Magic chastity potions, muti murder, smoking vulture brains to win the lotto and so-called cures for HIV and Aids. This is the sinister side of traditional healing. A picture of unethical, unsavoury behaviour surrounds some of these practitioners.
Magic chastity potions, muti murder, smoking vulture brains to win the lotto and so-called cures for HIV and Aids. This is the sinister side of traditional healing. A picture of unethical, unsavoury behaviour surrounds some of these practitioners.
While this is sometimes deserved, particularly with regard to purported Aids cures, according to traditional healer Amir Peters, who has practices in Port Alfred and Grahamstown, ethical, educated healers can play a huge role in building up South Africa’s health system.
He warns to be wary of the “money-grabbing tricksters” out there, however, and it is with this in mind that I enter the worlds of both sides of the business. Wisps of blue smoke curl around the small, windowless Port Alfred shop.
The heady smell of incense fogs my senses. A large dream-catcher is suspended over the door and rows of herbs, barks, and remedies are displayed in open boxes against the wall. The room engulfs me with a potent sense of the supernatural. The first patron to the store one recent morning is a woman who needs medicine to clean out her son’s system, a detox remedy.
“I chose to use traditional medicine, it is not below western medicine and often it is more expensive than that [western]medicine, so it is my choice to use it,” says Katie Maceba. People with various complaints, from bad dreams to erectile dysfunction, enter the mysterious little shop.
The diversity of Peters’s customers shows that consumption of traditional medicine is common across the population and not only the poor or uneducated. The World Health Organisation estimates that 80% of the population in Africa makes use of traditional medicine as their primary source of healthcare.
After frequent debate, the role of traditional healers was formally acknowledged in South African health policy under the new Constitution, with the Traditional Medicines Act signed into law in 2008. It states that all healthcare practitioners must be registered to practice and that they must have achieved a minimum standard of training at an institution accredited by the relevant council set up by the Department of Health.
Indigenous knowledge is embedded in the cultural and spiritual lives of South Africans. Thus, it is practical to consider traditional healers as partners in a dual health care system. MEC for Health, Sicelo Gqobana, was speaking at a provincial conference on traditional health practitioners held in Extension 9 last month.
He called for cooperation between traditional and modern health practitioners, in the form of cross-referrals and the exchange of information on illnesses and diagnoses. Many present disapproved of Gqobana’s challenge to the secrecy surrounding traditional health care.
But Peters supports Gqobana’s position on the need for transparency in the business. “I want nature conservation to come into healing to eliminate bush-stripping and allow the person on the street to buy herbal medicine for a cheap price, as well as a full explanation,” he also said.
“There are people in this country stealing medicines from the veld and selling it to organisations from overseas in bulk. These medicines then come back to us in a pre-packaged condition and we could have got it ourselves.”
So why does this secrecy exist? Peters has various answers. “One medicine can do various things; you can do good and bad with medicines, that’s why secrecy goes around the bad deeds,” said Peters. But he is part of the silence, nevertheless.
“If I know a certain root does a certain thing, I would never reveal it unto others; I keep it to myself, which is wrong, because if I do reveal it many people will be cured.” Peters’ openness and his ideals of a dual spiritual and physiological treatment are in stark contrast to the man who advertises himself as Dr Simbwa.
Thick piles of pamphlets are handed out throughout town. Simbwa claims he can do things like “bring back lost lovers”; “make your penis big long”; “safe abortions”; and “STD/HIV symptoms”.
A colleague made an appointment with Simbwa recently, saying he required an Aids cure and a bigger penis. The stairwell of the Beaufort Street office smells stale. Four men lounge on couches in the tiny office. The other side of the room is concealed. I feel intimidated by the men, who abruptly address us.
Simbwa’s intense stare makes me uncomfortable and for all my initial boldness, my heart races. How would a woman coming in for a safe abortion feel, faced with this chilling setting? “I can cure Aids,” Simbwa said, “but you need a letter of confirmation.”
He becomes suspicious of our motives. Proof of an HIV-positive status and money were the only things that would bring answers. The penis-enlargement could be done then and there if we had R400, but all of our questions around the treatment were left unanswered.
My colleague is expected to pay and enter the concealed room without knowing anything about what he’s getting into. I am left with the question, do these remedies work and, if so, how?
Although Peters employs a level of transparency, he admits to keeping some cures secret. But when it came to the visit with Simbwa, I wondered to what lengths people desperate for a cure for Aids or an abortion would go. Would they be prepared to go into a back-room, with no explanation of the process or treatment involved?
