Meandering Paths African Healers' Professionalisation and Popularisation in Processes of Transformation in South Africa, 1930-2004

Kirsten Rüther

Habilitationsschrift zur Einreichung bei der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Hannover

Hannover, 11. Januar 2006

TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 4 7 GLOSSARY

1 INTRODUCTION 11 SETTING THE FOCUS AND CONTEXT • Historical Orientations • Methodological Concerns: Processes of South African Transformation • The Focus: A Healer-Centred Perspective • Contexts: The Professional and the Popular • Explorations: The Mediating Materials

2 TROPES OF LEGITIMACY 39 DISCURSIVE ASSESSMENTS OF AFRICAN HEALERS • The Rule of Marginalisation, Social Pervasiveness and Academic Re-Enactment • The Furtiveness of African Healers' Activities • A Peculiarly African Culture Of Rural Abodes • Traditional Healing

3 ATTEMPTED PROFESSIONALISATION 65 FORMAL PRESENTATIONS OF HEALERS' ASSOCIATIONS TO THE AUTHORITIES • Reading the Archive • Sophiatown, 1937-1938: The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society • Professional Associations • Urban Transformation and Increasing Racism: The Intended Professionalisation of South African Healers • The Certified Healer

4 HEALERS' POPULARISATION 124 REPRESENTATIONS OF IZANGOMA AND IZINYANGA IN NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES • Browsing Newspapers and Magazines • More than Transformation into a Commodity: Healers in Bona Magazine, 1979- 1986 • Popular Representation in Tabloids • Apartheid's Underground: Health and Popular Culture • The Popular Healer

5 COLOURFUL FIXATIONS 168 OVER-DETERMINATION AND NEGLECT • Wordless Worlds • Entertainment in Colonial Pietermaritzburg, and When "Times Immemorial" Pass By: A Random Sample of Images • Silence, Difference and Fixation • Denied Transformation: Alienations and Estrangements • The Tribal Healer 3

6 THE FANTASTIC WORLD OF DOCUMENTARIES 206 NOTIONS OF A NOT YET RECONCILED SOCIETY • Delayed Narratives • Soweto and Johannesburg at the Height of Apartheid, and 1993: A Healer in Suburbia • Encountering Difference and Post-Apartheid Transformation in South Africa • Coping with Change: Unsettled Paths into the Future • The Culturally Brokered Healer

7 SINCE THEN… 238 PARADIGMATIC CHANGES MORE RECENTLY? • Some Current Visibilities of Healers • Documentaries and Picture Publications Re-Visited • Newspapers and Magazines Further Explored • Back to the Original Objective

8 CONCLUSIONS 260 HEALTH-SEEKERS, HEALERS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN STATE

9 BIBLIOGRAPHY 270

List of Illustrations

1. Correspondence of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives 72 Sangoma Society of Sophiatown with the Minister of Public Health, 8 Nov 1938 (SAB, GES 1787 25/30K)

2. Certificate of the Cape Province Herbalist Association, 89 valid 29 Apr 1957-28 Apr 1958 (SAB NTS 9303 9/376)

3. Certificate of the Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association, 89 valid 19 June 1958-19 June 1959 (SAB NTS 9303 9/376)

4. Healers' professional associations in South Africa 92

5. Motto of the African Dingaka Association printed in their stationery 95 (SAB NTS 9303 7/376)

6. Motto of the Orange Free State Herbalists Association, printed at the side of 96 their stationery (SAB GES 1788 25/30M)

7. Motto of the Natal Native Medical Association, printed at the side of their 97 stationery (NAB CNC 50A, CNC 43/25)

8. Membership card of the South African Native Bantu Dingaka 99 (SAB GES 1789 25/30s)

9. Letter of ngaka I. J. Ndhlovu, scientist and president of the Natal and Zululand 104 Inyangas and Herbalists Association, Durban, 16 Sept 1942 (SAB NTS 9302 1/376)

10. Motto of Isambane Medcines: Isambane above, like us, thrives on roots and 108 rests not on its laurels (SAB NTS 9303 9/376)

11. Stamp of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma 109 Society: To Introduce Native Custom (SAB GES 1788 25/30M)

12. Call for conference of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives 117 Sangoma Society, scheduled for 11 December 1938 (SAB GES 1788 25/30M)

13. Call for conference of the Orange Free State African Herbalists Association, 118 scheduled for 10 Dec 1953 (SAB NTS 9305 12/376) 5

14. Mina Molebo Moleko, Beautiful Sangoma, Bona (March 1979); 131 photographer: Jenny Ntuli

15. Credo Mutwa, Bona (January 1976); 144 unknown photographer

16. Smiler with a burden (Samuel Bopha Mthakathi Gumede), Bona (August 144 1974); unknown photographer

17. Face to Face with Msamariya, Echo (18.06.1981) 149

18. Various letters to the editor, illustrated with photographs taken by the readers 150 themselves

19. Various reports: images and stories of the popular media 155

20. Tea and witches, illustration in Lady Barker's memoirs of her years in 174 Pietermaritzburg (Lady Barker. A Year's Housekeeping in South Africa. London 1883).

21. A Zulu diviner singled out for study 176 (Duggan-Cronin, A. M. The Bantu Tribes of South Africa: Reproductions of Photographic Studies. Cambridge 1938).

22. A Zulu diviner with a party of pupils, posing as if involved in dancing 176 (Duggan-Cronin, A. M. The Bantu Tribes of South Africa: Reproductions of Photographic Studies. Cambridge 1938).

23. A divination session in Natal, 177 originally published in 1906, reprinted in a coffee table book published in 1968 (Tedder, Vivian. The People of a Thousand Hills. Cape Town 1968).

24. Drawing by Barbara Tyrrell entitled "Shangane witch-doctors", with much 178 adoring attention to detail (Tyrrell, Barbara. Tribal Peoples of Southern Africa. Cape Town 1968).

25. Drawing by Barbara Tyrrell entitled "Bhaca diviner" 178 (Tyrrell, Barbara. Tribal Peoples of Southern Africa. Cape Town 1968).

26. A Zulu diviner captured by Alice Mertens, creating the impression as if 180 running towards the viewer (Mertens, Alice/ Schoeman, Hilgard. The Zulu. Cape Town 1975).

27. Jean Morris' photograph of amatwasa, as if on display in a shop window 181 (Morris, Jean/ Levitas, Ben. South African Tribal Life Today. Cape Town 1984).

28. Face to face with two diviners in Peter Magubane's a post-apartheid 183 publication about "vanishing cultures" (Magubane, Peter. Vanishing Cultures of South Africa: Changing Customs in a Changing World. Cape Town 1998).

29. Photograph by Aubrey Elliott of an igqira captioned "Young Woman Witch- 198 Doctor" (Elliott, Aubrey. The Magic of the Xhosa. London 1970).

30. Photograph by Jean Morris of a diviner, caption reads "A bold look from a 198 youthful Zulu diviner" (West, Martin/ Morris, Jean. Abantu: An Introduction to the Black People of South Africa. Cape Town and Johannesburg 1976).

31. A photograph by Alice Mertens entitled "A herbalist at work – a variety of 199 medicines are kept in the containers" (Mertens, Alice/ Schoeman, Hilgard. The Zulu. Cape Town 1975).

32. A Zulu diviner as photographed by John Mack, taken from a chapter on the 200 significance of the ancestors in Zulu culture (Mack, John. Zulus. London 1980).

Glossary

God and the Shades uThixo Xhosa name for the High God/ Supreme Being/ God in Retreat modimo Tswana term for High God/ otiose Supreme Being/ God in Retreat badimo (plural of modimo) Tswana term for the shades and living elders idlozi (plural: amadlozi) Zulu term for the shades and the spirits of the ancestors

The Art(s) of Healing ngoma Bantu term for the art of healing, refers to drums and therapeutics in which drums are used beni ngoma dance societies in Eastern Africa lemba healing association into which in particular the prosperous are initiated with the aim of redistributing wealth and favour

Terms for African health practitioners isangoma (plural: izangoma) Zulu term for diviners; popularly used as a term of reverence for women and men who command the spirits in religious ceremonies; 8

popularly also used as a derogative term for particular men who smell out evil-doers. inyanga (plural: izinyanga) Zulu term for herbalist; popularly used for people who trade in medicines izinyanga zokwelalpha herbalists izinyanga zemiti herbalists izinyanga yokubula diviners beating the ground in collective action isanusi somebody who smells out abathakati (see below) igqira (plural: amagqira) Xhosa term for diviners, derived from San expression for trance healer; often used in anthropological discourse, and Eastern Cape discourse, whereas the term is hardly ever used in popular discourse ixhwele (plural: amaxhwele) Xhosa term for herbalist amagqira elinukayo Xhosa term for witch-finders amagqira aqubulayo Xhosa term for men and women specialised in removing harmful substances from the body amagqira ambululayo Xhosa term used for people skilled in discovering dangerous charms concealed in the homestead or cattle-byre

9 amagqira okuvumisa Xhosa term for diviners specially trained in therapeutics where patients clap their hands and chanted twasa (plural: amatwasa) Zulu for apprentice-diviners in the process of starting to make sense of a life-transforming illness ngaka/ dingaka Sotho term for diviner and herbalist; no sharp distinction between the two specialists of which much is made in Zulu language. dingaka tsa dichochwa Tswana word for herbalists dingaka tsa dinaka Tswana word for diviners tinyanga tenkhosi healers of the royal family in Swaziland nganga Swahili term for diviners and herbalists

Other experts in the religious/ spiritual realm moruti (plural: baruti) Sotho term for teachers; used for missionaries umfundisi (plural: abafundisi) Zulu term for teachers; used for missionaries abathanzi faith healers iprofeti, umprofeti Zulu term for prophets; derived from the English expression "prophet"

Agents of evil, affliction and misfortune umthakati (plural: abathakati) Zulu for evil-doer, sorcerer; popularly often used in connection with "witchcraft" or translated into "witch" moloi (plural: baloi) Sotho for sorcerers tokoloshe trickster figure, exhibiting both good and evil characteristics; children are favourites of tokoloshe; they also serve as dangerous familiars captured and trained by "witches"

Substances and Medicines muti Zulu term for medicines; more recently often associated with muti murder, use of medicines containing parts of the human body, and sale of body parts dihlare Sotho term for medicine muti wenyoni a number of medicines sold to treat inyoni, a widely spread illness

Terms for Community Coherence hlonipa isiZulu for respect and avoidance restrictions; popularly seen as a binding force of society ubuntu concept of humanity, mutuality, community and compassion; in South Africa's transition the language of reconciliation has almost become synonymous with ubuntu 1

Introduction Setting the Focus and Context

Historical Orientations At the outset it was anything but clear that I would write a study on processes of professionalisation and popularisation, more specifically on the various media which have contributed to the formation of semi-public, half-official, partly intertwined images of South African healers. Within the context of a research project on religious change in South Africa I had been commissioned to interview South African healers in order to ascertain their role in South Africa's post-apartheid transition process.1 It became evident rather swiftly that the wide and often diffuse landscape of healing was in transition itself, all the more as healers' officially acknowledgeable professionalisation preoccupied many African health practitioners, who, as a consequence, were hardly interested in reflecting upon their role in the transition away from apartheid. Their interest was in the here and now, and in the future. In addition, it became instantly evident that in their self-descriptions healers tended to refer to images through which over many decades their activities had been mediated into a public sphere in which – due to their criminalisation, cultural marginalisation and religious discrimination – it had been difficult for them to present their cause all too openly. From these first encounters I concluded quickly that a particular model of enquiry had to be found. It appeared, in fact, crucial to me to assess the various scopes of African healing, the long-grown self-conceptions of various healers, their achievements and the denial of access to South Africa's public space as well as the historical backdrop against which they acted, indeed against which they enacted themselves these days. It can be maintained that in order to understand the significance of the healers' role, and to assess their activities, it seemed vital to insert a thoroughly historical perspective, as otherwise it would have been almost impossible – especially for somebody with a training in history – to understand the

1 SFB 520 at the University of Hamburg 1999-2002: Umbruch und Bewältigung in Afrikanischen Gesellschaften, Coping with Change in African Societies; Sub-Project B5: The Significance of African Religion in South African Processes of Post-Apartheid Transition. 12 complexities of change within and around the profession. Quite stringently the project developed from what was intended as a study of contemporary transformations into an analysis of the historical developments which impacted more or less directly on the dynamics of the more recent transformations. I also realised that it would reduce my understanding of healers if I pigeonholed them in a clearly defined category of either medical practitioner, spiritual guide or transmitter of cultural knowledge. If approached from our compartmentalised system of institutionalised academic knowledge, healers either fall out of established categories, or they become marginal to them. Actually, in order to get an idea of what African healers do, represent and promise, their role has to be puzzled together from knowledge and data that exists in various fields of academic expertise. Even though healers practised African medicine, they always used to be more than medical practitioners, but psychotherapists and counsellors as well. Even though in particular diviners communicated with the ancestors and applied their advice, they were more, and sometimes less, than spiritual guides or harbingers of cultural knowledge to their people. Even though diviners and herbalists were commercially successful, they were more, and sometimes less than, entrepreneurs. Even though they acted in local communities, geographical location was not necessarily the exclusive scope of their activities. In the majority of their fields of activity healers virtually eschewed easy categorisation so that it was important to assess their significance from several disciplinary perspectives. In whatever role healers unfolded their activities, they were involved in people's search for health and truth. Health, which could also be defined in many ways, has always been a valuable good that had to be maintained and was threatened in a large variety of ways. The same accounts for truth. By one means or another healers had to respond to multiple quests and engaged in the various fields in which people sought health, or searched for the truth. This turned African healers into prisms through which, depending on circumstance, they reflected a wide range of social dynamics underway in South Africa's history. Healers were in fact, to change the metaphor, mirrors at which one had to look. If looked at they reveal an image of the self. Even the broken pieces – and a history of healers can never reconstruct of more than these – catch a wide universe, and reflect the world that is around the healers and those people who consult them. Possibly it is the essence of the fractured mirror that it reflects even more in more unusual ways than a proper mirror could ever do. In many ways this study came across some of the ways in which healers fought for sympathetic onlookers, as well as it is about the avenues African healers have pursued while they were vying for recognition. 13

More and more I started to wonder whether and how an actual history of African healers in South Africa could be written. I realised that neither the history of healers nor the history of healing could be written in a straightforward manner. Apart from a serious deficiency in sources the historian encounters the dilemma that in the course of colonial interactions, healers' activities became marginalised, criminalised and officially de-legitimised. To track down aspects of the history of healing, or of the history of healers in South Africa, the historian therefore has to creep into various corners and shafts. The historian has to trace discourses which lie in separate realms, but which – this much was evident right from the beginning – resonated with one another, and at times even related to one another. The most important academic fields from which a historian would have to draw in order to approach a history of South African healers proved to be religion, health and media, particular as articulated in the popular expression. More particularly, it became clear that the study that I was embarking on would have to take into consideration the methodological tools of discourse analysis. It was between approximately the 1930s and 1990 that they became prominent in the nexus of health and popular culture. In the past few years, up to 2004, healers have risen to renewed prominence, not only because people continue to seek their advice, but because the South African state worked towards an official acknowledgement of the profession. In this study I will follow an approach that – so one could argue – creates its own sources simply by asking new question of familiar documents. Using popular or semi- academic material that popularised academic knowledge, I started to explore issues of health and popular culture. Gradually I began to discover the quality of several sources, as well as the interconnections between various bodies of sources, which so far have been ignored in more conventional studies of healing, African Religion, or popular culture. Deliberately not an exercise in media studies, this study takes part of its inspiration from the literature of that field. This is a study of particular media which shaped the understanding of African healers and their activities. Deliberately not a study in the techniques, or even truths, of divination or the application of herbal knowledge, this study makes extensive use of the literature in this field. This is a study of how understandings of those who represent these arts have developed in a particular South African setting. Deliberately not an exercise in the history of medicine, this study draws significantly on the literature in this field and the concepts promoted in this literature. This is a study that focuses on popular perceptions of health, as can be traced less through institutions and experts but more often, and often vaguely only, through the eyes of those who seek it. Last but not least, even though this study is not an elaboration in urban studies, it is a study that focuses on an urban context for reasons that will become evident in 14 the course of the study. It will not, however, explore urban-rural relations of healers and their activities.

