Of Those Who Call the Rain
I first met Colin Campbell ten years ago when I invited him to teach at Schumacher College. He was recommended to me by a dear friend Julie, who came across him at home in his native Botswana. “He is just so wonderful” she said about this white man who was brought up from childhood in an ancient african land-based tradition and is now one of the last lineage holders of its magical practices, along with his brother Niall. She was right, he is wonderful, and ten years later I still have to grab a pen every time he speaks, knowing I’ve only ever glimpsed the surface of what he knows of the common wild tongue.
Colin is a diviner, one who understands the flows and balances and relationships of places and stories and ancestors, and can translate how these might apply to our life questions. He offers readings and communications through throwing of the bones, or ‘di taola’, in his native Setswana language. Anyone witnessing this arcane process of throwing the bones, from elephant, lion, hyaena, knows that this advice comes directly from ancestors or spirits or perhaps the land. You only need to ask once because the cryptic meaning of what ensues can take years to unfold, and leaves the same quality of truth as a portentous dream.
His reading for me, years ago now, suggested I focus solely on spirit work, because anything else would waste my time. This was said in so many words, because the bones themselves, in the pattern of how they land when he throws them, are represented by one of many hundreds of poems which Colin knows and can translate into the context of your inquiry. This was an axial moment of change for me as my professional work for years had been in a reductive form of environmental science. Thankfully now, after years of doggedly heeding his advice, I have managed, more or less, to build a bridge between science and spirit, which I can cross with my cognitive framework intact.
The exciting thing is that recently Colin has decided to work closely with his wife, Hanien Conradie, who is an exceptional painter and land artist, a wisdom holder in her own right. The two of them together alchemically combine his work in ritual, healing and restorative balancing, with her knowledge of beauty-making on and with the land. Their aim is to cultivate and call back the role of the artist-healer in our deeply uncertain times. This is the ancient work of The Rainmaker in the African stories and practices. The Rainmaker is the one who makes the land so irresistibly and exquisitely beautiful that the clouds are allured to drop their rain. This is important for survival in Botswana.
I am lucky enough to hold space for them and I witnessed their first work together, alongside a game and pioneering circle of artists and animists in the wilds of the English Lakes. We set out onto the wild hills together with no real certainty that the spirit of the Rainmaker could be awakened in a different country, a different culture, a different time. We went to the land over and over again to make beauty from the natural materials we found there, simple offerings as a prayer to place, to propitiate the unseen forces. We hoped that this ephemeral land art which was gone with the winds and tides, would work with the ritual and ceremonial aspects of connecting with the ancestors and spirits we called upon.
All I can say now is that this time changed us all, in so many ways. As we made the most beautiful offerings we could think of, with earth, clay, flowers, leaves, with no intention other than to give gratitude and allure the rain, we wanted to see if nature would respond to us, and she always did. The wind would blow suddenly from a still sky, a bird started to sing on a branch above us, a swallow joined our early morning ritual performance of flight, with grass wings that we made from the fields. Even Colin, who has worked this way with nature from childhood, rushed back from his first making beside the lake with thrilling news of how the water made its response.
On the last day it rained. That in itself is not unusual in the lakes, but on a cloudless week in July, the sky chose to give back its first drops in the last moment of our closing ceremony. I am convinced there is something potent and necessary in this making of beauty, to show that we have witnessed and appreciated, and that we give our thanks. It is what happens in the silence afterwards that is amazing, in the moment after the work is finished and you look to the sky and say ‘this is for you’. It can be the images that appear on the surface of our imagination, which not only help to restore the land in some way, but restore us too, and show us that there is probably no difference between us.
We can all be Rainmakers. I think a lot of us already are and just don’t realise. I want to find out more about what this creative practice means for humans and how it fits into the remembering of our ‘common wild tongue’, which seems not to be about human words but instead about a deep sense of reciprocity, that somehow creates a sympathetic resonance, that somehow then allures the rain. It’s mind-blowing … and really magic!
Of Those Who Call The Rain with Hanien Conradie & Colin Campbell
Free talk, 2 November 2025
https://animate-earth.org/events/of-those-who-call-the-rain/
this talk is part of
The Rainmaker Online: Art Animism & Restorative Practice
3 month course with Hanien Conradie & Colin Campbell