Ruby Reed (advaya): I'm truly honored to be joined by Mphatheleni and Pooven. Both of them come from very different ancestral lineages, and they are both joining us from South Africa, where they play very important roles as activists in the human rights and ecological spaces.
Mphatheleni is an activist, academic, and indigenous knowledge systems keeper from Venda, near the Zimbabwe border. She has dedicated her life to defending sacred natural sites, particularly sacred indigenous forests, rivers, springs, wetlands, as well as seeds and food systems. She is passionate about intergenerational learning and works closely with women and community members to revive indigenous knowledge and practices through eco-mapping, community dialogues, workshops, and research techniques.
Pooven is an international human rights and environmental lawyer from South Africa and a social justice activist. He has played an important role in various NGOs, including serving as the executive director of Natural Justice, where he represented indigenous and local communities across Africa in their efforts to stop rights violations and territorial destruction. He has also worked with organizations like ActionAid and Oxfam. Pooven has contributed to numerous global struggles, starting with the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa when he was only 14 years old. He is a council member of the ICCA Consortium, a global movement of indigenous and local communities protecting their territories. He is also the chair of the Defending the Territories of Life Stream, working with environmental and land defenders. Pooven is on the board of Awana Digital, which supports indigenous communities and their territories by combining ancient knowledge with modern technologies. Additionally, he serves on the board of the Institute for Natural Law and the international board of 350.org.
I hope you don't mind that I read out these bios, but I thought it was important to give context to these two incredible voices joining us today. Now, before we dive in, I'd like to invite both Pooven and Mphatheleni to introduce themselves from a more personal perspective, reflecting on their lineage, traditions, and where they are now. I'll pass it over to you, Mphatheleni.
Mphatheleni Makaulule: When I put my hands together and see it, it is part of our system of life. From my childhood, growing up, we weren’t taught this formally, but we saw it in action. Women, especially, would put their hands together and say, "Ah," looking down in this way as a sign of respect. I learned that this wasn’t just cultural respect but a respect for the spirit of the ancestors. I'm doing this today, speaking, as an act of respect for our ancestors. One of my ancestors is my son, who passed away at 20 years old, just 5 months before. Now he is the firstborn in another space, as one of my ancestors.
My name is Mphatheleni Makaulule, and I’m from South Africa, from the Limpopo province in a place called Venda. I grew up near the elders, especially my father, who was 74 years old when I was born. He passed away when I was 23, and I learned so much from him—not in the way of direct teachings, but through the knowledge that came to me naturally. When he passed, deeper knowledge came to me, which we describe as indigenous or ancient knowledge. I also come from the mother’s lineage; my mother is the daughter of the oldest traditional leader, a chief who was very old. I learned a lot from my grandfather through my mother. Even when she was sleeping, my mother would wake up and tell me stories about how her father respected the ancestors and nature.
To summarize, I come from this family, and growing up in this environment naturally led me to what I am doing today. Currently in Venda, we have formed an organization called Tomola Mupo, which translates to "The Voice of Natural Creations of the Universe." It’s a bigger group, but our focus is on making the living life of our ancestors real in whatever we do. It’s rooted in spirituality. I am a defender of the ancestors, a defender of sacredness. And this defense often comes through hardships, as I experienced after my father passed away. That’s how I would describe myself.
Pooven Moodley: Thank you, Mphatheleni. Ruby, if it’s okay, I’ll go ahead. Mphatheleni and I work very closely together, so it’s truly an honor to share this platform with her. I was just mentioning earlier to Ruby that tomorrow night, for the equinox, we’ll be climbing up Table Mountain in a special process. We are pushing for the legal recognition of the mountain as a being, similar to what we are doing in the Amazon with the Sarayaku territory and in many other places. The idea is to shift how we perceive and experience the world. It’s about a shift in consciousness.
My ancestry is from Tamil Nadu in South India. In the 1860s, many people were placed on a ship from Chennai to Durban in South Africa to work, essentially as indentured laborers, on the sugarcane plantations. That’s how my ancestors came to South Africa, and their journey has been a difficult one—from colonized India to colonized South Africa, to an apartheid South Africa. They experienced all kinds of trauma, grief, and hardship.
I grew up in Zululand, South Africa, which is the land of the Zulu people. I was deeply immersed in Zulu culture, alongside my Tamil heritage. Over time, especially in my work as a human rights and environmental lawyer, I was taken to indigenous communities worldwide. Once you are in these communities, you are welcomed, taken through ceremonies, and introduced to a very different understanding of life. It’s an understanding that challenges the colonial worldview—where the Earth, trees, rivers, and plants are seen as objects, rather than as living beings we are deeply connected to.