Methodological Concerns: Processes of South African Transformation Processes of South African transformation mark the background to this study. The study was, in fact, driven by the difficult question about what exactly constituted such processes of transformation, and how they were actually reflected in the histories and perceptions of health- seeking people, of healers and of those who talked about them. Reflecting processes of transformation in such a way that would grasp the history or the often inarticulate, the so-called ordinary masses required not only an understanding of theories of transformation, but also a close view to empirical data which could be derived from various source materials. Reflecting processes of transformation also entailed an awareness of the most recent controversies which revolved around healers and their activities, hence the focus on their professionalisation and their popularity. In the pursuit of an emphasis on problems and issues, the disciplinary delineations between social history, anthropology, literary studies and media history largely dissolved. Falling back on a rather broad range of disciplines and their methodologies, in turn, was hoped to render the problems and issues at stake sharper and more graspable.2 The historical reconstruction and analysis of the complexities involved in processes of South African transformation depended on the mediating materials. Therefore, in the course of this study, descriptive narratives will sometimes provide an understanding of how people were actually involved in processes of transformation, while at other times, analyses and theoretical reflections will be emphasised. The deliberate alternation between narrative and theori- sation will constitute a key characteristic of this text, especially as not every detail that can be described can be theorised in a straightforward manner. In this sense this study takes part of its inspiration from the study of culture, and hence form a field which is concerned with a turn from "hardheaded, utilitarian and empiricist materialism … to a wider appreciation of the range of human possibilities."3 In an additional step, this study attempts to take back the cultural studies approach into social history. It is an effort towards an integrated approach which will peer, wherever possible, into both the "material situation" and the "human possibilities". Ultimately namely, processes of South African transformation cannot be limited to

2 van Dülmen, Richard. Historische Anthropologie: Entwicklung – Probleme – Aufgaben. Wien 2001, pp. 6-28. 3 Sewell, William H. Jr. 'The Concept(s) of Culture', in: Bonness, Victoria E./ Hunt, Lynn (ed). Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley et al. 1999, pp. 35-61, quote pp. 35-36. 15 purely cultural or discursive processes. South African transformation ought to be understood through either economic or social factors as well. Most importantly – this cannot be stressed often enough – the current transformation has been more than a just recent phenomenon that could satisfactorily be understood in isolation from the legacies of South African history. Current discourses command their histories. Current attitudes and aspirations are rooted in historical experiences. The remodelling of institutions is occurring against the backdrop of the previous modelling of these institutions. A historical perspective adds especially to the understanding of mass and everyday phenomena such as people's health-seeking activities and such as the nature of health-providing environments in South Africa. Rather than subject to sudden twists and turns, shifts and reorientations of notions about health occurred continuously, unfolding according to a long- established, ever changing historical pattern. The search for health as well as the provision of it constituted a field to which virtually everybody committed himself or herself. In its historical evolution, healing constituted a field that concerned the majority of the African people in rural areas. With the increasing industrialisation of the country, however, it was only natural that the field of healing also moved into the evolving urban centres. In the industrialising spots new needs of orientation and new afflictions emerged for the African people. When the apartheid state consolidated its power, it was only natural that, again, the field of healing acquired new characteristics. Healing lay cross as a factor to such transformations, particularly when the bureaucratic state transformed and when, in an almost parallel scenario, the patterns of traditional rule were submitted to change. Over and over again, health scenarios transformed. Its actors were self-confident, their social status vulnerable. Particularly in the urban setting, the new world of healing was fragile, yet aspiring. To sustain this argument, it is necessary to enter the world of various discourses in which the changes in the sphere of healing were debated on often semi-public forums. It will be important to understand who spoke on behalf of whom, and how communication amongst certain groups unfolded. Intermingling discourses will be explored in order to penetrate to the social and material realities as well, which at times can only be assumed, or outlined, rather than be ascertained with ultimate authority. For health-seeking people and experts in the field of health provision, transformation in South Africa often meant to cope in the long run with the implications of dramatic political moments on which they had minimal influence only. The emergence, for instance, of an array of independent African churches, a process that originated in the late decades of the nineteenth century, and which took off vigorously in the 1920s, hence at the time of South 16

Africa's beginning urbanisation and of the modernisation of the state, has been understood as a process in the course of which the African majority was searching for orientation. The role of independent churches has academically been recognised, for instance, though not finally been written, of course, for the 1970s and 1980s, and hence for a period of mounting repression and state violence against the majority of South Africans.4 As a consequence of this academic recognition, the role of the many of the South African independent churches can be discussed more easily in more recent processes of transformation. Similar ventures prove to be more difficult once healing is concerned. The history of healing has not yet been written against the background of historical transformations in South Africa, even though, compared to the significance of independent churches, healing has concerned as many South Africans, if not many more. The world of healing, however, was structurally less articulate. Academically, it was often pigeonholed in the anthropological present (and not only by anthropologists). Most particularly, healing was understood in idioms of "tradition" and the rural so that healing in urban surroundings attracted marginal interest only. This is the reason why it is difficult to discern proper historiographical phases, or a change of approach, in the literature on (urban) healing and its protagonists. In contrast to many church leaders, who, taught by predominantly Protestant missionaries in the word of God, had learnt about the power of the word and had turned themselves into prophetic leaders backed up by their own church structures,5 healers who were untouched by Christianity in South Africa did not command the prophetic tradition in a significant way. Historically, South Africa was rather devoid of particular spirit movements. Prophets, who instigated resistance against colonial rule, always intermingled African with Christian cosmologies. Healers' ambitions were articulate primarily in the realms of the household, the lineage and the chiefdom. Healers were dependent on those whom they served and rarely commanded an independent voice that the historian could easily retrieve today. And yet they were agents in the dramatic course of transformations in South Africa. In the 1930s, when urbanisation and industrialisation increased, towns and townships such as Sophiatown, Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Soweto, places that will come under scrutiny in this study, emerged and changed their outlook. Some of them virtually developed into permanent "hot spots". Urban resistance, ethnicity and the emergence of an urban elite which was prohibited to pursue its ambitions were factors of town and township development. State

4 The emergence of independent churches is an integral part of general histories of Christianity in South Africa. See, for instance, most recently, Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa 1450-1950. Oxford 1995. 5 For the development of a prophetic tradition out of Protestant belief in the authenticity of the word see Dürr, Renate. 'Prophetie und Wunderglauben – zu den kulturellen Folgen der Reformation.' Historische Zeitschrift 281: 1 (2005), pp. 3-32. 17 intervention into African livelihoods, abject poverty and the anger of the youth unleashed growing unrest among urban populations. After the 1970s the level of violence increased and became a painful feature of everyday life in the midst of which individuals fought for survival and in the midst of which healers provided their services. To a large extent the professionalisation and popularisation of healing was driven within legal frames which were implemented in KwaZulu-Natal. Even though other regions could be selected for the purpose of explaining the drama of transformation, the violent transformations in this particular region may serve here as an introductory backdrop against which the un- written history of healing has yet to be understood. Like in many other South African regions the first decades of the twentieth century bore witness to the emergence of manufacturing and urbanisation in KwaZulu-Natal. Chiefly rule was devalued, and traditional leaders were caught in a state of dependence and ambiguity.6 Before the mid-1980s, however, with regard to violence, Natal as a whole was never as much affected as, for instance, the Reef or the Eastern Cape.7 This changed in 1985. The labour movement, which after the strikes in 1973 had facilitated the growth of opposition to apartheid, was crucial in the political awakening of, for instance, Pietermaritzburg and clashed violently with the interests and power bases of the Inkatha Movement, which was beginning to forcibly recruit members in the area.8 A growing middle class, nurtured by the KwaZulu homeland bureaucracy had become an important political actor.9 The infamous violence at Inanda in 1985 sparked off a virtual civil war, and levels of violence would even increase after 1987. By that time, and in the context of political turmoil and economic recession, vigilante organisation had taken place in the townships of KwaZulu- Natal. Their ascendancy coalesced with the collapse of state attempts to develop a collabora- tive African urban leadership. This again, at least in part, helps to explain the state's readiness not to intervene, but rather to adopt the vigilante associations.10 It can be maintained that to the death-incurring disadvantage of the people, the apartheid state supported Inkatha violence, or did not act against it. It can also be maintained that people, their homes and their wealth suffered because the state had an interest in the extension of control by the KwaZulu authori-

6 Marks, Shula. The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in Twentieth- Century Natal. London 1986. 7 Gwala, Nkosinathi. 'Political Violence and the Struggle for Control in Pietermaritzburg.' Journal of Southern African Studies 15: 3 (1989), pp. 506-524, here pp. 513-522. 8 Bonnin, Debby et al. 'The Struggle for Natal and Kwazulu: Workers, Township Dwellers and Inkatha, 1972- 1985', in: Morrell, Robert (ed). Political Economy and Identities in KwaZulu-Natal: Historical and Social Perspectives. Durban 1996, pp. 141-178, here pp. 141-142. 9 Gwala, 'Political Violence', pp. 147-153. 10 Beinart, William. 'Introduction: Political and Collective Violence in Southern African Historiography.' Journal of Southern African Studies 18: 3 (1992), pp. 455-486, here p. 467. 18 ties and in breaking the popular organisations.11 A cycle of violence, revenge and intimidation erupted between Inkatha, the United Democratic Front and the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Conflict was particularly prevalent in the Natal Midlands, where between September 1986 and December 1988 some 4,000 people were allegedly killed on all sides.12 Such a large number of deaths had last occurred during the Bambatha Rebellion in 1906- 1908, when also some 4,000 African people – as compared to 24 colonials – had died and chief Bambatha's head cut off.13 432 houses and vehicles were destroyed in the eighteen months up to July 1988. 1,000 houses were destroyed since 1987. In earlier rumblings, from September to December 1984, for instance, another 149 people had died.14 298 murders were reported from the township in Edendale during between 1985 and 1986.15 In addition, in the south of Durban Zulu-Mpondo violence exacerbated the crisis. Faction fighting there derived from locationally defined community and the violent (re)- construction of these communities in some places. It had engendered, by the 1970s already, the creation of a class of professional mercenary killers who were hired after the mid-1980s by participants in the fights in rural Zululand.16 The civil war was also a fight over resources such as water, land, schooling and transport. Rising levels of aggression concurred with the rising brutality of the state, parallel to the decay of apartheid as a coherent system.17 To add a suggestion of what some of the violence actually looked like for the majority of the people, one description may remind one that political violence also took on a symbolic form. The necklacing by "comrade" movements has been described as a "reference to industrial waste, barricades, fire and sacrifice, a creation of the cultural bricoleurs of the locations, not the exiled political movements".18 Against this background, any maintenance of health as well as the provision of it must have been an overwhelming task for many South Africans.

11 Marks, Shula/ Andersson, Neil. 'The Epidemiology and Culture of Violence', in: Manganyi, Chabani N./ du Toit, André (ed). Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa. London 1990, pp. 29-69, here pp. 54-55. 12 ibid., p. 29. 13 Marks, Shula. Reluctant Rebellion. The 1906-1908 Disturbances in Natal. Oxford 1970. 14 Aitchison, John. 'The Civil War in Natal', in: Moss, Glenn/ Obery, Ingrid (ed). South African Review 5. Johannesburg 1989, pp. 457-473, here p. 466. 15 ibid., p. 464. 16 Clegg, J. 'Ukubuyisa Isidumbu – "Bringing Back the Body": An Examination into the Ideology of Vengeance in the Msinga and Mpofana Rural Locations, 1882-1944', in: Bonner, Phil (ed.) Working Papers in Southern African Studies II. Johannesburg 1981, pp. 164-192. 17 Freund, Bill. 'The Violence in Natal 1985-1990', in: Morrell, Robert (ed). Political Economy and Identities in KwaZulu-Natal: Historical and Social Perspectives. Durban 1996, pp. 179-195, here p. 186. 18 Beinart, 'Political and Collective Violence', p. 483. 19

The Focus: A Healer-Centred Perspective In processes of healing, healers have historically been less important than is often assumed.19 They themselves may have defined their role as consisting of a combination of the "functions" of teachers, health practitioners, loyal supporters of given authority, counsellors and spirit mediators. Patients, clientele, the state, local authorities and society have taken note of that, but have not always concurred. Furthermore, they have involved their own interests, quests, and perspectives. For this reason healing dynamics have often been described as processes which have involved larger parts of the community, and most frequently the afflicted person's immediate surrounding.20 And yet it makes sense to inquire about health practitioners in a more focused way, to assess the history of healing through a lens that focuses on healers in as broad a scope of the profession as possible. It seems, however, as if it would be difficult to apply a profession-centred approach because until very recently South African healers were denied an officially recognised professional status. Even though the majority of healers understood themselves as professionals, they were not acknowledged as such by the state. In a very general sense, healing has always been a social affair that referred to the redistribution of wealth rather than a purely medical process. It has aimed at the maintenance of bonds between people, especially a society's youth, and their ancestors and communally agreed-upon principles of order. Healing has also been also a kind of mending, repairing, and ministering to the needy which took into consideration given balances of power. It addresses imbalances of power relations, most frequently with a view towards the restoration of former power balances. Less frequently it aimed at the revolutionising of social constellations. Healing comprises the task of diviners and seers to reveal the causes, forces and agents of misfortune, disease and death. It is about truth. The causes of misfortune, disease and death may lie in the past, or they may be virulent in the present. They may even be deemed to occur in the future only. Diviners diagnose and prescribe countermeasures to the causes of affliction and point towards people involved in it. When, for instance, a diviner confronts witchcraft, he or she seeks to expose deceit and malice, and indicates the identity and the motives of sorcerers, witches and other evildoers. They rely less on examination than on observation, shrewd questioning and psychological insight. They might also seek spiritual guidance or manipulate material objects: the patterns formed by powder sprinkled on water or seeds

19 Feierman, Steven. 'Struggles for Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Africa.' African Studies Review 28: 2-3 (1985), pp. 73-147, here p. 73. 20 Prins, Gwyn. 'But What was the Disease? The Present State of Health and Healing in African Studies.' Past and Present 124 (1989), pp. 159-179. 20 scattered from a basket.21 Herbalists' expertise covers a different area. They claim magical as well as chemical efficacy for their potions. Other healers, yet again, possess surgical skills. The lines between these experts can be blurred. On a general level, healers represent but one strand among doctrines and authoritative structures of religio-cultural orientations, ideologies and social practices. Healers' propositions are occasionally questioned by those at whom their propositions are aimed. In such cases the doubtful community may consult other experts to arrive at a clearer picture, or to obtain a more satisfactory explanation of the cause of some problem. Healing, particularly if it involves a whole group of people, brings to the fore grudges and rancour in order to enact various rituals which, in the ideal case, would eventually lay to rest the affliction. Overall, notions of social reform and communal consensus are important aspects of healing, in whatever guise they become manifest. Healing also includes an economic dimension. A therapeutic society such as the Lemba in the Congo region has even been identified as "a major historic cult of healing, trade and marriage relations."22 Healers who heal in the public interest, and who may be affiliated closely to people in political power would sometimes not demand money because they command a god-given power. The community must, of course, provide for their upkeep. The majority of healers, however, are compensated in exchange for their services. They may also practise for gain.23 In fact, historically, the community did not expect doctors to disdain financial gain. The position of a healer was one of high status and could result in considerable material reward.24 Herbalists may demand money for services when they administer healing powers residing in, or transferred into, charms and medicines. Herbalists must obtain the ingredients and mix the medicines first before they hand them on to their clients in voluntary commercial and egalitarian transactions.25 The achievement of wealth is not a taboo – neither for patients and clients, nor for health practitioners. Often the other way round, it frequently is a proclaimed goal of healing. The crucial question is, rather, whether somebody is prepared to achieve wealth at the expense of others, or not. In South Africa men and women who become healers negotiate their way into that profession, or follow the call, along different paths. They do not necessarily derive power and reputation from a particular charisma. Diviners-to-be, twasa in Zulu, often experience a life-

