Black Hamlet

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES COLLEGE LIBRARV BLACK HAMLET BLACK HAMLET by Wulf Sachs Little, Brown and Company • Boston 19 4 7 If¥7 COPYRIGHT 1947, BY WULF SACHS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PORTIONS THEREOF IN ANY FORM First published ig47 as "Blac\ Anger" «^^II1 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC., SCRANTON, PA. For BRENDA and MARTIN Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from Lyrasis IVIembers and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/blackhamletOOsach CONTENTS Part One: Memories of the Past 1 Part Two: White and Black Medicine 67 Part Three: Degradation 127 Part Four: Under Suspicion 191 Part Five: Kraal-land 233 Part Six: Revolt 273 PART ONE Memories of the Past n.E HAD LIVED in South Africa all his Hfe. "So," he said to me, "you are going to settle in Johannesburg. Well — here's the best advice I can give you. Leave your ideas in Europe. You're going among blacks — gentle, happy savages — children, children who never grow beyond the age of ten or twelve. So, if you have any notion of treating them as equals, forget about it." The Johannesburgers talked in a similar vein. Their atti- tude toward the blacks was as irrational, fraught with such blind fear and hostihty that argument was useless. I saw I would get nowhere with the whites. There was only one other way. I would get to know the blacks, not as blacks but as human beings. I first began to study them seriously in connection with my work at a mental hospital for blacks. I discovered that insanity in its form, content and causation is identical in both blacks and whites. This discovery made me eager to investigate the inner workings of the black man's mind in its normal state, to learn whether the emotional undercurrents and overtones of his thinking and feeling were not also identical with the white man's. I had difficulties in approaching this problem, for many reasons. To begin with, it was not easy to find a native who would be willing to become the object of a deep and pro- tracted psychoanalytical study. Africans could be found who were wilhng to subject themselves to various psycho- logical experiments such as mental tests; but examinations such as these have been carried out many times, without, in my opinion, leading to any appreciable understanding of the black man. Every psychologist knows now that a mere collecting of answers to questions submitted does not give an insight into the mind. I believe that under no circimistances can a knowledge of human beings be obtained merely from a superficial observation of a hmited number of people. Only a probing into the depths of the human mind, into the wide range of desires, conflicts, strivings, contradictory and confusing, can give understanding. And if this applies to the study of those whose language, habits, and daily hfe are identical with ours, how much more careful must we be in dealing with those who live in entirely different surround- ings, who are strangers to us, and whom we approach usu- ally with either masked hostihty or unconscious aversion, or v/ith sentimental idealization and studied friendHness. What I sought, therefore, was a native who would speak to me freely, as if he were thinking aloud, and so enable me to watch the building up of free associations and his re- actions to them. By a fortunate chance, I got in touch vdth an ordinary African, a witch doctor, whom I shall call John Chavafambira, who had lived for a number of years in Johannesburg. The fact that John was a witch doctor added interest to my study. At that time a witch doctor was to me a roman- tically mysterious figure. I thought of witches, witchcraft, and witch doctors in the confused manner of many white people, who imagine them to possess supernatural powers over good and evil. But actually, this was by no means the case, as will be apparent from the story of tMs man's life. John was an ordinary medicine man, known among his people as a nganga; in our terms, a diviner and herbalist. He told fortunes, gave medicines to guard against diseases and to counteract bad luck; he inherited his profession from his forefathers, and his sole ambition was to devote his life to helping other people. As he would often tell me: "There is such a lot of trouble among our people; such a lot of jealousy and poisoning. They need therefore help from a good doctor. And this cleverness in medicine can only come from the father. All my fathers [forefathers] were very clever noangas." My introduction to him came through a woman anthro- pologist who for months had been collecting sociological information in Swartyard, where John lived. She had discovered that John's wife was suffering excruciating pain in her legs, and I was called in to help. John, rather shyly, and speaking hesitatingly and apologetically, remarked that his own medicines did not appear to help her and suggested that some powerful poisoner must be working against him, or else that her disease was the result of hving among white people, in which case his medicines would be of no avail. "I hear that you are a famous doctor," he added. "Please help my wife. She suffers so much." As luck had it, I was successful; and one day when she was a good deal better I remained longer than usual in their tiny room and began a conversation with him on diseases, their causes and treatment, speaking to him as one doctor to another. He was obviously flattered. And when I expressed my willingness to explain the white man's meth- ods of treatment, his interest grew. "In order to become a good doctor," I told him finally, "one must have a good understanding of people. One must know what they think, what they wish to do, why they are ." unhappy . He nodded in agreement. Encouraged, I continued: "But to know others, you must first know some- thing of yourself." And I explained to him, in a simple way, the essence of the unconscious. He was, no less than white people, surprised by the possibihty that there were things in him of which he himself was not aware. "We doctors," he said, "can know everything through the bones, or through talking with our midzimu [ancestral spirits]. But it is true that I cannot throw the bones for myself." I seized this op- portunity to elaborate upon the subject; and when I offered to help him discover this hidden part of himself, he accepted wilhngly. I found out later, however, that he did not believe in my ability to do this, and that what really prompted him to come to me was his desire to learn the white man's medicine, so that he could best his professional competitors. Uncle Charlie and Cousin Nathan, on his return to the kraal. I arranged for him to come early in the morning to my con- sulting room in town, within ten minutes' walking distance of Swartyard. This was an important and favorable point, avoiding the necessity of his taking the native bus, which would have meant my giving him money for fares. Giving him money had, above all, in the beginning to be avoided. I knew that the majority of informants were paid by the re- search workers, and I always doubted the value of material thus obtained. In my case, it would have been disastrous to introduce money into our relationship. Our work had to be carried out in an atmosphere of friendliness and mutual interest: a kind of interchange of medical knowledge. For the final success of my studies, it was essential tliat John should become so attached to me that he would be wilHng to give me information, not sell it. And even when he fell into bad times later on, I never gave him money directly, but through a third person. I carried out my studies of him chiefly by the classical method of free associations. He came every day for an hour at a time, lay down on the sofa, and was asked to say whatever came into his mind. Contrary to the usual analytical practice, I wrote down whatever he said in his actual phrases and in their actual sequences. I was surprised at his quick grasp of what was wanted of him, and how freely he would talk to me. These talks lasted, with a few inter- ruptions, over a period of two and a half years. During that time I went out with him to practically every place he spoke of and talked to most of the persons he mentioned. I even went out as far as his kraal in Southern Rhodesia, where I met his family. I am telling John's story in normal Enghsh, as opposed to the broken though fluent speech in which it was told to me. Nevertheless, it is John's story, unaltered in its essence. The reader may doubt the truth of some of the events related: I often doubted it myself; but a fantasy of the human mind is just as interesting to us as the reahties of life, for it gives perhaps even more insight into the nature of the man than actual events for which he may not even be responsible. For example, the fact that a man talks continually of flying is obviously more important than the fact that he has once or twice flown in an aeroplane.

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