists, this information is too important to be withheld from humanity, and is needed in this time of great global crisis.

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References:

About Credo Mutwa, Credo Mutwa on Alien Abduction and Reptilians, www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_credo_mutwa03.htm
About Credo Mutwa, Credo Mutwa – Biography, www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_credo_mutwa04.htm
Bill Chalker, Hair of the Alien: DNA and Other Forensic Evidence of Alien Abduction, Paraview Pocket Books, USA, 2005
Nancy Connor and Bradford Keeney, Shamans of the World: Extraordinary First-Person Accounts of Healings, Mysteries, and Miracles, Sounds True, Inc., USA, 2008
David Icke, Children of the Matrix: How an Interdimensional Race has Controlled the world for Thousands of Years – and Still Does, Bridge of Love Publications, USA, 2001
John E. Mack, Passport to the Cosmos, Crown Publishers, USA, 1999
John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, Simon & Schuster, UK, 1994
Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies, and Mysteries, Destiny Books, USA, 1996
This article was originally published, in a substantially different form, in the May 2008 issue of FATE (vol. 61, no.5, issue 697), under the title ‘Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa and the Alien Agenda’.

LOUIS PROUD, who lives in Darwin, Australia, is an avid writer and researcher specialising in paranormal and occult phenomena, conspiracism, and fringe science. Described by Colin Wilson as “one of the most acute commentators on the paranormal to appear in recent years,” his work has been published in Fate, Paranormal, Nexus and New Dawn magazines. He has written two books: Dark Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences (Anomalist Books, 2009), and The Secret Influence of the Moon (due to be released in late-2013 by Inner Traditions). His blog is http://louisproud.net.