21 Iliffe, John. East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession. Cambridge 1998, p. 9; Schmidt, Elizabeth. Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939. Portsmouth et al. 1992, pp. 23-24. 22 Janzen, John M. Lemba, 1650-1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World. New York 1982, p. 3. 23 Iliffe, East African Doctors, p. 11. 24 Schmidt, Peasants, pp. 23-24. 25 MacGaffey, Wyatt. 'Cultural Roots of Kongo Prophetism.' History of Religions 17: 2 (1977), pp. 177-193, here p. 179. 21 transforming illness before they seek training with another diviner who will teach the initiands to recognise, listen to and interpret the voices of their ancestors. Such healers often conform with the image of the "wounded healer", a type of health practitioner who knows out of his or her own experience of and insight into what it means to be ill. The wounded healer's main interest is in people rather than medicines.26 Wounded healers and diviner initiands conceive of themselves as being called into the profession of healing.27 Once they master the techniques of communicating with the ancestors, they may proceed to be initiated. Quite frequently, kin, family and friends are involved in providing the goat to be slaughtered and meeting other expenses such as food and regalia. The initiates perform the ritual killing of the sacrificial animal, and are tested in public. Later on, initiated diviners may start to practise on their own account.28 Many diviners are specialised in a particular field. An African health practitioner's office is seldom automatically inherited. The practitioner's status is largely achieved, not ascribed. Practitioners therefore have a vested interest in learning from experienced diviners and herbalists, but also selectively from scientific medicine in order to improve the efficiency of their services and therefore serve as best as possible the needs of their health clientele.29 Herbalists, the second large group of healers in South Africa, seek training with experienced masters, who take in the person as an apprentice. The profession may sometimes run in the family. The special qualification of a herbalist is not to divine or diagnose the causes of an ailment, but, ideally, to be knowledgeable about, find, provide and apply medicines. Medicines may consist of many ingredients ranging from herbs and animal substances via chemicals and spoken words to much more. Medicines which contain, or are reported to contain, parts of the human body are particularly controversial. Most medicines are attributed manipulative powers. One may use them to manipulate one's own but also somebody else's fortunes and health. The distinction between herbalists and diviners and their respective fields of activity is important in South Africa, but the lines within the ideal typology have constantly been over- stepped. Among the many reasons why this is the case is that even though the vocabulary of healing in South Africa corresponds with the "common lexicon for religion and therapeu-

26 Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition. New York 1988, pp. 211-213. 27 Johnson, M. P. 'Called to Be: Isangoma or Prophet', in: Oosthuizen, G. C./ Kitshoff, M. C./ Dube, S. W. D. (ed). Afro-Christianity at the Grassroots: Its Dynamics and Strategies. Leiden et al. 1994, pp. 165-179. 28 For a detailed account see Hirst, Manton. 'A River of Metaphors: Interpreting the Xhosa Diviner's Myth.' African Studies 56: 2 (1997), pp. 217-250. 29 MacCormack, Carol P. 'Health Care and the Concept of Legitimacy in Sierra Leone,' in: Feierman, Steven/ Janzen, John M. (ed). The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa. Berkeley 1992, pp. 426-436, here p. 431. 22 tics",30 a lexicon that was derived from the cultural context of eastern, central and southern African healing, locally specific colonial influences and the regionally rooted historical development of the profession have contributed to a transformation of terms and designations that have come to bear very specific South African labels. According to the common lexicon ngoma has been identified as a therapeutic dimension which links many locally varying cults and movements to one another. Ngoma also refers to the drums, which play a central role in a number of healing cultures. In South Africa the Zulu term for diviner, isangoma (plural: izangoma), directly refers to this vocabulary. It cannot be said with certainty, however, when and via which way this word arrived in South Africa. The healing experts in South Africa beat drums, but more importantly, they prompt a collective beating of the ground as part of the divination.31 Izangoma carry out activities such as divination and singing. The Xhosa call their ngoma-singing specialists igqira (plural: amagqira), whereas the Sotho and Tswana term their specialists dingaka (singular: ngaka). The term dingaka can refer to both, herbalists and diviners. In Botswana, the term dingaka tsa dichochwa is used for herbalists while diviners are dingaka tsa dinaka.32 In the discourses that will come under review in this study distinctions were not explicitly made. Most frequently, reference was made to dingaka. Medicines are called muti in Zulu, dihlare in Sotho. In recent decades the Zulu terminology has conspicuously started to dominate the vocabulary of healing in South Africa, at least in urban contexts where healing cultures compete with each other. Zulu terminology also dominates in nation-wide debates that transcend local specificities. This is a process that has been observed in Tanzania as well, where locality-specific vocabularies of divination have been replaced by Swahili words.33 Through colonialism and interactions with Christianity new actors of health and truth added themselves to the already existing landscape of practitioners in the field. Missionaries, apt at converting Africans, intent on vehemently advocating notions of "civilisation" and ambitious in promoting commercial activity among Africans, were often not only experts in saving souls, but also in curing the body and addressing issues of social peace. Different encounters resulted in a different labelling of the newcomers. Whereas in Kikongo, for

30 Janzen, John M. 'Drums of Affliction: Real Phenomenon or Scholarly Chimaera?', in: Blakely, Thomas D./ van Beek, Walter E.A. /Thomson, Dennis, L. (ed).Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression. London 1994, pp. 160-181, here p. 164. 31 Müller, Aegidius. 'Wahrsagerei bei den Kaffern.' Anthropos 1 (1906), pp. 762-778; 2 (1907), pp. 43-58. 32 Ulin, Priscilla R. 'The Traditional Healer of Botswana in a Changing Society', in: Harrison, Ira E./ Dunlop, David W. (ed). Traditional Healers: Use and Non-Use in Health Care Delivery (Rural Africana - Current Research in the Social Sciences 26). East Lansing/ Michigan 1974-75, pp. 123-130, here p. 124. 33 Swantz, Lloyd. The Medicine Man among the Zaramo of Dar es Salaam. Uddevalla 1990, p. 63-79. 23 instance, missionaries were called nganga,34 healer, in the Zulu language they were called umfundisi, teacher, and the Sotho-Tswana decided to call them baruti, teacher. In 1862 the Pedi paramount Sekhukhune was reported to have admonished his subjects by saying that 'Mynheers have not come to make rain, they will teach!'35 Furthermore, medical doctors came from Europe, sometimes as missionaries, sometimes as health practitioners in secular guise. At first they interacted with African specialists and debated each others' expertise, but later they ceased to continue this practice.36 New religious movements were initiated by prophets, known as iprofeti (singular: umprofeti) and most recently as faith healers, abathanzi, in the Zulu context. They equally addressed issues of health and truth in ways that convinced many South Africans. Over the years, decades and centuries of interaction and exclusion the array of health practitioners has broadened considerably for patients and clients. And up to this point people involved in health care have not even be mentioned. In the course of history, some experts ceased to exercise influence. Rain doctors and lightning doctors, for instance, once extremely powerful, became fewer in number but still command the highest of respect.37 Innovative expertise developed with the experts when they were appropriating skills and knowledge from others whom they encountered, often as a result of people's migrations and contact with different cultures. As has been shown with regard to the Dar es Salaam context of the 1960s and 1970s, there were itinerant waganga, witchcraft eradicators, circumcisers, spirit shrine keepers, herb sellers, hawkers and midwives, all of whom acted in accordance with their own design of the profession.38 Health experts may be defined relative to even more perspectives. They do not try to avert, heal or protect against misfortunes or afflictions against which they are powerless. Herbalists and diviners would not address disease stemming from natural, or god-given causes. Such disturbances would be considered as constituting part of the order of things.

34 Schoffeleers, Matthew. 'Christ as the Medicine-Man and The Medicine-Man as Christ: A Tentative History of African Christological Thought.' Man and Life 8 (1982), pp. 11-28; Schoffeleers, Matthew. 'Christ in African Folk Theology: The Nganga Paradigm', in: Blakely, Thomas D./ van Beek, Walter E.A./ Thomson, Dennis L. (ed). Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression. London 1994, pp. 72-88. 35 Rüther, Kirsten. '"Sekukuni, Listen!, Banna!, and to the Children of Frederick the Great and Our Kaiser Wilhelm": Documents in the Social and Religious History of the Transvaal, 1860-1890.' Journal of Religion in Africa 34: 3 (2004), pp. 207-234, quote p. 210, originally Berliner Missionsberichte 1862, p. 254. 36 Etherington, Norman. 'Missionary Doctors and African Healers in Mid-Victorian South Africa.' South African Historical Journal 19 (1987), pp. 77-91. 37 Samuelson, L. H. 'Some Zulu Customs.' Journal of the African Society 10: 37 (1910), pp. 191-199, here pp. 194-195; Raum, O. F. 'A Zulu Diviner Visits a University', Anthropos 82 (1987), pp. 469-487; Schlosser, Katesa. Zauberei im Zululand: Manuskripte des Blitz-Zauberers Laduma Madela. Kiel 1972; Schlosser, Katesa. Die Bantubibel des Blitzzauberers Laduma Madela: Schöpfungsgeschichte der Zulu. Kiel 1977; Schlosser, Katesa. Medizinen des Blitzzauberers Laduma Madela: Eine bildliche Dokumentation aus Kwa Zulu/ Südafrika. Kiel, 1984; Hirst, Manton. 'Khotso: Legendary Herbalist.' Imvubu: Amathole Museum Newsletter 13: 3 (2001), pp. 5-8. 38 Swantz, Medicine Man, pp. 47-61. 24

Christian prayers or hospital medicines would be considered a strategy to cope with these, but primarily izinyanga and izangoma would concentrate on fields where they consider themselves better versed. There definitely is a competitive climate in which experts interpret evil, and different experts would offer varying strategies to tackle the problems of evil. Some health agents would not offer any treatment of evil forces at all. As a result, people who actually suffer usually have to consult a variety of experts – which, in fact, they do, and have always done. Traditionally, people protected themselves against abathakati (singular: umthakati) and baloi. These terms denote, in Zulu and Sotho respectively, "doers of evil" and "agents of misfortune", and include producers of "witchcraft" and sorcery. The missionaries brought with them a systematically arranged knowledge of witches and the devil, conceptions which were not indigenous to African society but which appealed to them because they corresponded with older notions of evil in Africa. It has been researched that notions of the devil have been translated with particular efficacy into the West African cultural landscape, where they have even been taken as the primary cause for the current upspring in Pentecostalism.39 It seems as if the devil's introduction to South African thought-patterns was less dramatic, and yet notions of Satan and the devil were established and began to interact with older notions of evil here as well. Health experts, whether missionaries, medical doctors, herbalists, prophets or diviners, learnt to respond to these new forces and the challenges they entrenched in society. In analyses of sources it must always be considered that a certain confusion of terms came into play as regards different African health agents when Europeans started to describe and categorise them. Reporting their encounters back home, or working within the framework of a systematic terminology which claimed universal applicability, missionaries, travellers, explorers, settlers and colonial bureaucrats introduced terms that differed from the rich African vocabulary. Many observers cultivated a sense that what African health agents did was morally and technically imperfect so that, as a result, the terms employed often derided the health agents. Diviners and herbalists came to be known as medicine-men, sorcerers, witchdoctors, false prophets and ascribed similar labels.40 In some areas, izangoma were known to be "part-time izinyanga".41 In one of the early ethnographies of truly seminal status it was recorded that "the medicine-man, the priest and the diviner is one and the same

39 Meyer, Birgit. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh 1999. 40 For more detail see chapter 2. 41 Müller, 'Wahrsagerei', p. 763. 25 individual, following the one indivisible trade."42 In the same text this statement was followed by a rather confusing, and contradictory explanation, which held that

the Zulu medicine-man is a personage totally distinct from the Zulu diviner or so-called witchdoctor; the medical man dealing very largely in magic and charms; the witch-doctor possessing an extensive acquaintance with disease and curative herbs. Both are commonly called inyanga.43

Even notes on witchcraft, playing a pervasive role in African society and persistently recorded by missionaries against the background of their own understanding of witchcraft and sorcery, indicated various phenomena, which were not one and the same.44 One missionary ethnographer, who used the term "witch-doctor" as a common designation for various African health practitioners throughout his text, qualified his usage of the term as being for the sake of generalisation:

Not all doctors specialise in witchcraft, for there are rain doctors, crop doctors, hail doctors, lightning doctors, grave doctors, herbalists, diviners and many others. Each man, in addition to being a general practitioner, specialised in some department of the craft just as European doctors do. […] The witch doctor is a protection to the public in heathen society where there are no policemen and lawyers, and his first duty is to protect it from people who are trying to injure it, by means of his magical rites.45

The notion that izangoma acted as "civil servants" on behalf of their communities was held by other observers as well.46 Around the turn of the century a variety of practitioners of health and order was subsumed under a broad range of descriptive terms. Authors did often not endeavour to systematise this diversity into an analytical system. Interpretations of what and who diviners were, and what people believed about them, varied widely. Consequently, the descriptive terms and their non-categorical application at some point seeped into the developing Christian culture, and also into that of the African people, and they became labels which have assumed a controversial currency in inter-cultural debates ever since. A good example of the elusiveness of labels is represented by the story of Hans Wellington Dr. Buthelezi, who between 1925 and 1928 headed the Wellington Movement, a popular groundswell in the Transkei which challenged local political authority and the state's ideological control in churches and schools. Wellington made the transition from herbalist,

42 Bryant, A. T. Zulu Medicine and Medicine-Men. Cape Town 1983, p. 13. 43 ibid., p. 14. 44 Delius, Peter. 'Witches and Missionaries in Nineteenth-Century Transvaal.' Journal of Southern African Studies 27: 3 (2001), pp. 429-443. 45 Dornan, S. S. 'Witchcraft.' The South African Quarterly (Dec. 1924-June 1925), pp. 3-13, here p. 5. 46 Müller, 'Wahrsagerei", p. 763. 26 healer and patent medicine vendor to popular politician.47 In the course of his biography he changed designations, and it is more than likely that he merged them in the process of changing them. It is easy to imagine that, from external descriptions, commentators and writers of reports would have difficulties in choosing the most appropriate label under which he currently operated, and it would be an arduous task to find out the "correct" designation of this man. As a consequence of the highly subjective use of labels and the changing meanings of words and their contexts over the course of history, it had to be determined for this study which terminology to apply for the different health practitioners. As has been shown, neat categories never applied to what healers represented or were believed to represent. Expertise changed over time. The term "healer", now current among various African health practitioners, was introduced as late as the 1970s as part of a universally unfolding ethnomedical debate, and has only quite recently been adopted as a term of self-reference. The term raises the status of the activities of African health practitioners, yet at the same time it neglects professional differentiation. Where no particular specialism is being referred to, the study will nevertheless use the term "healer", and it is hoped that the reader may bear in mind that "healer" remains a designation wrought with difficulty and representing a differentiated spectrum of health practitioners. In this study the term 'healer" is preferred to "health practitioner" as this designation implies a more technocratic perspective, one that is juristically sound and would also cater for doctors and nurses of scientific training in the Western tradition. In comparison with "health practitioner" "healer" is the more popular term. In this study the term "traditional" is throughout avoided. African healers stand for African health traditions, but they are far from traditional. The individual chapters of this study will illustrate this point as they will draw attention to specific terminologies in particular historical settings. The study will follow a healer-centred perspective and will focus on issues that related to the public and official image of African diviners and herbalists. To a considerable extent these healers' labels, designations and reputations were a result of their ability to project and present themselves to the South African public as the embodiment of a profession that devoted itself to the achievement of health and wealth of their clientele. The healers' dilemma

47 Beinart, William. 'Amafelandawonye (the Die-hards)', in: Beinart, William/ Bundy, Colin. Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape 1890-1930. London 1987, pp. 222-269, here p. 252; Edgar, Robert. 'Garveyism in Africa: Dr. Wellington and the American Movement in the Transkei.' Ufahamu 6: 3 (1976), pp. 31-57. 27 was, however, that generally, as social actors, they were written into obscurity.48 They were accorded a marginal position in society, legally discriminated against, and many people became suspicious of them. Against this verdict they had to struggle, and it is particularly in healers' meandering paths towards professionalisation and in the ways in which they were popularised in various media that this dilemma became evident. Official acknowledgement was, in fact, difficult to achieve. In their marginalised position, however, African healers represented much more than a group of actors whose social and professional ambitious were thwarted. They acted as prisms in which general developments occurring within society took on a fractured appearance because the prism broke pre-conceived ways of looking at things. Healers made visible ambitions and desperations in a society from rather unusual vantage points. For this reason a study on healers offers more than a reconstruction of the activities of healers in an historically defined place and period. At times it offers insights into South African society from unexplored perspectives. In the words of one scholar of health, health cosmologies are a particularly reliable medium in which to perceive centrally important principles of a culture.49 And, it should be added, of its transformation.

