MEET THE BLACK LION: SICELO MBATHA

Sicelo Mbatha is a wilderness guide like no other. More accurately, he’s a spiritual nature guide, and his mission is to help people reconnect with nature and heal.

---

Imagine a world in which there is no waste or greed. This is the wilderness world, and it’s Sicelo Mbatha’s world. Sicelo founded Umkhiwane Spiritual Journeys in 2014, and runs wilderness trails in KwaZulu-Natal, from Hluhluwe-iMfolozi to the Drakensberg. The name ‘umkhiwane’ is a tribute to the sycamore fig tree. ‘The umkhiwane or sycamore fig tree can rightly be called the giving tree,’ writes Sicelo. Tourists and the community alike benefit from the company’s wilderness excursions.

FINDING BEAUTY IN NATURE
Black Lion: Alive in the Wilderness is Sicelo’s new book, co-authored with Bridget Pitt, an environmental activist, author and art teacher. Ironically, we have Covid-19 to thank for it. About 10 years ago, Bridget went on a walking trail with Sicelo over six days and five nights. ‘I was blown away by how he held that space,’ she says. She later did another trail with him, and they talked casually about writing a book. ‘Then lockdown came, and Sicelo’s work flew out the window,’ says Bridget. So she got on the phone and convinced him this was their opportunity.

Sicelo gathered his journals, read his notes and sat down at his computer. He and Bridget worked together – he in KwaZulu-Natal and she in Cape Town – to produce a truly life-changing book. It tells his story, from the six-year-old who herded his family’s goats to his work today, which brings healing through rediscovering nature. The encounters he’s had with animals, from baboons and black mambas to lions and elephants, are by turns terrifying, agonising, and miraculous, but always enlightening and inspiring. ‘The purpose of the book,’ he says, ‘is to help people find the beauty in nature, to reconnect with it, and with themselves.’

The purpose of the book is to help people find the beauty in nature.

A WELCOME PUNISHMENT
The book is not without moments of supreme irony and humour. For example, he recalls a time when, as a young schoolchild, his ‘punishment’ for perceived wrongdoing was working in the school garden. The child whose very soul was itching to escape the confines of the classroom was never happier than when being ‘punished’, working with the soil and feeling at one with nature.




After witnessing the heart-breaking grief of a mother baboon mourning her dead baby, Sicelo says he understood that ‘one of the keys to repairing our broken relationships with other species is to start appreciating the depth of their emotions’.




Related article: Paralympians who inspire us