Lizeka Mda: CITY LIMITS In Diagonal Street shopkeepers give a good impression of being eager for your custom. None of the sulky reception here, nor the grudging service that one often gets in the fancier stores.
“Come in and see,” touts urge from surprisingly – for Johannesburg – uncluttered pavements. And if you should be so daring as to venture inside their caverns, you can find anything from groceries to brazen knock-offs of designer names like Pierre Cardin.
Business is conducted in indigenous languages or Fanagalo. Credit is an alien word. What people want, they buy for cash. It may take a while, of course, as they feel obliged to haggle over the price, but eventually the women will fish elaborately tied handkerchiefs out of their bosoms and count out the necessary payment.
Between Market and President streets is a Diagonal Street institution: the Museum of Man and Science, as the sign reads. There is no tout here. One either needs to go inside or not. The faint-hearted or queasy need not bother.
Guarding the entrance to this lair of “the king of muti, herbal and homeopathic remedies” is an assortment of carved African drums and baboon carcasses of various sizes frozen in deathly grimaces. In a corner, a man sits on the floor surrounded by a collection of roots that he grinds in an iron pot.
In an environment where every shopper is treated like a potential shoplifter, the “museum” stands out for its carefree atmosphere in which anyone can browse freely. Even the vaguely disturbing otherworldly smells are not as offensive as you would expect.
Perhaps the merchandise does not lend itself to being easily shoplifted. Snake skins, elephant thigh bones, ostrich heads, sangoma belts beaded with small shells, animal tails, calabashes, all manner of horns and dried plants hang from the ceiling and brush gently against your head as you walk towards the counter.
Carved canes and spears are lined against the counter in their dozens. Standing out on shelves behind the counter are glass jars with orange, pink, purple, green- coloured minerals used for “cleansing”.
Who knows what the consequences would be of stealing from a place like this? The 50 or more people who walk into the shop every day look resolute in their search for cures for whatever ails them. They speak in hushed tones.
“I’m looking for a Vaseline for luck,” says an elderly woman. The assistant, disappointingly, does not ask for details about this luck but responds, “We have it in oil form,” and proceeds to bring a bottle whose contents are the same colour as methylated spirits.
Down the counter two men ponder the head of a bird-like creature. They whisper between themselves, consult with the assistant and go back to turning the head this way and that. They eventually leave after about 30 minutes without the head, but with some ground herbs in a small plastic vial.
Dr Kessavan Naidoo, the owner of the shop, is certainly not your regular herbalist. Yet this is what he has done for 45 years. His parents brought their knowledge of herbs from India, where they had learnt it from their parents. Naidoo’s mother established the shop in 1948 after the family moved from Newcastle in KwaZulu- Natal.
She sent her son to study medicine, and he says the last thing she expected was that the newly qualified doctor would leave his job at the then Baragwanath Hospital to study traditional Zulu medicine with an inyanga for several years.
“I know every root, botanically and in any language,” boasts Naidoo. “I can identify any plant as to where it’s from and its value. My master, Mr Hlatshwayo, taught me everything.”
Naidoo says there are 3 000 herbs in his shop. Close on 800 have medicinal value. Some of the herbal remedies he learned from his research were placed at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Museum of the History of Medicine in 1968.
It’s one of these remedies – a pollen drink – that he drinks every morning and night for the diabetes he has suffered from for more than 40 of his 73 years.
“I don’t take tablets, and I don’t take insulin to control the level of sugar in my blood,” says the doctor.
The rest of the herbs in the shop are used as traditional remedies. Inyangas and sangomas are some of Naidoo’s regular customers. They may be in need of python fat for their own mixtures, a bone, or a bit of skin from a particular animal, to help a client chase away evil spirits. These are not eaten, he hastens to add. The users burn the skin and bones and inhale the smoke. Sometimes they eat the ashes, “because no poison is left”.
“You cannot condemn custom,” says Naidoo, who has also studied anthropology and spent time travelling in East Africa and India studying healing traditions. “Every nation in the world has customs and traditions and it’s important to respect them.”
He says he gets the animals through the zoos and other places where permits are issued. “I don’t encourage poaching, chopping of trees or the digging of roots, because I have to play an important part in nature conservation. Some of these animals have been in the shop for 50 years.” He is a taxidermist, too.
As for people who deal in human parts for muti, Naidoo is scathing. “Those are quacks, not real inyangas! In all the time I have been here no one has ever come into the shop to ask for human parts.”
Naidoo is very clear that he is providing a valuable service, and scoffs at people who look down at his business.
Maybe critics wouldn’t be so uppity if they knew just how lucrative the business is. He owns the building in which the store is located. Naidoo and his wife employ five assistants, all of whom have worked in the shop for 15 years or more. He says they are the best-paid shop assistants in the whole area. He has seven other muti stores located in the city, the East Rand and Durban.
“All my shops have black managers. I practised affirmative action long before it became fashionable.”
Naidoo also owns a racehorse farm: “I was the first non-white racehorse owner in the country.”
He has so many business interests his two sons – one qualified as an attorney, the other as a veterinarian – and two daughters, who have computer qualifications, all work in their father’s businesses.
While diabetes has kept him away from the shop for the last six months – he lost the sight in one eye – it has not stopped his dedicated clients from seeking him out for consultations.
“You would be surprised who comes for help with love, luck or to protect their homes,” he says. “I get lots of whites, farmers, Jews, professionals, everyone. All people want the same things.”
While he nurses his weak health at home, his wife, who in 35 years of marriage has come to know every root, looks after the shop, and welcomes the legions of foreign tourists who visit “the biggest herbal shop in the whole hemisphere”.
“I have a saying,” confides Naidoo, “that if you visit South Africa and don’t stop at 14A Diagonal Street, you have not seen anything.”