Contexts: The Professional and the Popular To understand the history of South African healers, to grasp how they developed their craft and their image, and to assess how they positioned themselves in the light of the challenges of a industrialising, urbanising and racially stratified South Africa, it was necessary to design a context within which their history could be read. Urbanisation, industrialisation and racism demarcated the field, the structures as it were, within which healers acted. Within these they made particular experiences and developed concrete strategies. Along meandering paths they ran towards the achievement of a professional status. The enduring process was thwarted, interrupted and later re-directed, by no means least, through the ways healers were popularly talked about. Healers found themselves in a nexus of relations and hence had to engage in discourse with various parties. While professionalisation was a controversy through which healers located themselves primarily in relation to the state, their popularisation was a field in which healers' relations with their clientele became visible. The ways healers were understood

48 Feierman, Steven. 'Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of Invisible Histories', in: Bonness, Victoria E./ Hunt, Lynn (ed). Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. Berkeley et al. 1999, pp. 182-216. 49 Prins, Gwyn. 'Disease at the Crossroads: Towards a History of Therapeutics in Bulozi Since 1876 [1].' Social Science and Medicine 13 B (1979), pp. 285-315, here pp. 285-286. 28 and the ways in which they conceived of themselves always correlated with this enormous background which they could not escape, and for which they had to design multifaceted agendas in order to speak in many directions. Efforts towards healers' professionalisation spanned the whole period under review in this study, but the degree to which these efforts were discernible varied in different phases. For this reason it is not possible to write a linear history of healers in South Africa. In the 1930s healers launched their first consolidated attempts towards their own professionalisation. They particularly had in mind the restructuring of their trade in medicinal herbs.50 In this phase their interests collided with the interest of the state and with the representatives of officially instituted medicine. Both held the power to cut short healers' ambitions. A fully-fledged debate about healers' professionalisation would have had to tackle the idioms in which disease was interpreted. Healers used such idioms in a different way than scientifically trained doctors, but the issue, like so many other topics in need of attention, never reached the debating stage. In fact, as this study will show, also if one reads accounts of South African social history of medicine, often written in the tradition of political economy, one hardly encounters the views of African healers.51 Studies in the political economy of health located the discussion of medicine in its social and political context. They questioned the model of the heroic advance of medicine which was supposed to be in the benefit of the people in the former colonies. In South Africa it has been shown how epidemiology was shaped by cleavages of race and class. Migrant labour, social dislocation and poverty in the countryside and towns helped create an environment in which disease proliferated. State officials, the mining and industry and whites frequently only expressed concern about ill-health in the African population when this threatened labour supplied or threatened to spread into the white areas of town. The studies were largely silent on African healers. This can be taken as an indication that they did not figure in official debates about medicine and health. If one reads accounts of African healers of this period, in turn, one does not often come across the concerns so prevalent in medical history. It appears as if the two groups, healers and doctors, worked in separate realms. And yet they often tended the same patients. To devote full attention to the ambitions healers devoted towards professionalisation ought to have implied an involvement on the side of the registered and institutionally repre-

50 Flint, Karen. 'Competition, Race, and Professionalization: African Healers and White Medical Practitioners in Natal, South Africa in The Early Twentieth Century.' Social History of Medicine 14: 2 (2001), pp. 199-221. 51 Packard, Randall. White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa. Berkeley 1989; Wylie, Diana. Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa. Charlottesville 2001; Marks, Shula/ Andersson, Neil. 'Diseases of Apartheid', in: Lonsdale, John (ed). South Africa in Question. Cambridge 1988, pp. 172-199; Jochelson, Karen. The Colour of Disease: Syphilis and Racism in South Africa, 1880-1950. Houndsmill 2001. 29 sented medical practitioners in order to discuss a range of issues which, within the ranks of colonial and imperial medicine, were not fully settled. The frictions between different interest groups in South African society must be read against a diversity of factors, each of which played a decisive role in the complex process of professionalisation. Discussing healers' professionalisation would have required consideration of, for instance, the alternative nature of healers' knowledge about health. Into such a discussion the discussants would possibly have had to include considerations about how to "translate" concepts of one interpretational background into a self-confident system of medicine that was not only eager to dominate the medical scene in South Africa, but convinced of its own embodiment of scientifically more sophisticated and culturally more advanced principles. The field of biomedicine, above all as far as medicinal plants were concerned, was one of the few areas subjected to such discursive dynamics. Among the vast array of African health practices divination was sometimes seen as an indigenous equivalent to Western psychology and psychiatry. In both comparisons African healing was crudely reduced and subjected to comparison rather than being explored under a comparative perspective. Furthermore, in a successful debate around the professionalisation of African healers, the position of individual practitioners in the health scenario would have needed consideration. The possibilities ought to have been debated as to how and where to incorporate African healers into the already recognised, and yet still fragile, developing rank and file of the medical and health establishment. In this context clearly-defined training and examination procedures ought to have been part of the debating agenda. In the 1930s the hierarchies between health workers were yet far from fixed in South Africa, and it became an issue of power as to who achieved access to the establishment, and with what rights and privileges practitioners did so. Last but not least, a successful professionalisation would have meant that healers themselves would have attained a level of determining control over the discourse as to what they represented. This, however, remained a problematic point until at least the years immediately following post-apartheid transition. It would be too crude a denial to claim that none of the issues concerning the professionalisation of African healers was taken up in debate. On the whole, however, these points were unsystematically tackled. Frequently, healers tried to instigate debate, but did not receive response. Medical officials unfolded their own debates, also about African healers, to which healers were not invited to contribute. Relegated into a sphere where it was difficult to act in public, and where it was prohibited to develop organisational structures, the (denigrated) profession was officially barred from performing public activities. And yet, even though professionalisation was halted, and 30 the debate corrupted, the efforts of healers towards professionalisation were not completely to be thwarted because they occurred at a time when new social constellations concerned many Africans in the developing urban industrial settings. Halted, thwarted, corrupted the climate may have been, but it provided insights into the self-conceptions of an emerging profession at a stage before the modern mass media became involved in debating, commercialising and popularising their cause. Throughout the period which is under review in this study these initially voiced ambitions remained laid out like threads from the 1930s, and it is in connection with these that later styles and contents of popular debates around healers have to be read. The cause once set out remained a voice, though not a course. The voice retreated to the background, maybe it even was forgotten, but in the name of the longue durée it left behind a faint legacy of professionalisation which, if taken into consideration, helps later discourse to penetrate to the more actual and more material realities of healing in South Africa. In the end discourse is social practice. It is at least intimately connected to it. In parallel to this, the various fields of popular culture contributed to the making of a complex public sphere in which South African healers were debated. Particularly to African people, popular culture provided discursive platforms and scenarios of information at a time when political discourse was oppressive and when the majority of the country's population was marginalised, discriminated against and racially oppressed.52 Popular culture may be seen as the "heroic" expression of resistance by marginalised people without access to official channels of power. It can also be considered a manifestation of the passive acceptance of a colonialist, or even fascist, ideology. Hence, depending on view, popular culture can be celebrated either as a creative and imaginative product of communities which express their needs, or it can be dismissed as ersatz pulp forced upon an unperceptive mass audience.53 Of course, the South African truth lies close to both. Or in between. Cultural communication touched upon political realities. It often initiated dynamic discourse and contestations which illustrated the relations between individuals, social groups and classes in a society.54 In South Africa there have always existed many cultures which could never be neatly arranged in some sort of pluralistic circle. Each of these cultures had its own origin, history and logic. Cultures in South Africa have been locked in constant conflict with one another, over and over again, on the basis of the material conditions in which their adherents live, the class cleavages of

52 Fabian, Johannes. 'Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and Conjectures.' Africa 48: 4 (1978), pp. 315-352; Gunner, Liz (ed). Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry and Song in Southern Africa. Johannesburg 2001. 53 Kaarsholm, Preben/ James, Deborah. 'Popular Culture and Democracy in Some Southern Contexts: An Introduction.' Journal of Southern African Studies 26: 2 (2000), pp. 189-208, here p. 195. 54 Furniss, Graham/ Gunner, Liz (ed). Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature. Johannesburg 1995. 31 society, and the historical legacies which informed the conflict.55 Conflicts have been debated in culturalistic terms as well, especially as these conflicts occurred in a racist setting. The "warlike Zulu" were deemed more violent than the "peaceful Sotho", to name but one example. It is easy to envisage that healing in particular, which is often conceived of as an attribute of culture itself, has been subject to culturalistic analysis. As part of South African popular culture and popular cultural discourse, however, the activities of African healers looked different. Analyses of the media offer a way to approach developments in healing and healers' activities from a relatively unexplored perspective. A focus on popular health cultures, that is explored in this study as far as possible, will help conceptualise healers' activities from a new vantage point. As the elaboration on the context of professionalisation has set out already, the idea of this study was to explore healers' efforts towards professionalisation in the 1930s before these efforts, set into motion by healers themselves, submerged for many decades. The submerged discourse provided the underground longue durée which will have to be born in mind when from around the 1970s various print media, popular and semi-academic, took up the discourse about healers and pushed it into new directions. The popular discourse partly contrasted with what healers had wanted back in the 1930s, but it also took up previously voiced concerns. Quite naturally, the discourse of the 1970s and subsequent decades had to explore new directions, because the significance of African healers and their activities were always dynamic. The perspective that evolved in the sphere of health and popular culture, once again, provided an underground over which the current professionalisation process is taking place. Again, the current professionalisation process is not immediately linked to the sphere of health and popular culture of former decades, but the popular debate provides a link between healers' original ambitions towards professionalisation and the actual professionalisation that has come underway some seventy years later. If the professionalisation and the popularisation of African healers are read into processes of urbanisation, industrialisation and racism in South Africa some details which will be explored in the course of this study are worth noting at this introductory stage already. Whereas the 1970s stood out as a period in which independent churches mushroomed in the urban environment, the activities of African healers were deemed to be disappearing. Against the background of urbanization and rural-urban migration a "model of one-way change" was

55 Bozzoli, Belinda. 'History, Experience and Culture', in: Bozzoli, Belinda (ed). Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response. Johannesburg 1983, pp. 1-47, quote p. 22. 32 assumed.56 Behind this model lay the assumption and concept that migrants, under the influence of the town, would gradually abandon their rural roots and norms altogether. Whereas the independent churches were accorded a place in the city, African healing was evidently not. According to prevalent notions of the time healing remained firmly located in the rural areas. It was thought that in urban settings individual elements of "traditional healing" might survive in hybridising cultural innovations, but that "authentic" healing would not command a site there.57 And in fact, the many forms of legal, religious and cultural discrimination definitely contributed to an obscuring of divination practices in particular under the mantle of either mainline Christianity or the newly emerging churches.58 As healing was considered misplaced in an urban and industrial environment, it never commanded a prominent focus of interest in the numerous studies on migration, which explored people's coping mechanisms in the cities, but which were not particularly interested in the activities of African healers. The prevalent themes in urban studies revolved around the urban poor, ethnic diversity and the maintenance of intense urban-rural relationships.59 In these fields African healers played their role, but they did so in a fashion less conceivable to academic scholars. For the people, living and working in the city meant exposure to unhealthy conditions, which they encountered in the work place or in the dwellings of the slums. It can be taken for sure that not all of them resorted to healers, but it can be taken for sure as well that not all of them abstained from seeking health with healers. The activities of African healers were also not a major topic of studies on labour relations in industrial environments.60 The studies were not intended as investigations into medical pluralism, and as a result, they did not address themselves to the ways in which unofficial African healing fitted into the institutionally responsible health scenario they had set out to analyse. As will be debated later, the studies did, of course, provide important information on the political economy of health and on the South African health culture more generally in which African healers positioned themselves from their marginal position. African health practices have predominantly been studies from the perspective of medial anthropology. In these studies a focus on the variety of technical aspects of African

56 Mayer, Philip. 'Migrancy and the Study of Africans in Towns.' American Anthropologist 64 (1962), pp. 576- 592, here p. 579. 57 Kiernan, James P. 'A Cesspole of Sorcery: How Zionists Visualize And Respond to the City.' Urban Anthropology 13: 2-3 (1984), pp. 219-236. 58 Janzen, 'Drums', pp. 175-179; Kiernan, 'Cesspole', pp. 219-236; Scarnecchia, Timothy. 'Mai Chaza's Guta re Jehova (City of God): Gender, Healing and Urban Identity in an African Independent Church.' Journal of Southern African Studies 23: 1 (1997), pp. 87-105. 59 O'Connor, Anthony. The African City. London 1983, pp. pp. 20-21. 60 Packard, White Plague; Wylie, Starving; Jochelson, Colour of Disease; Marks, Shula. 'South Africa's Early Experiment in Social Medicine: Its Pioneers and Politics.' American Journal of Public Health 87 (1997), pp. 452-459, here pp. 454-457; Marks/ Andersson, 'Diseases of Apartheid', pp. 172-199. 33 healing practises dominates. These studies, often located in a number of locally, culturally and ethnically defined contexts, conceptualised understandings of, and coping strategies with, disease, misfortune, illness and affliction. Scholars of this academic tradition re-thought established categories, assumed the internal logics of cultures, and tried to decode them. An array of ethno-medical "systems" and health-seeking procedures were mapped out, and correlations to hospital treatments sought. The fact that people often resorted to hospital treatment as well as African health practices was generally interpreted as the mingling of two separate systems. "Traditional" medicine was often interpreted as an adjunct or "modern" medicine, an adjunct that was difficult to bypass if one observed people's health-seeking strategies.61 Ethno-medical systems were described in their rural abodes, and less so in urban environments, where conceptions changed and intermingled.

