Vusi Khoza and Annie Mapoma
HUMAN hands — burnt to ashes and mixed with herbal ingredients — are considered an effective anti-stroke remedy by muti men who use body parts in their practice.
This is according to Johannesburg muti shop owner Kessavan Naidoo, a herbalist for 30 years and close observer of traditional healing methods.
Naidoo also said female genitals and placentas, used to counter infertility and for good luck, were viewed as the most potent body parts by such practitioners. The Johannesburg newspaper The Star last year reported that police found a human vagina in a fridge during a raid on a Reef migrant labour hostel.
The issue of the use of body parts was highlighted two weeks ago when a white policeman appeared in the magistrate’s court charged with removing organs from a corpse at the Braamfontein state mortuary for sale as medicine. A human heart and two gall bladders were reportedly purchased from the policeman for R3 500.
Prices for human parts reportedly range from R500 for a testicle or gall bladder, to R1 000 for a kidney and R2 000 for a heart.
Naidoo explained that strokes were seen as the result of bewitching, with the spell being cast by the witch’s hands. A human hand, burnt, reduced to a paste and rubbed into the victim’s wrist, was therefore considered an antidote.
Other parts in particular demand, Naidoo said, were hearts, used for heart disease; eyes, used to counteract the “evil eye” of enemies; and brain matter, used in the search for political power and business success.
Naidoo said clients were asked to obtain parts from children below the age of 12 because they were believed to be more potent.
He stressed that mainstream sangomas rejected such practices, which were in decline in urban areas –although still widespread in rural southern Africa, and particularly Swaziland. A newly established police anti-corruption unit is investigating the trade in Johannesburg
In an interview, the president of Lwandlelubumbene Health and Herbalist Association in the Eastern Transvaal, Fanyane Matsaba, said sangomas were born with a healing gift and that the herbs they used as medicine were revealed to them by their ancestors in dreams. This knowledge could also be imparted in training.
“Inyangas use human body parts because they are not in direct link with the ancestral spirits,” said Matsaba.
The view was echoed by Claude Makhubela, a traditional healer from Soweto, who said: “People who use human body parts are witches. True sangomas and inyangas would never use human organs for muti because the ancestral spirits who work through them would remove the power of healing. Spirits work through the living — not the dead.”
Makhubela said those who resorted to the use of human organs called themselves sangomas and inyangas but lacked the power to heal.
“They are just there to exploit people with a desperate need,” he said.