I harbour a great sympathy for our embattled Minister of Health, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. It’s not her fault. She was sent on her absurd HIV/Aids denialist safari by her boss, the celebrated air-traveller, Thabo Mbeki. He has often stated that his personal clinical findings have proved that the HIV has nothing whatsoever to do with Aids which, anyway, is only a syndrome and not a disease. Hearing these statements, Manto realised that if she wanted to keep her job as health minister and thereby fulfil her life’s mission of reducing the South African health services to derangement levels, she would have to sing along with the dissonant Mbeki fugue. The trouble was that all the nasty things being said about her by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and its racist media vassals had awakened some deeply suppressed need for being humiliated. As each day the flagellations increased in intensity, some covert masochistic streak in poor Manto cried out for more and more of this exquisitely pain-racked fix.
Minister Manto has emphasised the value of traditional treatments for illness and disease. By sheer chance a wonderful book has come into my hands. It’s a compendium of traditional remedies for all manner of ailments and disorders. Compiled with immense style and humour by Carol Bishop, it’s called The Book of Home Remedies and Herbal Cures, published by Octopus. I hope Bishop won’t mind my repeating a few of her findings, as perilous as doing so might turn out to be. Should Manto get to see these, who knows what she’ll start adding to her already overflowing basket of vegetables.
Here’s an ancient Egyptian and, therefore, African cure for a fever which must at all costs be kept from Manto’s sight. ‘Cut the ear of a cat, let three drops of the blood fall into some brandy, add a little pepper thereto and give it to the patient to drink.” Bishop adds that no remedy was suggested for the cat.
An Appalachian cure for the same problem might well be considered by our globally conversant health department: ‘Tie a bag containing the sufferer’s nail paring to a live eel. It will carry the fever away.”
Consumption was an earlier name for pulmonary tuberculosis (TB), a disease currently running riot in South Africa. In case she’s tempted to abandon traditional European remedies marketed by exploitative international pharmaceutical houses, please don’t let Manto ever hear about the cure invented by Newfoundlander, Benjamin Smith, in 1841. ‘Take an old cock, a beast’s foot, four ounces of goats-horn shavings, six poppy heads, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, boil all together until it comes to a jelly. Add as much lump sugar as will make it sweet and a bottle of red port wine.” Two teacups a day keep the TB away.
The common or garden affliction of diarrhoea can easily be treated by traditional means, thus saving enormous sums of money. The Country Gentleman and Farmer’s Best Guide of 1741 advises: ‘Grate to a fine powder the dry’d pizzle of a stag and give it as much as be upon a shilling or thereabouts once or twice a day in any convenient vehicle.” A pizzle is a penis. Where to go for dried stag schlongs is something the health department will have to find out for themselves.
The publication, Texas Folk Medicines, should be kept out of reach of Manto as she’d probably add it to a list of required reading for medical students. Texan remedies for the common cold would go down well with beetroot and lemons. If a patient has got a runny nose and a cough, one of these alternatives will help. ‘Apply fresh cow dung to the chest in the form of a cross. Wear the skin of white weasel around the neck. Take dried frog skins and make a powder of them, mix with fruit juice and drink. Rub the bottom of the feet with tallow and turpentine and then hold the feet against an old wooden stove.” On no account let Adriaan Vlok wash your feet first. You could catch pernicious hypocrisy as well.
Here’s the Northhamptonshire, Devonshire and Welsh folk remedy for a persistent cough. ‘Put the hair from a patient between two slices of buttered bread and give the sandwich to a dog. The animal will then catch the cough and the patient will lose it.” Don’t tell Manto and definitely don’t tell the SPCA.
Common or garden toothache is costing the health department millions in painkillers. Smith has a far more economical treatment. ‘Rinse your mouth with your own urine for three mornings and the teeth will never again ache.”
The health ministry and its redoubtable Director General, Thami Mseleku, are outraged at the response to the greengrocer’s stand they put on show at the recent Toronto World Aids Conference. Think what they could present as official South African scientific thinking on Aids at the next conference: a table laden not only with vegetables but also with cat’s ears, nail parings, live eels, mounds of steaming cow dung, bottles of turpentine, cups of tallow, goats horn shavings, beasts’ feet, old cocks, white weasel skins, hair sandwiches, dried stag penises and powdered frogs, all set off by tastefully arrayed glasses of fresh urine.
Please make sure neither our health minister nor Mseleku get to see this column.