Explorations: The Mediating Materials Despite the fact that it is difficult to assign healers into a neat social category, and despite the fact that through processes of marginalisation, criminalisation and discrimination their visibility was fractured, healers appeared in a wide range of materials which mediated their concerns and contributed to the making of their image. The materials which will be explored in this study are diverse. They have been composed from various perspectives and by different agents. They have been designed for a variety of readers, consumers and interlocutors. In the course of this study healers' correspondence with the authorities, their documents and licences will come under review as will popular newspapers and magazines. In addition, the texts and photographs of coffee table books will be examined, and biographical documentaries will be subjected to analysis. Seen in perspective these materials help to make healers reappear as discursive and historical figures. These mediating materials are either produced by healers themselves, or they were popular reflections of healers and their activities, or of a para-academic nature. They were frequently designed for a combination of information and entertainment purposes. For this study oral material was checked as well. I conducted interviews with diviners, herbalists and journalists who wrote about healers. The interviews were intended as a supple-

61 Leeson, Joyce. 'Traditional Medicine: Still Plenty to Offer.' Africa Report (October 1970), pp. 24-25; Singer, Philip (ed). Traditional Healing: New Science or New Colonialism? Essays in Critique of Medical Anthropology. Owerri et al. 1977; Mankazana, E. M. 'A Case for the Traditional Healer in South Africa.' South African Medical Journal 56 (1979), pp. 1003-1007; Fyfe, Christopher (ed). African Medicine in the Modern World: Seminar Proceedings No. 27. Edinburgh 1986; Last, Murray, 'The Importance of Knowing about Not Knowing: Observations from Hausaland', in: Feierman, Steven/ Janzen, John M. (ed). The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa. Berkeley et al. 1992, pp. 393-406. 34 ment to the printed material rather than as an independent study of healing which would have followed the methods of oral history. Interviews in which one wishes to bring to the fore personal experiences of healing and health-seeking, are particularly difficult in nature as they easily touch upon very intimate and private situations.62 The material I recorded was rich because it drew attention to health practitioners' self-conceptions, and to the marginality in which they dwelled and out of which they often wanted themselves to be written. In fact, interview partners made it quite clear to me that they expected me to write about healers' concerns in European newspapers, or in a book for readers in Europe. Thus they hoped that I could inform European readerships about what healers were really like. A significant amount of material gathered in oral interviews proved unsuitable for use in this study. Healers, who happened to be "professional interviewees", were often familiar, through generations of previous researchers, with the kind of information they thought I was looking for. They often tried to serve me as best as they could, particularly as they hoped that I would act as a messenger. There were cases when interviewees supplied narratives, usually the story of the initiation of a person, which I did not even have to trigger off with even a single question.63 I did not command the means to decipher the stories, but they strongly reminded me of the set patterns in conversion stories which I had come across in my previous work on missions in South Africa, and which I had found equally difficult to decipher.64 In turn, journalists provided a lot of information that consisted of amusing or astonishing anecdotes. On the whole I learnt a lot about the often disparate ways of conversing about healers and their activities. I witnessed how some of the discursive representations that I was working on might have evolved, but in the end I shied away from subjecting the oral material to broader analysis. The subsequent chapters each follow a similar logic. They begin with an exploration of the sources, the mediating material, which constitute the basis of the respective chapters. This part is always followed by a section which, in the format of a case study, explores a particular historical process unfolding in a local or case-specific context. In chapter 3, for instance, the correspondence of a particular healers' association with the Ministries of Health and Native Affairs is reconstructed. In chapter 4, for instance, the development of a tightened-up image of healers in a particular popular magazine is outlined in detail. Chapter 5 presents a random sample of pictures on African healing, and finally, chapter 6 follows the story of one bio-

62 Palmié, Stephan. 'Zur ethnographischen Annäherung an das Geheime.' Sociologus 28: 2 (1988), pp. 97-114. 63 Mansusu Mkhulize and Baba Ngubane, [Bulwer], Interview with Nokhaya Makiwane and Kirsten Rüther, 23.08.2000 64 Rüther, Kirsten. The Power Beyond: Mission Strategies, African Conversion, and the Development of a Christian Culture in the Transvaal. Münster 2001. 35 graphical documentary. The reconstructed case studies serve as examples for broader processes which are discussed in the remaining sections of the chapters. As the material under review differs in nature, and as each of the assembled bodies of mediating materials points to particular aspects of the processes of South African healers' professionalisation and popularisation, each of the broader analyses necessitated a middling section. In it the conceptual approaches will be discussed which were indicated in the concise case study already and through which a broader analysis of the material became possible. In chapter 3, for instance, which is based on healers' correspondence with the state authority regarding the formation of professional associations, it will be explored how the landscape of professional associations in South Africa can become a lens through which to understand the documents with which healers tried to endow themselves with status. In chapter 4, once again, which is based on articles in popular newspapers and magazines, a conceptualisation will be needed of how representations work in such media. Chapter 5 provides a conceptual focus on the techniques through which photography works, while chapter 6 will explore conceptually the narrative constellations between protagonists of healing and the writers of their stories. At the end of each chapter a concluding paragraph will attempt to conceptualise healers and their activities with regard to professionalisation and popularisation. While chapters 3 to 6 form the core of the study, chapters 2 and 7 are wrapped around these and provide historical sketches which lie outside the period under review in this study and against which the core chapters ought to be read. In principle, they take up conceptual questions and propositions that frame the individual discourses and analyses followed up in chapters 3 to 6. Chapter 2 will provide an overview of discursive tropes which have historically dominated the discourse about healers and which leave a more or less direct impact on the ways healers and healing were talked about in the decades under review in this study. The chapter also develops a focus on the issue of the legitimacy of healers, a core concern around which many of their activities have been structured. It will set up questions rather than propose answers. After the evaluation of different discourses of different time periods chapter 7 will take up the different discourse strands which have been explored and will look at how they merged and intersected in the immediate post-apartheid situation. As long as segregation and apartheid provided the social, cultural and political context in which discourse about healers and their craft unfolded, they remained rather separate, though not completely distinct from one another. After the ending of apartheid this changed. The immediate transition years became the context in which the discourses were beginning to relate to one another in a new form, and on new forums. 36

Chapter 3 starts by an exploration of the nature and availability of documents and petitions written by healers themselves and by the representatives of professional associations never acknowledged by the government. The material under review in that chapter conveys less of an immediate indication of how healing developed into a popular culture, but it can rather be considered as a media which tried to transfer innovative images of African healing into a state-dominated public domain, where healers were either not acknowledged or where they wanted to campaign for a new kind of acknowledgement. The media under review in that chapter reveal self-confident styles of accommodation to what they think the state demands of them. The material also shows how healers used innovative medial styles in order to promote an innovative image of their profession. Shifting the focus on material that opens up insights into popular attitudes towards the healing profession, chapter 4 introduces popular newspapers and magazines which, within South Africa, were aimed specifically at African readers. This was material which lived from its amalgamation of text and image. It developed its significance as mass media rather than the voices of an emerging lobby. Newspapers and magazines communicated and conveyed provocative and innovative messages to African mass readerships because they communicated self-conceptions of African culture expressed in the face of prevalent racial ideology and apartheid. The material was popular, in parts because it also drew "private" – though rarely personal – affairs and stories into the sphere of "human interest". But of course, healers and their activities were not an exclusively "African" topic. Chapter 5 follows the discourse on healers into the world of coffee table book audiences. These books can, as well, be subsumed under the term "mass media", albeit speaking to other audiences than African ones. The material became popular at a time when it had become easy to reproduce photographs, and for a few decades it represented an innovation to readers who wanted to cast a look into worlds deemed far-away and far-apart. Picture books put across, mass-medially, communication about the other. They were popular material in the sense that the books worked with a wealth of illustrative material, employed translations from English into European languages, and because they provided a path away from complicated academic jargons, away from the "devious paths of social research" as one author put it.65 Finally, chapter 6 explores the nature of biographical documentaries. This material also indicated that healers and their activities were much more than merely a topic peculiarly African topic or specifically confined to the African continent. Picture book illustrations were important material because it showed how as a modern trope African healing entered into South African

65 Mertens, Alice/ Schoeman, Hilgard. The Zulu. Cape Town 1975, foreword. 37 discourse of lived encounters and experience. Chapters 5 and 6 are shorter than chapters 3 and 4 because they relate less immediately to African contexts and are therefore less complex in their discursive qualities. In the conclusion, chapter 8, which according to the structure of the chapters corresponds with the introduction, the outcomes of the various chapters will be brought together and synthesized as far as possible. The conclusion will pay particular attention to the ways in which South African dynamics resonated with more globally unfolding discourse scenarios. Frequently it is possible to say of these that existed, but frequently it is also quite difficult to relate them unanimously to discourses that unfold in local or regional contexts. Last, but not least, the conclusion will provide a clearer outlook on terms and terminology that will come up in multifaceted ways in the course of this study. Using the study of different sources and media as its starting point, each chapter develops a particular insight into the correlating processes of South African healers' professionalisation and their popularisation. As has been mentioned already, thus not a linear history becomes possible, but a study in which strands of history become intertwined. Chapter 3 focuses on healers' attempted professionalisation, and basically covers the period between 1930 and the 1950s, while chapter 4 draws attention to the first phase of healers' popularisation in the South African mass media from about 1970 onwards. These two chapters show how healers, who were denied official recognition, were not completely sidelined from public appearance. At least they made it into the sphere of popular representations, where they could not negotiate their cause directly with the authorities, but where over the years they managed to establish a semi-public and semi-official standing. This standing was controversial and healers were always prepared to confirm with the rules of the established authorities. In a climate, where huge taboos were levied on healers, in a climate where black and white people interacted in repressively defined space only, the media provided platforms on which at least some of the repressive definitions could be mocked and mimicked. Chapters 5 and 6 argue against the notion that African healers and their activities were particularly "African" or "indigenous" topics in South African history. They reveal how, in different contexts, white and black individuals encountered each other and how out of an interaction of attitudes and conceptions, these encounters resulted in discourses, which in turn, framed conflicting, but at times also integrated, understandings of healers in South African society as a whole. Chapter 5, with its subject of the colourful fixation of "tribal" life, analyses the power of efforts which tried to frame healers in a context of tradition. Read against the dynamics explored in chapters 3 and 4 this reads like a discursive strategy only, 38 but it assumed power against the realities of the time. Images of healers were distributed all over the world, they created distorted knowledge, and reproduced it. Contemporary and future generations of healers have, and will have, to engage with this knowledge. Another setting of discourses that often transcended the boundaries of South Africa will be explored in chapter 6. This chapter examines biographical documentaries which were recorded between the beginning of the twentieth century until most recently, and which assumed particular popularity in the years of South Africa's transition from apartheid to a post-apartheid society. The material indicates a rethinking of community, and in this chapter the function of healers as prisms of society becomes particularly clear. Chapter 7 focuses on the merging of the various discursive strands. It also points towards new thematic foci which were at times initiated in previous periods but which became more prevalent only when the discourses started to entwine. Religion education textbooks come under review as a new medium through which healers and healing are visualised. As media the textbooks relate to forms of visuality pursued in the tradition of the coffee table books. HIV/AIDS will come under review as a topic of the print media that began to enjoy a particular focus after 1990 only. Especially with regard to this topic it will be made clear that the discourse of the print media has become less important, and that at least with regard to HIV/AIDS other media seem to have taken over. Last but not least the current status of healers' professional acknowledgement by the Health Department of the post-apartheid state is sketched as far as is possible. It would prove to be difficult to draw together these many planned explorations and strands so as to follow them up with a crisp argument. Suffice it to state here that the main argument to be advanced will be that it is both worthwhile doing and feasible to explore perspectives which have, so far, not been connected to studies of healers. The major aim of this study is to identify a topic that has been relegated, and explored, in a number of different settings, and through this to move it closer to the centre of historical investigation because there a prism might be identified through which it is possible to observe social and political dynamics of an African society from hitherto unexplored perspectives. 2

Tropes of Legitimacy Discursive Assessments of African Healers

The Rule of Marginalisation, Social Pervasiveness and Academic Re- Enactment There is a relatively fixed set of tropes to which, in one way or the other, healers have historically been forced to respond. Almost regardless of time, this set of tropes has particularly revolved around issues of legitimacy. Through the interrelated and interwoven processes of the legal, cultural, medical and religious discrimination of the activities of African healers, to which the Christian missions, churches, the state and the institutions of colonial medicine made a substantial contribution, healers were, in effect, written into invisibility.1 They were denied a recognised place in colonial society, even criminalized, and it became precarious for them to act publicly. In many ways, however, this was merely an officially imposed invisibility. Writing and legislating African healers off from the African public sphere did not necessarily bring about the actual disappearance of healers and healing activities. Socially they remained pervasive. And this, in turn, led students of divination, of religion and of African society, to the conclusion, that healers were still in existence. As a consequence, renewed ponderings about the legitimacy of healers ensued. Yet, generally, in moments of crisis, or situations of competing for power, the state had manoeuvred itself into a position where it was able to enforce the rules it had set, and healers found themselves at a dramatic disadvantage. They had to prove their worthiness, had to earn legitimacy as individuals, professionals or bearers of an alternative culture. In more recent decades, healers have been forced to recast their legitimacy in terms of tradition, which has placed them in opposition to so-called modernity, an opposition which historically they have not intended. Historical patterns of legitimacy, not to mention pre-colonial arrangements of legitimacy, were subjected to interferences from the new political frames of reference, discourse about issues of race as much as a global discourse about medicine and health, so that healers had to design strategies

1 Feierman, 'Invisible Histories'. 40 on how to convince politicians and clients alike, even the world itself, of the benefit that lay in healers' involvement in social affairs and African health. The familiar patterns of legitimacy, stemming from pre-colonial times, continued to exist, but they had to be amended through the course of history. It did not change, for instance, that diviners received individual calls. The "call" was interpreted as a kind of supra- human and supra-natural request by the ancestors to perfect communication with them. Communication with the ancestors was not a highly unusual occurrence. The heads of house- holds who assumed key responsibilities in performing religious household rituals commanded this skill and could thus manage the majority of household affairs. Diviners, however, were not only able to communicate with the ancestors in the interest of their own affairs. They were trained to solve more problematic cases on behalf of others. The call was often experienced as a painful intercession on the parts of the spirits, and had to be channelled and shaped through an apprenticeship and, finally, by initiation. Through their ritual initiation the adepts established a personal, ritually regulated and sanctified relation to the worlds with which they communicated. The power of initiated diviners resulted from personal contact with the world of the supernatural. Their obligation was to act for the sake of the community. Their healing strategies have therefore been described as redressive rather than revolutionary.2 At times diviners united in guilds whose members specialised in treating certain ailments, or who came together to exchange knowledge, or to solve a particularly problematic issue.3 Diviners contacted ancestors and identified spirits, less so from a desire for spiritual enrichment, as a mystic would do for instance, but more so in order to use this contact to serve the community or a clientele. God, the spirits and lesser deities were the ultimate authorities to which healers owed allegiance.4 It was not the aim of diviners to control ancestors or spirits, as would be the preoccupation of magicians. Instead, they acted as vessels for voices from the other world. The ways in which diviners established contact with the other world were culturally determined, but they always allowed scope for individual variation. Diviners did neither perform a canonised cult, nor did they form part of a religious "system", the functioning of which would have been based upon the performance – be it a service, a sacrament or sacrifice – and which was enacted in accordance with set rules. Such was the basis of the power of the Christian priest, but not of the diviner.

