Why three elder women call Africa the 'womb of humanity' ahead of a major gathering

Three women talk over a video call, hosted by Dominic, an organizer linked to the World Tribal Alliance (WTA): Queen Eloise, who presents herself as a leader of the Korana people in southern Africa; a South African traditional healer introduced as Gogo, a sangoma (a term for healers and diviners in Zulu, Swati and Sotho traditions); and Auntie Puna, a Hawaiian elder tied to royal Hawaiian lineages. The conversation lays the groundwork for the Origins gathering, a meeting of elders from several continents set to take place in South Africa.

The most concrete account is Queen Eloise's. She says that starting in 2020, after learning of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — a real document, adopted by the UN in 2007 — she began reclaiming land historically occupied by the Khoi and San peoples, now grouped under the term Khoisan. According to her, the land was occupied without direct confrontation and now supports more than four thousand households. The video offers no independent verification of that figure or of the legal process behind the claim.

The rest of the conversation is of a different nature: less fact, more shared belief. Eloise describes a vision in which she saw, in a cloud, the shape of Africa separating from Madagascar, which she interprets as a prophetic sign for the WTA's expansion across the continent. Auntie Puna spends a long passage unpacking the layers of the Hawaiian concept of aloha — compassion for oneself, for family, for the collective — as a key to understanding the gathering's purpose. And Gogo recounts her training as a sangoma, a calling she describes as coming directly from the land's own ancestors.

What ties the three accounts together is the idea that Africa, and specifically the Cape of Good Hope — where the gathering will pass through Cape Point and Robben Island, the former political prison now a UNESCO World Heritage Site — functions as a symbolic "womb" of humanity, from which healing for colonial traumas carried across lineages is expected to flow. It is a spiritual reading, acknowledged as such by the participants themselves, not a historical or anthropological claim.

Worth watching for anyone who wants to understand, in the organizers' own words, what drives gatherings like Origins: less a declared political agenda, more an attempt to give collective meaning to personal stories of loss and reconnection with the land.