ISKCON Temple

Recently, after a long absence, I was invited to return to spiritual life by His Holiness Bhakti Charu Swami, with whom I had developed a firm relationship. He helped my family move from South Africa to ISKCON’s one-year-old Radha-Madana-Mohana Temple in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. Having given up my hedonistic artistic life, I was filled with trepidation, uncertainty, and fear.

It had been twenty-two years since I became an initiated disciple. In the early eighties I was the first black South African to step back from the apartheid struggle and cross the divide to Krishna consciousness, away from the violent maelstrom of political upheaval endemic to my life. Filled with violent hatred of the apartheid regime, I was fortunate to cross paths with the Hare Krishnas through the gift of a Bhagavad-gita. Mesmerized by the lyrical and spiritual quality of its revelations, I became disgusted with the continual ritual of violence—domestic, social, political, and even academic—that accompanied my existence. I decided to jump ship from my Rastafarian, ganja-smoking lifestyle and join the search for true meaning.