2 Hirst, Manton. 'Bricoleurs, Brokers, Mediators, Healers and Magicians: The Diviner's Role and Function in Grahamstown.' Curare 6 (1983), pp. 51-68. 3 Ngubane, Harriet. Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine. An Ethnography of Health and Disease in Nyuswa-Zulu Thought and Practice. London 1977. 4 Dillon-Malone, Clive. 'Indigenous Medico-Religious Movements in Zambia: A Study of Nchimi and Mutumwa 'Churches.' African Social Research 36 (1983), pp. 455-474. 41

Through the spread of Christianity, and the gradual establishment of colonial administrations in the course of the nineteenth century, and through the inception of the modern South African state as from 1910 onward, as well as through gaining a full-time ministerial head of the Native Affairs Department in 1924, African healers came to act within the confines which impacted upon traditional conceptions of legitimacy. Their own legitimacy changed when the legitimacy of political authorities, of traditional leaders, of religious actors and of gods was undergoing a transformation as regards its nature, because healers stood in a sensitive relation of obedience to all these formative forces of society. Healers had to find responses to the change of relations at local levels when colonial administration was closing in on those levels. Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that the ascendancy of the modern bureaucratic state, when it, for instance, reached into the rural areas with efficient strategies of tax collection, reinforced popular notions of witchcraft. Tax collection was an act which stripped chiefs of their former power and which revealed to the African population that their names had already been laid open to the state. Hence, through tax collection, the state could be interpreted as being imbued with supernatural powers. This belief in the supernatural potency of the state may have been further reinforced by the co-optation into the regime of some chiefs and headmen, people widely reputed to command supernatural powers.5 This argument could certainly be considered an overstatement, but it was indeed the case that when the national state was installed and was slowly but gradually asserting its strength, healers had to initially address the authorities at a local level first, and subsequently at a national level as well. Throughout the period which will be under review in this study, healers' legitimacy and the legitimacy of their activities remained key concerns, concerns that had already meandered through the colonial period, but which became issues of pressing urgency the more elaborately the modern state developed its bureaucracy. Both healers and the state acted on the assumption that legitimacy meant order, and that the stability of order could only be safeguarded if the ruled accepted for themselves the relation that existed between the rulers and the ruled. Max Weber's considerations regarding legitimacy and legitimate rule provide a terminology and a concept that, at least in parts, applies to the dynamics which healers went through since the nineteenth century. In Weberian terms, rule is linked to obedience. The specific legitimacy of a particular rule is linked to a particular type of obedience.6 Seen from this perspective, legitimate rule is

5 Redding, Sean. 'Sorcery and Sovereignty: Taxation, Witchcraft, and Political Symbols in the 1880 Transkeian Rebellion.' Journal of Southern African Studies 22: 2 (1996), pp. 249-270. 6Weber, Max. Soziologie – Universalgeschichtliche Analysen – Politik. ed. Johannes Winckelmann. Stuttgart 51973, p. 122. 42 a relationship in which the ruling party justifies its claim to rule, and hence its legitimacy, by justifying specific reasons why people should follow the rule, and to which the ruled people have to consent.7 Were such a relational model to be applied to the South African situation, it is possible to argue that within this model diviners and herbalists were a ruled group of people as well as being, to some extent and in some cases, holders of power themselves. A few exceptional healers used to be tied to chiefly authority. By the gradual erosion of that authority through the colonial state, or more generally, by the gradual weakening of traditional authority and of the authority that elders had over those who migrated to urban centres, many healers became linked up more directly with the colonial state and its administration. This did not, however, have an immediate impact on the ways in which healers were ruled and surveyed and supervised by the ancestors, the spirits, and the Supreme Being. It has been previously mentioned that healers did not manipulate the spirits, as magicians would do, but acted as their voices or vessels. This is particularly important to note in a context where society is founded upon the assumption that ancestors and spirits can, and do, interfere with the community of the living. In a context in which communication with the ancestors, and ancestral interference, are vital for the well-being of the community, the subjection of those who command the spirits to the spirit world is probably more real than in a society which conceives of the other world as being rather detached. Hence, first and foremost, it is important to note that in South Africa healers remained in serious submission to the agents of that other world.8 Further, it has to be taken into account that in the context of the spreading of Christianity and, through this process, in the context of the renewal of the idea of the One (Legitimate) God, whom Africans traditionally conceived of as a Supreme Being in retreat, notions of God and the Supreme Being as nodes of social coherence have been to the subjects of severe controversy. Last but not least, healers have also been also submitted to the knowledge of the community which, as the debate on the popular management of illness will show at a later point, curbed any uncontrolled activities of a healer. The extraordinary powers of a healer could, therefore, only unfold in controlled ways. However, the mechanisms for verify- ing their power have, of course, been subject to change in the course of history. Gradually, the dependence of healers shifted from being dependent upon traditional rule to dependence upon the rationalising rule of a gradually evolving bureaucratic state. The rule of chiefs with whom a small number of outstanding healers were associated became dependent on the rules which the colonial administrations set through locally implemented colonial

7 Breuer, Stefan. 'Das Legitimitätskonzept Max Webers', in: Willoweit, Dieter (ed), Die Begründung des Rechts als historisches Problem. München 2000, pp. 1-17, p. 6 8 This is a phenomenon that Weberian categories do not provide for. 43 legislation. The majority of healers who were related to the community, rather than to its head, may have perceived this entwinement of authorities on a similar, albeit more indirect, scale. They, too, were at the receiving end when the community had to come to terms with the deteriorating legitimacy of the chief. In the Eastern Cape, for instance, colonial anti-witchcraft legislation was initiated as early as 1862. It criminalized healers' activities persons who actively sought consultation with diviners. The bureaucratic hope was that Africans would abstain from their belief in the cures of African herbalists and diviners once they would be exposed more thoroughly to Christianity, industrial production and to the kind of medical care offered by the colonial regime. In 1881 the Natal Native Commission asked missionaries, government officials and African chiefs to speculate on the effects of employing white doctors to discourage African belief in "witchcraft". In 1887 Proclamation 2 decreed that the accusation of performing witchcraft constituted an offence in Zululand, and hence cases were no longer to be tried by chiefs but by the Magistrate. The primary fear of the colonial government, not only in South Africa, was that diviners of high repute who commanded more charisma than run of the mill diviners, and who potentially held the revolutionary power of upheaval against traditional or bureaucratic rule, and whom they suspected of being able to gather around them a group of followers would instigate resistance at times difficult to foresee. To apply the terms of Weberian sociology once more, it was less of a problem for the state that in South Africa diviners possessed certain charismatic characteristics. Rather it caused concern among colonial administrators that such charisma would potentially be underestimated, and that it could be activated through a certain crisis in relation to the situation in which the ruled people found themselves.9 The colonial bureaucracy feared that people could interpret and envisage their situation in such a way that they were actively looking for a person who commanded superhuman and supernatural powers and who could reinterpret their circumstances in such a way so as to make them feel better, and this – again according to the "writing on the wall" scenario envisaged by the colonial bureaucracy – would unleash irrational emotions and hence, the potential for resistance within the community. The colonial government was less interested in sanctioning ordinary and inconspicuous herbalists, or non-authoritarian diviners who acted on a limited local scale, be it in the sphere of either religion or health. They wanted to target the more openly political individuals with regard to whom they needed more than a pragmatic attitude. However, the specific diviners whom they wished to control through legislation, namely those diviners who acted in the name of traditional authority, or who commanded the potential for

9 Schluchter, Wolfgang. Religion und Lebensführung, vol. 2: Studien zu Max Webers Religions- und Herrschaftssoziologie. Frankfurt/ Main 1988, p. 538. 44 resistance on the part of a community in crisis, were not easy to legally subsume under one clearly defined category. As a result, broader, undifferentiating and sometimes inappropriate categories such as "witchcraft", "witchdoctors" and "diviners" were introduced as general labels for those regarded as potentially disruptive of the colonial order, and these labels marginalized many more individuals and groups of specialists than originally intended by the government. Colonial fears and colonial legislation actually subjected under constraint a majority of health practitioners who had not defined themselves on the strength of charismatic leadership, nor had they been otherwise installed as legitimate leaders beyond the interpersonal level. As the result of this colonial legislation, however, and depending on how closely they operated to colonial surveillance, these healers too were challenged to claim a legitimacy too – legitimacy that would, first and foremost, defend them against colonial bureaucracy and that would, secondly, prove their worthiness to clients. It looked as if, in contrast to previous times, women and men who engaged in practices concerning the health of individuals and society as a whole needed an additional layer of legitimacy in order to address and allay the suspicions of the colonial state. Needless to say that through such an extra layer of legitimacy their previous patterns of legitimacy which set out relationships with other healers, the political elite of African communities, and with the community itself would be touched upon as well. Much of this rearrangement of legitimacy depended on how the colonial government handled the problem of actually distinguishing between the diviners the government wished to subject to control and those whom it was basically not interested in. For the government this proved to be a difficult task, and finally led to the opportunity for izinyanga to eke out a comparatively increased status for themselves by the 1920s.10 The transformations of legitimacy and obedience were rendered more complex by the ongoing spread of Christianity in South Africa, and, in particular, by the increasing significance of African Independent Christianity, which started to virtually boom in the 1920s.11 Whereas for almost more than a century mission Christianity had probably been prompting anew the idea of the High God, or Supreme Being, the majority of Ethiopian and Zionist Churches introduced the role of the prophet in unprecedented proliferation. Mission Christi- anity displayed a tendency to identify diviners and herbalists, whom missionaries denoted as witchdoctors, powerful rainmakers and common sorcerers, as bulwarks against the success of evangelical missions, and whom they discredited in a multitude of ways. Independent Christi- anity openly re-acknowledged the interference of ancestors, and rejuvenated religious practice

10 Flint, 'Competition', p. 202 11 Hastings, the chruch in Africa?; Campbell, James T. Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa. Oxford and New York 1995. 45 that was geared towards the easing away of the ancestors. Furthermore, adherents of Independent Christianity adopted from the missions an increased sensitivity towards the evils of witchcraft and tried to design, in different ways, methods of counteracting these evils. Their attitudes towards African diviners and herbalists were substantially diverse. Some of them incorporated them into their structure, while others considered them evil, backward and of no use. The prophets and founders who headed the new churches were frequently endowed with a charisma of a much more unbounded nature than that of the majority of diviners. As heads of churches they created their own followings, embodied the power of the spirit and created sacred orders of their own.12 In mission circles, diviners were frequently compared to the prophets, not least of all because neither the state nor the mission churches found a satisfactory way of arriving at a terminological distinction between African priests, sorcerers, magicians and prophets. To the state and the missions they all represented "false" religion, if they were deemed to represent religion at all, and in their ranting and raving against these manifestations of "backwardness", "savagery" and "heathendom", missionaries and colonial bureaucrats used as many derogative labels as possible to denigrate the charismatic individuals with whom they were confronted. Occasionally, the slogans against the mission churches bore anti-British sentiments so that colonial politicians feared that emancipation from the mission church contexts would give rise to resistance against colonialism. In the Eastern Cape, renowned for its prolific prophetic traditions, a few such movements occurred in the 1920s, and resulted, for instance, in the Bullhoek Massacre of 1921-1922. Throughout the 1920s the local administration remained sensitive towards emerging prophets and founders of churches.13 Overall, the colonial government arrested leaders who incorporated into their ideology ideas of the Christian message, but they hardly ever faced problems with diviners who abstained from such a mélange of ideas. In the field of medicine and in the provision of physical health care, medically trained physicians, surgeons and nurses began to distance themselves from African health practitioners, albeit after an initial period of European doctors' fascination with healers' knowledge, their approaches to explaining disease and delivering treatment.14 Doctors and pharmacists disliked healers who dispensed medicine for gain, especially as they themselves often found it

12 Murray, Colin. 'The Father, the Son and The Holy Spirit: Resistance and Abuse in the Life of Solomon Lion (1908 - 1987).' Journal of Religion in Africa 29:3 (1999), pp. 341-386. 13 Edgar, Robert R./ Sapire, Hilary. African Apocalypse: The Story of Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a Twentieth-Century South African Prophet. Johannesburg 2000; Edgar, Robert. 'The Prophet Motive: Enoch Mgijima, The Israelites, and the Background to the Bullhoek Massacre.' International Journal of African Historical Studies 15 (1982), pp. 401-422; Edgar, 'Garveyism', pp. 31-57. 14 Etherington, 'Missionary Doctors', pp. 77-91. 46 hard to achieve the desired income.15 As early as 1891 the Natal Native Code had placed restrictions on the indiscriminate practice of various herbalists such as izinyanga zokwelapha and izinyanga zemiti. A licence was required if they wanted to practice for reward. The procedure for obtaining such a licence required, amongst other things, for the applicant to provide a recommendation by his or her chief. The legitimacy of a healer in the context of the colonial state in Natal was herewith translated into an extension of the legitimacy healers enjoyed from of their relation to traditional authority. No form of qualification was needed. No inquiry was made as regarded any previously acquired knowledge of herbs or the treatment of particular diseases.16 It becomes evident that, especially in urban contexts, healers may have wished to free themselves from the requirements of providing proof of a close association with a chief and that they may have wished to put their legitimacy on an alternative solid footing. Healers needed new standards according to which they could qualify in the eyes of the government, an endeavour that was difficult for as long as the colonial government deemed that "traditional" health practices were bound to die out in urban and modern contexts. As a result of the pressing problem of legitimacy, a sharp distinction evolved in the colonial understanding of African health practitioners, differentiating between so-called "medicine men" and "witch-doctors" such as diviners, rain-doctors or lightning doctors. All of these terms could be used out of utter fear and respect, but also as a derogatory catch-all label for men and women whose proper designations would only have further complicated the legislatively set rules. The rules of the state followed their own logic. They were primarily directed by concerns with regard to the legal authority of the state and the economic interests of the medical profession. Consequently, the lucrative sale of love philters and charms was explicitly prohibited, and it became a criminal offence to consult or employ a "witch-doctor". In parallel to this, a process of professionalisation within the respected branch of health practices became apparent. The 1891 Cape Medical and Pharmacy Act required the registration of trained nurses by the Cape government. The symbolic importance of this certification was greater than its practical effect and did not go unnoticed by the discredited health practitioners who competed for the same clients, and in comparable field of health care, as did nurses and doctors in hospitals. In 1894 a proclamation ruled that in the Transkeian Territories no official recognition would be given to "native herbalists". Whereas in the Transkei healers

15 Digby, Anne. '"A Medical El Dorado?" Colonial Medical Incomes and Practice at the Cape.' Social History of Medicine 7: 3 (1995), pp. 463-379. 16 Gower Jackson, Cecil. 'The Medicine Man in Natal and Zululand.' South African Journal of Science 5 (1919), pp. 191-204. 47 did not obtain licences, in Zululand Proclamation 7 of 1895 decreed that healers not only had to practice as licensed individuals but that, in addition, they had to renew their licences annually. Healers from outside the territory had to obtain licences as well, either as guest practitioners or as permanent practitioners from outside the area. The legal situation was becoming confusing for healers and colonial administrators alike and needed consolidation in the dual context of the significant increase in people's movements, mainly labour migration, and an extending colonial bureaucracy. When, in 1927, the South African Medical Council replaced the provincial medical councils, a process of centralisation was initiated which again impacted on African herbalists and diviners who were suspected of being "bogus doctors" and whose practices were now conceived of as "quackery", "witchcraft" and regarded as "unscientific customs". The 1928 Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act consolidated sixteen previous laws. It was enacted to protect the public from the activities of unqualified persons, and to shield qualified and registered practitioners from competition. The privileged practitioners were, in turn, endowed with a monopoly on healing. Anyone who was not registered as a medical practitioner committed an offence if, henceforth, he or she was found practising for gain, or if he or she was denounced by others as performing any act that was considered as specifically belonging to the professional realm of a medical doctor.17 At that time fees used to be another subject of frequent discussions. The Medical Bill included, therefore, a clause by which every doctor was bound, when his charges were in excess of what was customary in the respective district or area, to inform the patient beforehand what the cost of treatment was likely to be.18 In the immediate aftermath of this legislation health activities became more distinctly categorised. Herbalists, for instance, were still allowed to dispense, but they were not allowed to diagnose for a fee, with the exception of Natal, where licensed izinyanga zokwelapha and izinyanga zemithi to be permitted to continue to practise for gain among Africans. African healing experts who came from other areas and who, consequently, operated under different cultural designations were not mentioned in the laws. These designations included, for example, amagqira elinukayo, a Xhosa term for witch-finders, or amagqira aqubulayo, who were specialised in removing harmful substances from the body, or amagqira ambululayo, skilled in discovering dangerous charms concealed in the homestead or cattle-byre, or amagqira okuvumisa, who were specially trained in therapeutics where patients clapped their hands and

