Teresa Kutala Firmino’s family history is a complex one, with both sets of her grandparents having fled civil war. Firmino was born to a Congolese father and an Angolan mother in 1993 in Pomfret, a town in the North West province of South Africa, where many of the former soldiers of the country’s 32 Battalion—a unit of the South African army founded in 1975 that fought in Angola—settled after the Angolan war. 

She tells the story of how her Congolese grandmother, while hiding out in the forest, having fled not just the war but also an abusive marriage, fell into a dreamlike trance in which she saw humanoid figures that were so tall she could not possibly see the tops of their heads. Many other women in Firmino’s childhood community have similar stories of these figures, whom they called “owners of the earth.”

Find the full story here.