This is part two of our report on traditional healers. Read part one here.
Different traditional healers claim to be able to cure different things. A pamphlet stuck on a wall in Fordsburg advertising the healer ”Dr Ismael … from the Spiritual Mountain Kumi” offers solutions to a range of problems, from removing bad luck and making one likeable at work to providing muti if one is ”weak in sex” and helping ”women who can’t produce”.
Dr Ismael’s consulting room is on the third floor of a building in Fordsburg, located down a long corridor that also houses a fashion designer’s room. A white paper with his details is taped up on a half-open blue door, and his assistant sits at a desk in the front corner of the poky room.
A red and black curtain covers most of the room; beyond the screen, the space is in darkness. As I remove my shoes and sit down on a bamboo mat opposite Dr Ismael, I can barely see though the dullness around me. A red light in the centre of the space produces a faint eerie glow; through the shroud of darkness, I can just make out his face as he starts to speak.
Dr Ismael seems hesitant to talk to me, saying that his ancestors have not granted us permission to do so. Promising to contact me as soon as he gets in touch with his ancestors, I leave without hearing from him again. Unlike the healers at Faraday, Dr Ismael is cautious about sharing any trade secrets.
”Healers are extremely reluctant to be ‘transparent’,” says Professor Robert Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand who has worked closely with traditional healers for the past five years. Healers follow their own rituals and procedures.
”No two healers operate in exactly the same way. No two collections of divining bones are the same. Each ritual is different and depends on the case and the dreams and other inspirations of the healers who conduct them.
”There is also tremendous diversity in the way herbs are used, the specific types of herbs used, what they are believed to do, how they are administered … There is, in fact, no common knowledge, formalised and teachable as such,” Thornton says.
Charlatans
Some feel that this leaves the industry wide open to charlatans and ”quacks” looking to make easy money. And the government’s implementation of the 2004 Traditional Health Practitioners Act, which seeks to register and regulate healers, is aimed at, among other things, protecting the public from such elements, the Health Department’s Rose Mdlalose says.
Thornton disagrees, though, saying ”there will always be criminals who purport to offer ‘healing’ and muti to help other criminals … the Act will have no effect on this”.
Doctors for Life International, an NGO, opposes the Act and the formalisation of traditional healing, saying its herbs and methods are not scientifically tested, and dangers exist with the ”muti murder” elements linked to it.
Unisa’s Minnaar researches muti killings, and says it is difficult to obtain statistics for such murders as most of these are simply investigated as normal killings would be.
He says the use of ”strong muti”, or muti containing human body parts, is widespread in African countries south of the Sahara. There is a belief in the greater efficacy of ”strong muti”, and some unscrupulous individuals capitalise on this. ”But it is not exactly a common crime,” Minnaar adds.
Thornton agrees that these activities are rare, saying individuals who engage in it are ”criminals, not healers”, as most healers believe that if they cause harm, death or illness they will lose their healing powers.
Paulina says these elements do exist. ”Some people use their knowledge to change the gifts their parents gave them, to be able to do these wrong things,” she says.
”Witches hide themselves … They appear as sangomas but they are not; real sangomas can see them … real healers are employees of God,” Mvubu says.
”You have to be truly honest and forgiving [when working as a healer],” Paulina says, ”like when someone does something to you, you have to tell yourself that she doesn’t know what she is doing. You have to forgive them.”
Mduduzi Ntuli, Mvubu’s 21-year-old apprentice of sorts, says witches are people who are not in touch with the ancestors. ”Ancestors are only for a good reason; this place [Faraday market] is only for a good reason.”
The power of herbs
Faraday is principally a muti market, with a great amount of herb sellers and herbalists working around the few sangomas there. Sangomas and herbalists generally work independently of each other, and some practitioners see the relationship between them as similar to that between a doctor and a pharmacist.
Mvubu explains that while a herbalist can only prescribe medicine after patients say what is wrong with them, a sangoma already knows their problems.
”If there is water in the womb, for example, the smoke from [this] water rises to the chest and makes you sick,” Samson says. ”The herbalist will just go straight to the chest, but the sangoma will be able to see that it’s the womb that’s a problem … a sangoma can see it, because their ancestors let them.”
Healers such as Mvubu, Mthiyane and Zikhali prepare muti specially tailored to the ailments of their patients. To do this, they ground together numerous herbs to blend something suited specifically to a patient. These types of muti often do not have specific names, according to Mthiyane, as they are all created uniquely.
Scelo Mvubu, Samson Mvubu’s son, works as a herbalist at Faraday. He mostly stocks bottles of animal fat, such as that of horses and anacondas, as well as skinned and dried creatures like meerkats, which he calls izimbila. ”We use this to create power for you,” Scelo says, explaining that specific combinations of herbs and animal fats could give one better luck or make one successful in business.
Also a herb seller, Samson says traditional means are able to help in more ways than Western medical practice can. Pointing out a beige, bean-like herb that he calls mpata mpata, he says it is used to ”decrease war”.
”If South Africa is in war with another country, and if our president bathes with this, they will stop fighting,” he says.
Western medicine
Paulina feels that traditional means help people in certain ways and Western medicine helps in others, but they both have an important role to play.
”There is a sickness called high blood; black people didn’t used to get it, we [sangomas] can’t cure it, we don’t know it,” she says. ”It is a white [Western] doctor’s sickness, like operations; and white doctors can’t cure some sicknesses that we can.”
Ntuli is being trained and educated about herbs and muti. Although neither a healer nor a herbalist himself, he says he feels it is important to learn about herbs anyway. He also feels that it is important for traditional and medical doctors to work hand in hand.
”These days we are facing so many problems and diseases,” he says. ”Maybe one day I will find something [a herb] that can cure HIV/Aids, but we will need to work together, because I will need a scientist’s help to test it and see [if it could work].”
Wearing silver earrings and All-Star shoes, Mduduzi is not particularly traditional. Although his grandmother was a ”tribalist”, he ”did not grow up with the traditional healing thing”. He moved to Johannesburg to study public relations at university in 2003, and has since seen the importance of learning about this aspect of his heritage.
”I won’t become a herbalist or anything, but I just want to learn,” he says.
Scelo Mvubu has also learnt to embrace his traditional identity. Talking about being a herbalist, he says: ”My ancestors forced me to do this job; at first I did not like it, but I do now.” Removing his sunglasses and showing off his collection of bottled animal fats, he says: ”It is better now.”
This prevailing link to culture, heritage and the world of ancestors keeps traditional healers bonded to the societies they serve.
While groups and individuals such as Doctors for Life International and Thornton argue that measures like the Traditional Health Practitioners Act will either destroy the identity of these people or negatively affect Western ideas of healing, and while the government pushes on with its plan to implement it despite the potential shortcomings, these healers are still content with where they are.
Over the years, the rites guiding this world have remained practically unchanged, and they probably will for generations to come.
As Mduduzi says: ”People are different, some things work for some people and other things for others … and for us, this works better.”
Read part one of our report on traditional healers