17 Denunciations took then frequently place if a diviner or herbalist was known to practise in a white coat, of if the health practitioner used a stethoscope, two of the major symbols of recognised medicine! see Flint, 'Competition' and chapter 3 of this study. 18 Leipoldt, C. Louis. Bushveld Doctor. Johannesburg 1937, p. 195. 48 chanted.19 In legal terms their expertise was subsumed under some selected terms that referred to the Zulu context. While healers, if not exempt from the law, were marginalized, written into invisibility and silenced anew as a social voice, a number of people who were not healers developed an interest in them and started to write and publish about them. This publishing activity promoted South African healers into figures in universally unfolding academic debates which "informed" the worldwide public about cultures that most of the readers would never get into contact with. Healers were mentioned in numerous diaries and travel accounts, some of which were published. They were often referred to merely "en passant" and not necessarily treated as an essential cultural attribute to African society. Notes and Queries on Anthropology was first published in 1874 as a popular-academic journal intended for travellers, ethnographers and ethnographic observers in need of information for their own comparative studies about physical types, customs and traditions. The journal promoted the idea that all "races" "deserved an equal place in the annals of human development". The rapidity with which some people became extinct or "brought down to the level of European custom" made the study and documentation of these "races" necessary in order to save knowledge about them before it would be too late.20 And this took place in 1874! In addition, healers' arts received ethnographic consideration and coverage in anthropological journals, and by the late 1920s a range of such journals existed. In Germany, the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, founded in 1868 by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde and the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, counted amongst the earliest publications to cover descriptions of healers and healing techniques. Other journals such as the British Journal of the African Society, published since 1900 by the London Royal African Society, and the South African Journal of Science, based since 1903 at the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in Johannesburg, or Anthropos, launched in 1906 as an international journal for anthropological and linguistic studies from the Anthropos-Institute in Fribourg, Switzerland, accommodated observations and interpretations of African healing. In 1921, the first issue of Bantu Studies appeared as an academic journal of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and in London Africa was launched by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in 1928. Ethnography which was still in its infancy, and not yet fully established as an academic discipline at African and European universities, addressed a broad constituency, including

19 Hirst, 'Bricoleurs', pp. 52-56. 20 Subsequent to Brauen, Martin (ed). Fremden-Bilder: Eine Publikation zu den Ausstellungen "Frühe ethnographische Fotografie" und "Die exotische Bilderflut". Zürich 1982, p. 13. 49 museums which organised exhibitions in the "northern" hemisphere of the world about the cultures to be found in the "rest" of the world.21 The academic discourse that evolved around healers helped to establish a number of tropes which thereafter authoritatively defined healers and their activities. Most of the tropes corresponded with the more general tropes that Africa as a continent became associated with. In this general image of Africa as a world apart, notions of a primitive and static Africa began to feature as prominently as the conception of Africa as an exotic other. Compared to other continents and societies which were also perceived as being different, Africa was often deemed to be even more different than other different societies. By and large Africa was conceived of as being determined by its environmental characteristics which included notions of prevailing rural abodes and, correspondingly, the overall absence of towns and cities. Perfectly in line with countless negative images that represented Africa, the notion of the broken Africa started to emerge as a further paradigm in discourse about Africa. Last but not least, the notion of a utopian Africa became prevalent in which life used to be more harmoni- ous, and society structured along egalitarian lines in the strength of the unspoilt life and natural purity that was still there.22 Healers and their activities were projected into each of these dominant tropes, and each of the tropes became more specifically infused with questions of legitimacy so that terms such as "recognition" and "acknowledgement" kept recurring in discourse scenarios and actual political considerations.

The Furtiveness of African Healers' Activities Among the first and foremost tropes on African healing which have repeatedly entailed problems for the assessment of healers' legitimacy counted the alleged furtiveness of healers' activities. It constituted part of the discourse when the first missionaries and travellers started to report about divination in Africa; and it has remained, in changing format, an important clue to the picture of healing up to the present day. The notion that healers perform secret acts, entertain secret knowledge and use, or confront, occult forces comprises a multitude of layers to which, over the course of time, new ones have been added. Thus healers have been described, formerly and today, as being involved with secrecy, but the essence has changed as to what it means when healers are thought to act in secrecy. One of the reasons why the trope

21 For a history of anthropology see Hammond-Tooke, W. D. Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa's Anthropologists 1920-1990. Johannesburg 1997; Schumaker, Lyn. Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa. Durham and London 2001. 22 Reynolds, Jonathan T. 'So Many Africas, So Little Time: Doing Justice to Africa in the World History Survey.' World History Connected 2: 1 (2004), 10 pp. 50 has been so pervasive is that the "secret" represents a fundamental methodological category of an obstacle and of a challenge to ethnographic observation.23 Even more importantly, the particular problem of observing healing is that crucial features of it remain unobservable. The notion about whether the observer received what he or she expected to be able to perceive rests, to a large degree, on trust. As one ethnographer put it,

although there would seem therefore to be ample opportunity for studying the craftsman at his work, in reality this is not so, as the witch-doctor is notoriously reserved and jealous of his art, and even when he consents to be interviewed it is more than likely that for various reasons he does not divulge the whole of his ritual nor demonstrate all his stock in trade.24

The processes of social reconstruction and change of which divination forms a part, can be observed and recorded. So can divinatory techniques, the medicine a diviner has to offer, as well as the "career paths" of diviners. But it is more difficult to observe the aspects of speaking and conveying the truth, a dimension that divination always entails, and which is so central that without it divination would not be able to exist. Unfortunately for the ethnographer, observation is the major technique through which to understand divination, and more generally, healing. Over time the idea of healers' secretiveness has developed into a complex discursive paradigm which refers to many different types and forms of secrecy, masking, veiling or illegibility. Healers' secrets may, in general terms, refer to the notion that their knowledge and activities, that the very source of their power is un-nameable. This actually is the reason why many people do not speak about it, and why in fact they do have no knowledge of it. The diviner usually remains a stranger in his or her own community, and so this basic perception of healers' elusiveness has accounted for the fact that in the community they are persons of social liminality. It has, however, never been seriously implied that healers were, physically and operationally, in hiding. This notion only came into play when the colonial bureaucracy started to ban healers from public activities. As one missionary once put it in his observations, "African wizards carried out their dark deeds in secret, even quite openly at times [my italics]."25 Others held that dingaka, virtually "artists of the secret", formed their own guilds whose members would not tell their secrets. People knew, however, exactly how to approach

23 Palmié, 'Annäherung'. 24 Drennan, M. R. 'Two Witch-Doctor's Outfits From Angola.' Bantu Studies 8: 4 (1934), pp. 383-387, here p. 383. 25 Calker, Ernst van. 'A Century of Moravian Mission Work in the Eastern Cape Colony and Transkei, 1828- 1928', in: Moravians in the Eastern Cape, 1828-1929: Four Accounts of Moravian Mission Work on the Eastern Cape Frontier. Transl. F. R. Baudert, ed. Timothy Keegan. Cape Town 2004, pp. 1-143,quote p. 29. 51 them in order both to protect themselves against evil and to achieve good fortune.26 Many secrets were visible, all too visible for some tastes. In addition, some secrets were scarcely guarded. Moreover, many observers compared the social role of healers with that of civil servants of modern political regimes, or with modern techniques of communication. The images which were conveyed and perceived on the strength of these parallels drawn were images of defect and deficiency. One observer argued that many of the healers ranked among the "most important official[s] in the tribe" who were "jealous of power, and allowed no competition."27 They pointed out the fact that healers embodied law and order, so that their role could be compared to that of policemen, lawyers and journalists. Healers were, quite naturally, found wanting in these roles. "The witchdoctor is a protection to the public in heathen society where there are neither policemen nor lawyers, and his first duty is to protect the community from people who are trying to injure it, by means of his magical rites."28 In terms of communication, a healer was "the native newspaper. He must be adept at spying upon people and reading their thoughts."29 In a "properly" structured society there would have been "proper" policemen, "proper" lawyers and "proper" journalists, who would have conducted their activities according to a socially agreed-upon code of ethics. Healers were discredited as deficient. Their activities were shrouded in secretiveness whereas others would have followed a transparent code of conduct. In Christian parlance in particular, healers' activities have often been associated with so- called "religion by night" whereas Christians have considered themselves practising their belief as "religion by day". When, in the nineteenth century, missionaries started to teach Christianity in African surroundings, they obviously considered healers to be secretive – one the strength of a paradigmatic understanding of the secret that was deeply rooted, both in terms of religion and politics, in the European understanding of the paradigm. And the paradigm, according to the way they understood it, was a fundamental marker of their understanding of the world.30 Missionaries, being among the first observers of divination and among the first to report about it back home and thereby into a different cultural context, used the concept of the secret to explain that the religious context they encountered in African

26 Endemann, Karl. 'Mittheilungen über die Sotho-Neger.' Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 6 (1874), pp. 16-66, here p. 42. 27 Dornan, S. S. 'Rainmaking in South Africa I.' The South African Outlook (02.09.1929), pp. 176-179, here p. 176. 28 Dornan, 'Witchcraft', p. 5. 29 ibid., p. 6. 30 Luhmann, Niklas. 'Geheimnis, Zeit und Ewigkeit,' in: Luhmann, Niklas/ Fuchs, Peter. Reden und Schweigen. Frankfurt 1989, pp. 101-137. 52 surroundings differed dramatically from the one they had left behind. Their motivation was multifaceted whereby one of the main reasons for their actins was that as agents of European culture they were convinced that they represented – not always, but quite often so31 – the forces of superior cultural achievement, and of civilisation. In a world which they deemed to be "the other", and which they wanted to improve, they developed merely scant, if any ambitions to actually demystify "the secret" of said others. Instead, more effort was directed and expended towards its stigmatisation and the social marginalisation of those who embodied the secret. In European Christianity, prior to the age of enlightenment, and in some of the ancient religions such as, for instance, the Egyptian Religion, the secrets of God constituted forbidden knowledge. Likewise, it was prohibited to know the secrets of power, be this power of a religious or a political nature. During the age of enlightenment "science" attained the role of a counter-category to the secrets of power and religion.32 Science actually became a medium with which to unveil, and to demystify the secret. Depending on the convictions people held, the effects of science were considered either to increase blasphemous intellectual pride or to create the basis for the critical engagement with, and sometimes the refutation of, a powerful, cohesive social force such as religion. Protestant missionaries, so essential in the South African history of Christianisation, often criticised the use of science. They feared that science would promote the view of the world that religion was nothing but an erroneous and out- moded concept for understanding the world. This did not mean, of course, that they were people unremittingly steeped in pre-enlightenment traditions. They refused to accept, for instance, the secret of secrets, with which the use of religion for the substantiation of political power was meant. According to this principle, rulers legitimated their power on the strength of religion, or from access to the church as an institution. Missionaries projected this notion onto the activities of charismatic diviners, particularly where diviners were locally allied with chiefly and royal power, and accused them of using the power of religion to install themselves, or the chiefs, as persons of (political) authority. A reputed missionary ethnographer once argued that "along with the chief he [the diviner] shares the greatest power in the savage tribe, not the power of supreme authority, but a power over life and death no less effective and

31 Many missionaries came to African surroundings to search for culturally pure grounds. They had experienced the cultural "achievements" of their home society as a process in which they had been marginalized, and subsequently hoped to find a less corrupt society in Africa. The positive disposition towards African societies and cultures did not necessary entail that they appreciated all features of African culture alike, or that they were completely untouched by modern European cultural traditions such as the enlightenment, the belief in personal responsibility etc. 32 Ginzburg, Carlo. 'High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.' Past and Present 73 (1976), pp. 28-41, here p. 35. 53 real, though hidden and mysterious."33 In the eyes of the missionaries, diviners were not only markers of an undesirable order. They were considered destructive to the prospective order, if not threatening the one and only eternal and legitimate truth. It ought to be noted that – as compared to European paradigms of the secret – the knowledge of South African diviners, their skills and activities, were never conceptualised in African systems of thought in as systematic a pattern as in early modern Europe. Initiation to particular cults of priesthoods used to be more flexible. So the interpretation of African phenomena of secretiveness against the background of European-derived conceptualities always bore a touch of exaggeration. In addition, furtiveness of action was also associated, in African and European cultures, with the activities of the witch, the sorcerer, the anti-social and malevolent person who inflicted harm in "mysterious" and non-natural ways upon others. In some African societies a distinction was made between diviners, who commanded the spirits (often good and evil at the same time), and herbalists, who knew the manipulative medicines (which could be used for good and evil purposes). Even more so, a distinction was made in terms of intention, that is to say between commanding the manipulative powers and actually harming others as much as achieving personal benefit by using familiar agents and specific medicines. Evildoers physically injured other individuals or their property.34 From their own background missionaries knew that occult knowledge existed and that sometimes particular secret societies were formed to practice occultism.35 The notion of the secret society was transferred into the African context, where, for instance, missionary ethnographers recorded that evildoers and witches, of whose actual powers they were usually convinced, were organised into guilds, whereas diviners were not. The "baloyi form a kind of secret society amongst the tribe, and they assemble – with their spiritual bodies – during the night to eat human flesh in the desert."36 To counter these evildoers who were organised into guilds, people needed specifically skilled diviners who could act as "smellers-out".37 According to these observations, evildoers were the first to join up in networks, long before healers decided to embark on similar ventures. The associations of evildoers were deemed socially counterproductive, and this may be employed as one explanation as to why, in later decades, state authorities remained scepti-

33 Bryant, Zulu Medicine, pp. 9-10 34 Thomas, Religion and Decline of Magic 1973: 638 35 The trope of the "secret society" will be explored further below. 36 Junod, H. A. 'The Theory of Witchcraft amongst South African Natives.' South African Journal of Science 3 (1905-1906), pp. 230-241, here p. 230. 37 Mabille, H. E. 'The Basuto of Basutoland.' Journal of the African Society 5: 19 (1906), pp. 223-251 and 5: 20 (1907), pp. 351-376, here p. 355, pp. 376 - 375. 54 cal towards associations, which were different, but which in their minds they brought into connection with the "secret societies" of evildoers.38 Another strand interwoven with the many paradigms of secretiveness was that a secret meant that one did not know because one feared to know. African people were observed to know terms and expressions, often those used by diviners when they were invoking the spirits. But to know the expressions did not imply to know their meaning.39 In European enlightenment discourse, Christians became bold enough to know. The majority of missionaries who came to African societies, however, had chosen not to inquire intellectually about certain bodies of religious knowledge. In fact, they held it to be morally condemnable to do so, and considered anyone who did so to be a spiritually proud and immorally curious heretic. The differentiation and distinction they arrived at between themselves and African people was, however, that they conceived of themselves as having consciously decided to fear and revere God, whereas Africans were deemed to be enthralled in "irrational" fear. The implica- tion was that whereas Europeans understood their fear of God, African people did not understand theirs. So the European fear of God was superior to African people's fear of their gods. Depending on perspective, the activities of healers were sometimes described as gleichgültige Spielerei, "fools' games that do not matter",40 and, if scholars were convinced that there was more to it, as jahrhunderte alte Zauberwissenschaft, an "ancient wisdom of magic".41 Between the turn of the twentieth century and World War II, the study of secret societies served as a common research paradigm was understood in which the formation of therapeutic associations, rather than of "evildoers".42 As regards the geographical area, the focus extended from West Africa to Equatorial Africa and the Lower Congo. South Africa was not a major area where such "secrets societies" proliferated. The studies acknowledged the political significance exercised by the therapeutic associations in periods of dramatic economic transformation. They raised the question as to why in certain regions African states came into existence in the form of centralised kingdoms, whereas in other areas cults and therapeutic movements assumed this power. The focus of study became outdated when in the process of achieving independence from the colonial regimes, the African national state became a more central focus of investigation in history and political science. In anthropology

38 See chapter 3. 39 MacGaffey, Wyatt. Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire. Chicago 19xy, p. 56. 40 Bartels, Max. 'Der Würfelzauber südafrikanischer Völker.' Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 35 (1903), pp. 338-378, quote p. 375. 41 ibid. 42 For a summary see Janzen, Lemba, pp. 9-12. 55 the paradigm of the secret society gave way to the study of therapeutic associations, of systems of thought with regard to affliction and misfortune. Overcoming notions of healers' furtiveness by striving to close the gaps between observation, participation, and initiation has remained a concern for many scholars in the study of divination and healing. When scholars straddle, on the one hand, the achievement of knowledge in academic terms and, on the other, the attainment of insight and clarity one only gets through initiation, the exploration of the secret remained an important paradigm to be addressed in the name of experience.

