LUCK MEDICINE in its most common form comes as a shocking-pink powder that you can buy from any general store in South Africa. You put the powder in a hot bath and immerse yourself for five minutes. Then you drink the liquid until you vomit. Apparently this makes you feel like a new person, ready for anything. Judging by its popularity, many South Africans feel they need the luck it brings to negotiate the hazards of everyday life.
Remedies such as this were banned under apartheid, and the traditional healers who prescribed them were dismissed as witchdoctors. But many traditional medicines are no longer so summarily dismissed. Indeed, one native herb among several generating interest is sutherlandia (also known as unwele or “the cancer bush”), which scientists from the World Health Organisation (WHO) have found to be safe and remarkably effective in halting the wasting process associated with cancer and Aids.
This could be critically important in South Africa, which is in the grip of an HIV/Aids epidemic. GlaxoSmithKline says that it is to halve the cost of Combivir, the anti-retroviral Aids drug it sells to sub-Saharan Africa, but even at half price the drug is prohibitively expensive considering the number of patients that the Government has to treat. Furthermore, amid all the noise over the pharmaceutical companies’ pricing policy, it is easy to forget that nine in ten Africans will not consider using these drugs anyway, except perhaps as a last resort.
Many Africans go first to a traditional healer when they have a problem. The muti or traditional medicine market that has grown up under a flyover in downtown Johannesburg is an indication of how popular the old traditions have become. As in any other South African city, rows of market traders sit by piles of skins, bones and bundles of herbs. Women hollow out gourds, which are then decorated with beads, filled with powder and healing “spirit”, and used as medicine bottles. Here “luck medicine” is the most expensive item you can buy; it comes in the form of a piece of leopard skin which, if boiled in water and drunk, is supposed to be particularly effective before a visit to the casino.
Customers’ dreams may have changed with the times, but the stalls would have looked much the same 100 years ago. Sitting against a background of office blocks are small round huts or boma, which are the healers’ consulting rooms. One, made from red earth mixed with concrete and shaped over a structure of wood and chicken wire, is marked by a hand shaped from blackened tin. The word inyanga, Zulu for spiritual healer, is carved above the buffalo horns that frame the door.
The traditional healer I visited in Soweto had worked previously as a conventional doctor in the large Baragwanath general hospital — post-apartheid, Dr Makhubele was able to give up orthodox medicine in favour of the traditional African healing that he learnt from his mother. He showed me into the boma in his compound, where he sees his patients. The traditional healer diagnoses by casting “the bones”. Dr Makhubele asks me to blow on the collection of bones, shells and a coin that he slips from a leather pouch. Once the bones have “captured my spirit”, he throws them on the floor between his splayed legs and begins to read off my condition. “Anaemia” comes up. Is he guessing, or is this a joke about my pale face?
But then he begins to rub the back of his round, bald head. I have a pressure on me, the bones tell him, which causes me to twist and leads to pain in the back of the head. Too true. He might have observed that I twist my head sometimes, because my left eye is stronger than my right, but the reason for this — a lump inside my skull which is putting pressure on one of my optic nerves — has taken months of consultations in Britain with several ophthalmologists and neurosurgeons (using MRI scans) to diagnose. Despite the Latin labels they use, it is clear that they do not know what the lump is, where it came from, or how to treat it. Dr Makhubele says the bones tell him that it is the result of an untreated injury as a child, and he is confident that his herbal treatment can cure it.
I don’t stay in Africa long enough to find out if his treatment works, but the World Health Organisation is conducting trials of several African herbs.
Although sutherlandia has been shown to be safe, some traditional practices have come in for strong criticism. Unsterilised porcupine quills or rusty razor blades used on successive patients have been blamed for spreading HIV. Most healers now ask patients to bring their own surgical tools.
Healers are also blamed for the persistence of vicious myths among the population, such as the claim that Aids can be cured by sleeping with a child under ten. And there are bad healers who make mistakes. Conventional doctors have encountered patients, especially children, whose intestines and liver have been damaged by taking the wrong dosages or the wrong medicines. Wild creatures are also threatened to some extent by the use of their skins, beaks and claws in a tradition which began when the continent’s indigenous animals were more plentiful.
But the Government knows it needs the healers if it is to tackle the public health problem. Collectively, healers have tremendous influence over the wellbeing of the population because of their power to instil or dispel belief, as well as for the herbal treatments they offer.
For almost ten years the Government has tried to create a national register of healers which would authenticate their training and skills (such a system exists in Zimbabwe). Ironically, this is where tradition has proved a thorn in the Government’s side. There are more than 30 healer associations in South Africa which refuse to recognise any authority. Many healers are functionally illiterate despite their knowledge of herbs, and will not subject their skills to the independent scrutiny of an alien bureaucracy. This recalcitrance has already caused the collapse of one scheme which aimed to cover traditional healers under medical insurance.
So while the research on traditional African medicine continues, and sutherlandia is beginning to be cultivated for export, legislation to get to grips with the nation’s health problems has temporarily run aground.
