White Sangoma
Chris Ntombemhlophe Reid was born in the small town of Chipinge on the Mozambique border of Zimbabwe. His parents were coffee farmers and he began his schooling at the local village school before moving to Cape Town, South Africa where he attended school at S.A.C.S. He moved back to Zimbabwe with his family where he completed the final two years of his schooling.
Upon leaving school he went to the U.K. to embark on a career in breeding horses and also began modeling. After two years he returned to Zimbabwe where he worked as an equine stud farm manager on a thoroughbred stud for a year. Returning to South Africa, he took a new direction and studied horticulture in Pretoria for three years, going on to work in Johannesburg first as a retail nursery manager, and later heading up his own landscape business “Gang green”, which did extremely well. He continued to model part time.
After eight years of living the high life in Johannesburg with fast cars, fancy addresses and designer clothes, circumstances led him to leave the city and join his parents in Port St. Johns, a beautiful little town in Pondoland in the Eastern Cape.
It was here that he finally realized and answered his calling to become sangoma, leaving the material world behind. He found his mentor; Ziphate Manxele of the Dlamini clan, in the hills village of Mtambalala, where he lived for the three and a half years it took before his graduation in 1997.
Since his graduation, he has met his life partner, with whom he spends half his time in Cape Town where he trains students, treats people, writes books and takes day tours into the townships and the botanical gardens.
He has also established his own traditional homestead, kwaReid, which he inherited from a renowned Pondo herbalist. His homestead is situated in a powerfully spiritual place surrounded by astonishing natural beauty in the valley of Mdakhane. Here he farms crops, goats and chickens and is available to the surrounding community as their healer.