In my legal work, I’ve been involved in pushing the boundaries of the law. Recently, we defeated Shell in a case in South Africa. We argued that the ancestors live in the ocean, and if Shell conducted seismic surveys for eight months nonstop, it would not only harm the environment but disturb the ancestors. While Shell’s lawyers laughed at us, the judges took our arguments seriously, and we won the case. This is the power of understanding life beyond what we traditionally know.
Through these experiences, I’ve been called to work on specific projects related to the energy grid of the planet, bringing together elders from different traditions, and around sacred artifacts. All of this is tied to my personal experiences with death in my family. But before I go into that further, I’ll pass it back to you, Ruby.
Ruby: Thank you so much, Pooven. I’m going to add myself to the screen for a moment and include Mphatheleni as well, so we’re all visible. Thank you both for sharing about your personal ancestral experiences. One thing that really strikes me is the position of the ancestors in both of your stories. There’s a clear emphasis on the ancestors—on who we are in relation to them, and to the people who have come before us. Mphatheleni, thank you for sharing about your son, particularly.
I’m curious to explore further how this reframing of oneself within a lineage—connected to those who have come before and those who will come after—can help us think differently about death, compared to how it’s understood in today’s materialistic world. Mphatheleni, you also mentioned Mupo, and I think it would be wonderful if you could speak more about Mupo for everyone on the call.
For the next part of our conversation, I would love to delve into how death is conceived from both of your perspectives. Who would like to speak first? Please feel free to unmute and share.
Pooven Moodley: I can go first. Death has always been a part of my life, even during the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Death was a constant. I was on a hit list, and many of my comrades and friends were killed. I was number six, and four of them were killed before me. In the activist world, we lost many people, and at that time, there wasn’t really time to grieve. It was just about surviving and resisting.
Later, when my brother, an activist in South Africa, died at 31, it was a major shock. It was the first time I really had to deal with death in a personal way. Then my father passed away about seven years ago. A few days before his passing, I knew it was time. When I was sitting in my office, I suddenly felt an energetic shift and knew he had passed, even before receiving the call. Similarly, my mother passed away last year, and I experienced the same energetic feeling when I was in New York.
In the Tamil tradition, there are many rituals around death. The process of washing the body, preparing it, and various ceremonies involving fire and water are important parts of the ritual. On the day of the funeral, community members gather, and after the cremation, we offer the ashes to the ocean. During these rituals, there is a strong belief that death is not the end but a transition to another state of existence. This transition is linked to the laws of karma and rebirth. It’s about understanding that life exists in many other realms and dimensions.
Mphatheleni Makaulule: It’s a very painful experience, but we give thanks for the wisdom of our ancestors. As Pooven said, death is not the end. I experienced this when my father passed away. When I was in university in 1990, I came to understand that death is not the final ending. I give thanks for the ancient wisdom that helps guide us through such experiences.
Ruby: Thank you, MBA Mbateleni. Thank you so much for sharing, and Pooven, I am listening to you speak. Mbateleni, I was so touched when you were explaining the role of ceremony and the role of the elders in teaching ceremony and guiding you through it when you're in a place of immense grief. I really loved when you spoke about being bathed in the medicine, being washed in the medicine. I had an image of you almost not being fully aware of what was happening as you were taken through the ceremonies. And this idea of the elders you spoke of as a living library of knowledge was a very powerful way of describing the elders—the people who hold this knowledge and share it with you. You spoke of the hope that you can gain from this knowledge and then pass it on to others.
Pooven, this relates a lot to how you were talking about grief—not as a person or a process, but something that’s collective. It’s about the family. It’s about the community. Both of you spoke so much about how the ancestors continue to walk with us. Pooven, you said specifically that they shape our path, and Mbateleni, you spoke extensively about communicating with the ancestors in the living world, as well as in the dream world, and the role of dreams. I was thinking about how we can work through ceremony, ritual, and dreams.
But I also felt that it wasn’t just through those means. I think if you weren't raised in a tradition that has a strong sense of working with ritual or ceremony, it could feel foreign or complicated. But I also appreciated, Pooven, when you spoke about how ceremony and ritual involve the elements—like fire and water, ashes and the ocean. Even if we don’t have elders as a living library around us, I think we all do have this library within us, and we can tap into it, even if we don’t have literal people teaching us.
This reminds me of a conversation we had last week with someone from the British Isles who is a wisdom holder. He talked about how traditional knowledge in Europe has been lost. What was once an oral culture has now been forgotten, and often we find ourselves in the process of recreating or reorienting this knowledge. There’s a sense of humility we can adopt when faced with death and immense grief, and I think there’s an intuitive sense of how to work through it if we allow ourselves to tap into that living library you mentioned, Mbateleni.
Even if we feel like we don’t have the community or family to guide us through ceremonies, we can still support others who are going through those processes. And perhaps we can create what we feel is missing in ourselves.
