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 Contact Information
Bio
I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, land of the Alabama, Creek, Cherokee,
Chickasaw, and Choctaw people, and came of age in the fifties and sixties,
during the great social ferment of the Civil Rights era. Our family lived
in a district called Dynamite Hill because of the frequent bombings
targeting black families who dared move into the previously all-white
neighborhood.
The deaths of close friends Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robinson in the
1963 Birmingham Sunday School bombing stoked inner fires of an enduring
commitment to fundamental social change. For the next two and one-half
decades, I followed the way of the warrior as activist in the civil rights,
Black students', women's, prisoners', anti-apartheid and socialist
movements. I now live in Oakland, California, land of the Miwok, Pomo and
Ohlone.
For almost twenty-five years I have been an attorney, specializing in
employment discrimination litigation, with a subspecialty in academic
discrimination.
In recent years, however, the rivers of this lifelong quest for
transformation have delivered me upon the healing shores of spirit. During
the passage to my elder years, an urgent yearning for wholeness would not
allow me to continue living a life or pursuing a vision of social
transformation bereft of spirit. One day in 1994, while leaving the
courthouse, a homeless woman stopped me abruptly to ask: "Is your work
fulfilling?" Before I could gather myself to answer, she pointed to the
northeastern sky, urging me to learn from the beings of the Great Bear and
entreating me to transform my life. During this time, I'd also been having
recurring dreams of the bear and the element water.
Later I learned that, in the Hindu tradition, the Great Bear constellation
represents the ark in which ancestral knowledge is preserved. I discovered
too that bear symbolizes the return of the wisdom of the ancients. Also,
the hibernating bear represents incubation leading to rebirth, or
initiation. Around the same time as my encounter with the homeless
prophetess, I had been diagnosed with recurrence of a reproductive
disorder. Both the waters and the bear, a lunar animal because of its
seasonal disappearance, are associated with the archetypal feminine.
Masculine energies dominating my life would give way to feminine.
Though at the time I was aware neither of the initiatory symbolism of the
waters and bear, nor of the phenomenon of initiatory illness, I intuited I
was on the brink of great transformation in my life. While not
contemporaneously aware of the deeper initiatory meaning of events then
unfolding, I was quite conscious of a deep yearning within. This yearning,
the encounter at the foot of the courthouse steps, dreams of the waters and
bear, and the reproductive disorder together sounded the initiatory call,
beckoning me to embrace the healing enshrined in ancestral wisdom.
The tree grows great only on its own roots, says a West African Mina
proverb. But I had no previous exposure to ancestral African spirituality,
having been raised Christian and having later explored yoga, meditation and
eastern spirituality as a young adult. But Egun (Yorùbá for Ancestors)
soon opened the way for me to sit at the feet of His Holiness Vusamazulu
Credo Mutwa, an extraordinary Zulu elder and living archive of African
indigenous wisdom. I was also shown the way to Ifágbemi Fasina, an
extraordinary Ifá diviner and Oakland-based scholar and musician, and to
Apela Colorado, Oneida Indian and visionary founder of a Ph.D. program in
Traditional Knowledge (TKN) at San Francisco's California Institute of
Integral Studies.
And so I responded to the initiatory call by enrolling in the TKN program
in 1996. Prescribing rigorous emphasis on recovery of one's own ancestral
traditions, TKN offered the life-altering gift of keeping company with
healers of indigenous traditions in Africa, the Diaspora, North America,
and elsewhere in the world.
After a divorce, shutting down my law office, and moving out of my family
home, I'd "died" to my former identity. I learned in a dream message that
my medical condition was an "initiatory illness", i.e., an illness curable
only through initiation into the ways of the Ancestors. For months,
initiatory images of water and journeying recurred in my dreams. The call
to initiation could not have been clearer.
A cowry shell divination confirmed I was indeed being called, and I
underwent preliminary initiation in the Yorùbá-based Lucumi tradition in
the U.S. in 1998. Some months later, while visiting South Africa in 1999,
I was initiated as a sangoma or traditional healer after the calabash of
initiation landed upward in a Zulu bone divination, signaling the call of
the Ancestors.
Now, having returned home from Africa, completed the Ph.D. program, moved
back into my home, and returned to full-time lawyering, I have come full
circle. Perhaps the return is a spiraling rather than circling. Today, I
consciously strive to live—and practice law—in ways that honor the
Ancestors and the spirits of justice. Almost eight years ago, when
embarking upon this journey, I shut down my law office and resolved to give
up the practice of law for good. At the time, I felt compelled to choose
between either law or spirituality, logic or intuition, and the masculine
or the feminine. But now, having completed indigenous initiation, ways of
integrating ancestral with legal work are becoming more apparent. After
years of viewing spirit and law dualistically as polar opposites, today my
practice as a trial lawyer profoundly challenges me to seek to harmonize
them in the indigenous way of wholeness. This non-dualism is the vital
essence of the indigenous sensibility.
Having been initiated myself as a traditional healer, I have come to
realize that my life's work is to facilitate healing of the social
body—not so much the physical body. And so I have spoken of the ancestors,
initiation and healing to jurors during the trial of a discrimination
lawsuit brought by an African university professor denied tenure. My
client was himself an initiated man. In the search for healing
alternatives to our adversarial, retributive justice system, I teach
indigenous justice and restorative justice at San Francisco's New College
Law School. Discussions are underway to develop such courses at other Bay
Area law schools. I have delivered a sermon on restorative justice at a
San Francisco church. I am presently engaged with local community
activists in introducing peacemaker circle processes to the criminal
justice system. I am also currently developing a project to research,
write and teach about African indigenous justice processes.
Contact Information
Fania E. Davis, Ph.D., J.D.
445 Bellevue Avenue Suite 202
Oakland CA 94605
Phone: (510) 451-0104
Fax: (510) 451-5056
E-mail: faniad@earthlink.net
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