BY Tshegofatso Senne
“The border is a wound where the third world grates against the first and bleeds.” – Gloria Anzaldúa (From “Borderlands/La Frontera”)
We begin in the body. The first site of breath and connection. The first site of pleasure and violence. The first site of health and illness. The site that carries us through histories, our joys and victories, our pains and lessons. This is the site we are nested in our parents’ belly and the site that is later lowered back into the earth.
We begin in the body, the first borderland where histories of empire and resistance collide. As fascisms rise and genocides continue to erode communities and the lineages contained in them, it is the feminized, queer and racialized bodies that are often first to be wounded. Yet they are often the first to respond. This site’s survival is how we stay alive, in physical realms, in the soul, the spirit, and the shared histories of communities constantly under threat. Our survival is an intentional and sacred refusal to be made disposable.
And how do we attempt to remain whole in fragmented times? We hold care, grief, spiritual technologies at our disposal. This is how we continue to expand what movement work can look like. Ritual and ancestral practices have always kept movements going, even when they are archived in unseen realms. To survive, we must call on memory, amadlozi*, the land we live our lives on and our breath – even as those are being torn from us. We attune to the spiritual echoes of resistance from Gaza to Sudan, from Kashmir to West Papua, from Beirut to Congo, from Haiti to Myanmar. This is how we challenge colonial timelines and capitalist expectations, putting our embodied memory at the center of our struggle. When empire fails (as it does), the spirit endures.
In South Africa, where my body borderland began and remains, spiritual technologies are not just private practices, they were and remain modes of rebellion, survival, and re-mapping a country under siege. Under apartheid, where Black life was pathologized and criminalized, spiritual resistance became an act of defiance, so much so that the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1957 was created to delegitimise and criminalise African spiritual practices, branding them as a threat. And yet, people continue to consult izangoma, izinyanga, dingaka, amagqirha* alike for protection, anointing of bodies with herbs, and interpretation of dreams of ancestors who give instructions for survival and healing. We continue to light candles and make offerings, we continue to praise through song and drums, gathering in waters and on mountains, communing with nature in ways that the state cannot fully surveil or control what is being conjured.
Even in the armed liberation struggle, many soldiers of uMkhonto weSizwe engaged in ancestral and spiritual work, the intimate details of which are rarely named publicly, lest we reveal our own sacred ‘playbooks’. This work is an ancestral technology of protection in the most literal sense. When you live in a world where your skin is treated as a weapon, your language and prayer marked as dangerous, or your history is wiped from textbooks, you call on something deeper than the law for your defense.
We can see traces of spiritual armies being built in recent years. Mothers pray in tongues over their children’s hospital beds in under-resourced public wards. Sangomas gather the resources they need to hold, consult and heal a bleeding nation. Collectives of queer and disabled activists reclaim varieties of ancestral gifts as anti-colonial medicine. Grandmothers stitch protective herbs and prayers into garments for the displaced and disappeared. Midwives and doulas revive birth rituals once erased, calling the spirit into the room alongside new lives. This too, is resistance work.
In a time marred by the spread of fascist ideologies and the recurrence of genocidal violence, history shows us that spiritual resistance is a necessity. In the Vilna Ghetto, Jewish people used prayer and art to defy dehumanisation, and Colombian Indigenous communities protected themselves through rituals rooted in ancestral knowledge. In Liberia, Leymah Gbowee mobilized women to pray, organise, and transform grief into nonviolent action (Gbowee, 2011). Rwanda’s post-genocide healing, from the music of Kizito Mihigo to the deep trust built in sociotherapy circles, proves that spiritual care can rebuild community (Mwambari, 2019). To meet this moment, we must turn to living elders, learn from their wisdom, and reactivate the practices that have carried generations through devastation and into renewal.
Do you know the somatic, spiritual scripts in your family, in your community? Asking, listening, learning, and practicing this work together is how we resist disposability. Our spiritual work offers us another strategy of cross-border acts of solidarity, one that lives in the body and spirit, not just in theory. When we draw on our ancestral knowledge systems that were never meant to obey the logic of empire or border, this work connects us across any border. It offers us a quiet and potent tactic that we can engage in when we are far away, sick, grieving, or too burnt out to march. It shows us that our spiritual work is inherently political and vital.
The trauma from militarized policing is transmitted through our bodies. State repression leaves spiritual wounds. We must reclaim the ways that these are etched into our body borderlands, where the violence of the state collides with the memory of our ancestors. The refusal to numb ourselves is a political act of reclamation, of sacred refusal, of assertive life. By naming the emotional residue left behind by these violences, ritual becomes a form of spiritual disarmament.
We began in the body, journeyed shortly through time, and now I come to you. In the present. And ask to bear witness as you hold your grief, your rage, your hopes for a gentler world in a ritual of your own. This framing builds onto a grief ritual by Sobonfu Somé, author of The Spirit of Intimacy and a healer from Burkina Faso, who has said, “In the village, we don’t think of grieving as a private thing. We grieve together to heal the community.”
- Take 3 bowls of salt water.
- Plunge your hand into the first. Call on the names of ancestors you know, those who hold you in love. Ask them to look into your heart, they know what your tongue may not. In South Africa, we call this ukuphahla*.
- Name the violence you are witnessing, those you carry in your body. When you are done, pour the water out.
- Take the second bowl of water, speak into it your hopes, your asks, your prayers of hope and healing.
- Pour this water over yourself. Do not pat yourself dry.
- Take the third bowl of salt water, plunge your hand into it and speak into it your affirmations; we survive, we remember, we return.
- Set this bowl on your altar. Allow your ancestors to take in the offering.
- Speak to your loved ones about how this felt for you, do it together if that feels good to you. Ask them to share the ways your family or community has held heaviness. Listen.
- Remember, that grief is not to be held in isolation.
May this ritual, and these words, hold you in the answers you are guided towards. May they sit with you as you hold all that is heavy and all that is light in the world. The body is both a wound and a witness, it carries the grief of borders and mends what those same borders fracture. This is where spirit meets flesh: in the trembling, resistant breath of those who survive what was meant to break them. Spiritual resistance here is not just about belief, it is about embodiment, about how to hold life in a system designed for your demise.
*ancestors
*Traditional healers, diviners, and herbalists of various South African cultures
*To commune with your ancestors