There was something else that came up for me when you were talking about pain, Mbateleni. I felt this deeply when you shared about the visceral pain of loss, the pain of grief and death, and what happens when there’s no hope. What do we do when there’s no hope? How does the human spirit still move forward? In the last 10 minutes, I’d love to explore that idea—what happens when there’s no hope, and how grief and loss also reflect planetary and societal realities. We can think about these personal experiences of death and reflect on broader societal and ecological realities of death and renewal. How can loss catalyze an opportunity for change or a new beginning?
Pooven, I think it would be great if you could speak on this first, given how directly your work relates to these themes.
Pooven Moodley: Yeah, thank you so much, Ruby. And I just want to acknowledge everyone in the chat group—Sidra, Maria, Theresa, Devika, Angelique, Alex, and many others who’ve been sharing their personal experiences. The key thing here is that, on one hand, grief is obviously a very personal process, and there’s nothing that can take that away. It’s a deeply individual journey. At the same time, many of us are going through this at different points in our lives, and many of us are also dealing with other difficulties right now.
When we zoom out and look at the bigger picture—like the massive loss we’re facing on the planet, with 70% of species lost since I was born, the loss of jungles, forests, and rivers—it gives our personal grief a broader context. We’re already in the sixth mass extinction event, and this too brings its own pain, suffering, grief, and trauma that we’re forced to deal with. It feels overwhelming, but it’s something we have to face.
One thing that’s helped me personally is looking deeply within my own journey. Despite the challenges, I’ve been able to understand who I am, where I come from, and my purpose here. I’ve also gained awareness of past lives and the roles people play in our lives, which has helped me understand the bigger picture.
For example, Elder Dave Cochran from Turtle Island, who built the Turtle Lodge, had a vision before he transitioned. He said we all need to share knowledge from every culture and every corner of the world. Even though some practices may feel disconnected, there are many ways to reconnect to our ancestry and our lineage. It doesn’t always require a book or a direct teacher—sometimes it’s about making energetic connections with those who’ve come before us.
When Elder Dave passed, I was meditating on a mountain, and he came to me and showed me something very profound—a triangle that represented what’s happening on the planet right now. Some people are transitioning to play a different role in a different dimension. And they are asking us to step up and carry the baton. I’m not just talking about elders who hold specific knowledge. I mean everyone who transitions has a different role to play in this shift.
This is why I feel that we are all starting to connect more deeply now, and that death, though painful, is triggering something within us. It’s forcing us to go through a process of transformation. I’ve experienced the loss of friends and family, and although it’s been painful, I find meaning and comfort in knowing that I can still connect with them. They are still working with us as we navigate the challenges we face today. That sense of connection gives me a lot of meaning.
I’m not sure if we need to talk about hope, but the clarity and the gifts that each of us carry are a source of strength.
Ruby: Thank you so much, we have just a few minutes left. Would you like to share your thoughts in response to what Pooven has spoken about?
Mphatheleni Makaulule: Yes, thank you. Just like you mentioned earlier about people living in traditions where their practices are no longer being passed down through experience or direct teaching, I believe there are many spaces now where people can gather to find healing, solutions, or ways forward. The healing doesn’t necessarily require adherence to a specific tradition. There are many spaces where you can find a way to know who you are.
For me, through my experiences and life journey, it’s not about culture—it’s about connection. We must not lose the forest because the forest is our healing space. The forest doesn’t require a teacher. The forest doesn’t need someone to guide you. If you go to the forest, you find yourself. You’re able to tune out the noise of the world and experience healing naturally. Yes, there can be some guidance, but the forest is our natural teacher. The ancestors are in the trees, in the rivers, and in the forest.
I have found a lot of healing in the forest, and I’ve taken others there. I am not a teacher, but I can facilitate activities that bring people to the forest for healing. The forest is where we can heal, even when we feel torn apart by loss or grief. The forest offers us a space where our minds can begin to heal.
Ruby: Thank you, Mphatheleni. I’m going to have to interrupt there, as we’ve reached the end of our call. But I’m so grateful that you brought the forest into this conversation just as we close. I want to invite everyone on the call to attend or watch the course we recently filmed with Pooven and Mphatheleni about sacred sites. We explore sacred sites that aren’t just human-made monuments like the pyramids but natural sites—forests, rivers, mountains, like the ones Pooven and Mbateleni are walking with tomorrow for the Equinox. These places help us connect to the very things we’ve discussed today—sites of healing, transformation, and change.
And I think it’s the perfect note to end on—the idea of the ancestors in the forest, how we can find healing in nature, and how these sacred places help us through grief and loss. I’m so grateful to everyone on the call for sharing so generously. We’ll send out the recording of the call and the chat history, as many people have offered helpful resources and book recommendations.
Again, immense gratitude to Pooven and Mphatheleni for sharing so deeply from their personal stories and ancestral perspectives. Thank you so much.