There is, without the slightest doubt, much of profound human experience, tragedy and beauty in any ritual. The stranger who is given the opportunity to share in this experience, however im- perfectly and at whatever costs, receives much to be grateful for. He is admitted into a great intimacy, and this imposes obligations upon him as a professional and as a fellow man. Professionally, the main obligation is: to strive passionately for understanding.43

The techniques of observation have their limits if the aim is to unveil secrets. The unveiling of secrets obviously requires a different approach, which is not academic in the conventional sense. At a certain point, observers can probably decide whether to take the step towards initiation, or whether to leave as a secret what the gods and the bearers of the secret do not want to be revealed.44 More recently, secrets have also been considered in connection with the loss of wisdom. In some cultures elders have stopped imparting knowledge on persons to be initiated. This means that persons become initiated to particular bodies of knowledge, but that they remain dormant as long as elders do not talk to them about it. This way, some knowledge will become irretrievably lost. In these cultures elders may even be accused of taking wisdom, and secrets, to the grave.45 The loss of wisdom is an issue that South African cultures have been facing in their own ways. Some of the ways of compensating for this potential loss will be explored in the subsequent chapters, but unquestionably, processes such as the professionalisation of healers and their popularisation are not necessarily a compensation.

43 Binsbergen, Wim van. Religious Change in Zambia: Exploratory Studies. London and Boston 1981, p. 234. 44 Palmié, 'Annäherung'. 45 Palmié, Stephan. 'Against Syncretism: 'Africanizing' and 'Cubanizing' Discourses in North American òrÌsà Worship', in: Fardon, Richard (ed). Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge. London 1995, pp. 73-105, here p. 86. 56

A Peculiarly African Culture of Rural Abodes Another extension of the issue of legitimacy, and almost metonym, is that African healing has usually been accorded recognition as a particular, even though peculiar part of African culture. It was a notion of culture that was neither urban nor "modern", and which has been accredited with particular status because it was understood in the context of life in the rural areas. As part of rural culture, the culture of African divination has been conceived of as one of the authentic expressions of people's social realities. In urban surroundings, however, African healing has often been understood as misplaced, and corrupted by the influences of industrialisation and modernisation. For many it jutted or stood out as a problem of confusion in so far as in urban surroundings healers and health-seekers incorporated colonial values into their self-definition, blending together the properties of various ethnically and culturally defined techniques of achieving health. To grasp the purity of African healing cultures, the majority of scholars and students thought it seemed worthwhile concentrating on field studies in rural areas. The number of studies on healers and their activities in urban centres have always been striking in their paucity. Yet African cultures always lay entwined. So did African healing. In its expression as ngoma it was connected to other cultures to be found on the continent.46 In addition, it was connected to understandings of health held by other people who lived in the same surroundings. Healing in South Africa was a product of different African health cultures that met, for instance, in the racially segregated townships. Moreover, it was a product of African and white attitudes towards health which interacted in particularly virulent ways in rural areas. A medical inspector travelling the Northern Transvaal in the 1920s noted in his diary that the majority of the settler population explained the occurrence of diseases, such as malaria for instance, according to a completely different logic than the one he himself, as a scientifically trained doctor, would have applied. The population which he inspected conceived of many diseases as miasmatic ailments and refused to discuss insect carriers of "mal-aria". They conceived of malaria "as a visitation, like influenza or typhoid".47 This rural concept of disease was probably closer to African interpretations than to any of the "western", scientific explanations. Most African healers stressed anyway that their patients came from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and that a Zulu healer did not only tend to Zulu patients. In the towns, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it caused concern among government

46 Janzen, 'Drums'. 47 Leipoldt, Bushveld Doctor, p. 76; Swart, Sandra. '"Bushveld Magic" and "Miracle Doctors" – an Exploration of Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt's Experiences in the Waterberg, South Africa, c. 1906-1917.' Journal of African History 45 (2004), pp. 237-255. 57 officials that white people of the "poorer classes" sought treatment from African healers.48 Vice versa, many local African cultures called upon external experts to solve particularly problematic issues. It must also be taken into consideration that later in the century, with rising legal discrimination of African healers, many of them sought training in neighbouring countries such as Swaziland, where rulers were less ill-disposed towards African traditions of healing.49 In the context of writing "history from below" it has been argued with regard to cultural dynamics in general that

there are many cultures, but they are not all neatly arranged in some sort of pluralistic circle, each with its own pure history and logic. Furthermore, they are not to be granted autonomous historical status. Rather, they are locked in constant conflict with each other, on the basis of the material conditions of their adherents, the class cleavages in the society, and the historical legacy which informs every conflict.50

This was particularly true for African healing, given the general quest of health-seekers for innovative healing techniques, and given healers' inclination towards curiosity, experimenta- tion and inquiry.51 The notion that African healing primarily had to be understood in terms of culture, resonated with the notion that authentic African healing cultures were local in their scope. Ancestors and spirits did not like to travel. They preferred to reside in rural abodes. Local communities commanded the means to control African healers, whether they came from within the community or from without, and the more important diviners were linked to chiefs and local regimes anyway.52 Through residence, veneration of the local dead, and ritual focus- ing on land spirits, a special link between the living, the supernatural and the land was established. Beyond this matrix which kept people in place success could not be expected in economically vital undertakings such as agriculture, fishing, hunting and collecting.53 That this changed in more recent decades, has caused uneasiness not only among Africans, but particularly among many academic scholars of rural communities. Did change imply destruction? It has been argued that colonial incursions contributed to the fragmentation of world views in African societies, and to the tendency of associating health and its causative spirits with local and clan ancestors rather than with chiefly spirits.

48 Flint, 'Competition', pp. 209-213. 49 Maseko, N. 'Current Traditional Healer Policy in Swaziland', in: Freeman, M. (comp.) Recognition and Registration of Traditional Healers – Possibilities and Problems (Conference Proceedings). Johannesburg 1992, pp. 18-23. 50 Bozzoli, 'History', p. 22. 51 For more detail see chapter 3. 52 Ngubane, Body and Mind. 53 van Binsbergen, Religious Change, p. 277. 58

In rural abodes healing was deemed to be practised in common consensus by the community and discretely from the provision of so-called western, or modern, health services. Rural expressions of culture were deemed "alive and dynamic", but nevertheless entrenched in "cultural entities" and set off from urban influences.54 Among the disasters that could therefore befall a researcher was that their observations of healing ceremonies in rural abodes were "spoilt" when, for instance, migrants returned back home from the mines. In Zambia, nkula, which exemplified typical features of Ndembu cults of affliction, redressive ritual and the restoration of social relations, was exposed to urban influences, and academic observers of nkula were disturbed by this interference:

I will begin with this account of Nkula by giving Muchona's version of Ku-lembeka… the Ku- lembeka I saw was fragmentary and incomplete, largely because a crowd of youth, most of whom had recently been working on the Copperbelt, came with guitars and clinking bottles to enjoy themselves in modern style. Singing and dancing nsabasanba, and the local modern dance chikinta, they stole all the limelight and almost brought Nkula to a halt. A good deal of my note- taking concerned their activities, as the chance to study change in a ritual context was too good to miss. The circumstances did not lend themselves to recording traditional practices. But Muchona's account corresponded closely to what I did see of Nkula, and to the versions of others I questioned about Ku-lembeka.55

In this assessment urban influences were interpreted as disruptive. The migrants brought back home not only innovative ways of conducting a ritual, it was particularly disappointing that they disturbed the traditional ritual with popular song, dance, and music. What the researcher recorded, however, pointed, firstly, to an interaction of ritual and entertainment, and secondly highlighted two different understandings of culture. The anthropologist remarked that the situation did not lend itself to recording traditional practices. He was right in so far as the situation did not lend itself to the sampling of symbols and meanings that clustered neatly into one coherent cultural system. However, notice was taken of the close relation between ngoma as therapeutics and as a form of entertainment in East African contexts as well.56 It was recorded in numerous studies on healing in African cities. From the 1920s until about 1933, popular ngoma dancing was one specific form out of a large array of popular music and dance in Durban.57 Rather frequently, scholars disentangled what they understood as not belonging together, and distinguished between "therapeutic" and "entertaining" ngoma in Kinshasa, Dar

54 Kapapa, Paul. 'The Role of the Traditional Healer in Malawi and Zambia.' Curare 3 (1980), pp. 205-208. This but one article stands representative for many others written in a similar inclination. 55 Turner, Victor. The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia. Oxford 1968, p. 58. 56 Ranger, Terence O. Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma. Berkeley 1975. 57 Erlmann, Veit. 'But Hope Does Not Kill: Black Popular Music in Durban, 1913-1939', in: Maylam, Paul/ Edwards, Iain (ed). The People's City: African Life in Twentieth-Century Durban. Pietermaritzburg 1996, pp. 67-101, pp. 84-94. 59 es Salaam, Mbabane-Manzini and Cape Town.58 The notion that things did not belong together was perhaps, one offshoot of over-emphasising in these scholars' understanding of culture the aspect of culture as a system of norms and institutions which ideally would have been "logical, coherent, shared, uniform and static".59 If, however, culture was understood in terms of "practical activity shot through by wilful action, power relations, struggle, contradiction, and change", the mixing of nkula and popular music as it occurred was the very essence of the culture of the people.60 The quote given above covered both these notions of culture, pointed to the difficulty in reconciling them, and gives an idea of the pervasiveness of the notion that authentic healing somehow had to be a sub-system of African culture, preferably in rural abodes. In studies on urbanisation, healing was also neglected as a topic that could have been followed up as regards the dynamics it developed as an interloper between town and countryside. Whereas many studies have focused on urban-rural relationships, health practices have not received particular attention in this regard. It has sometimes been assumed that when searching treatment for difficult conditions migrants went back home.61 It has also been observed that due to the fact that the increasing number of Africans living and working in the towns the profession of African medicine thrived in the towns.62 It has been noted that due to labour migration introduced new forms of spirit possession were introduced into the rural areas of Delagoa Bay, where healers had to find new remedies for this affliction.63 In the towns hospitals were poorly equipped and mine owners were reluctant to offer appropriate treatment to their workers so that resorting to African medicine was often the only way to tackle illness, affliction and disease.64 But these were observations mentioned in passing rather than foci of broader investigations in the context of rural-urban dynamics. Among the literature on the development of independent forms of Christianity, studies on South Africa's independent churches have stated in abundance that healing became conspicuous in urban contexts. Note was taken of the fact that in the towns new medico- religious scenarios unfolded, which constituted responses to the particular diseases and problems people encountered in urban environments. Assessing "socio-cultural and

58 Janzen, 'Drums', pp. 175-179. 59 Sewell, 'Concept(s) of Culture', p. 44. 60 ibid. 61 van Binsbergen, Religious Change, pp. 215-235. 62 Janzen, John M. 'Pluralistic Legitimation of Therapy Systems in Contemporary Zaire', in: Harrison, Ira E./ Dunlop, David W. (ed). Traditional Healers: Use and Non-Use in Health Care Delivery (Rural Africana - Current Research in the Social Sciences 26). East Lansing/ Michigan 1974-75, pp. 105-122, pp. 105-107. 63 Harries, Patrick. Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860- 1910. Johannesburg 1993, pp. 163-165. 64 Onselen, Charles van. Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia 1900-1933. London 1976, pp. 251-253. 60 economico-political change and the emergence of new problems and needs, one is well advised to search for basic roots in continuity with traditional African indigenous religious systems."65 This observation differed, at first sight, from the cruder "model of one-way change" which had previously been taken for granted. In the end, however, these studies on innovative Christianity promoted just as well one-directional models of understanding urban innovations as being based on rural foundations. These studies did not go as far as to examine the ways in which changed practices of healing impacted on the very basis from which the innovations were assumed to have sprung. The models also assumed that change was taking place "within" one ethnically defined culture, which was vacillating, and thus in a state of suspension, between the town and the countryside, and they neglected the interaction that took hold between cultures or on the basis of social stratification. Last but not least, the models did simply not assume that certain cultural dynamics had their "origins" in the urban setting, where they took as a result of interaction that would not occur in the rural areas. The concept of exclusively rural abodes for healers and their activities is an historically difficult notion for the period under review in this study. Rural areas themselves changed dramatically as processes of peasantisation transformed rural society all over the African continent. Particularly in South Africa, changes in the agrarian society were eminent and at times dramatic. In addition, a process of industrialisation gained momentum in the latter half of the nineteenth century that also altered relations between town and countryside. The 1913 Natives Land Act barred Africans from purchasing or leasing land outside the reserves from people who were not Africans and it also prohibited sharecropping in the Orange Free State. In the different regions, for most part of the twentieth century, white-owned farmlands came to stand in stark juxtaposition to overcrowded and impoverished African reserves.66 The 1920s constituted a period during which agrarian society underwent substantial transformation, also as a result of or, in connection with, industrialisation and urbanisation, whereby the outcome of this transformation consisted in the fact that populations of the reserves became captive labour for the mines while tenants became trapped labour for farmers.67 The period also became indicative of state intervention, less in terms of granting subsidies or controlling markets, but rather in terms of providing a basis for accumulation.68 African farming, on the other hand, gradually collapsed. Prosperous peasants, who had been

65 Dillon-Malone, Clive. 'The "Mutumwa" Churches of Zambia: An Indigenous African Religious Healing Movement.' Journal of Religion in Africa 14 (1983), pp. 204-222, quote p. 205. 66 Beinart, William/ Delius, Peter. 'Introduction', in: Beinart, William/ Delius, Peter/ Trapido, Stanley (ed). Putting a Plough to the Ground: Accumulation and Dispossession in Rural South Africa 1850-1930. Johannesburg 1986, pp. 1-55, here p. 1. 67 Bundy, Colin. The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry. London 1979. 68 Beinart/ Delius, 'Introduction', p. 31. 61 producing a substantial surplus for the market, were wiped out. The quality of life declined for all Africans in the reserves, and for a growing number of Africans migration was one way out of this disastrous quandary. The discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 wrote into the social geography of the region the actual existence of urbanising and industrialising centres to which Africans were drawn. The diamond fields in Kimberley and gold mining on the Witwatersrand stimulated the growth of other population centres such as the port towns of Durban. East London, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town expanded as commerce swelled. People became sick in the towns due to malnutrition, housing conditions and problems connected to issues of sanitation and poverty. At times epidemics spread. With this process patterns of African health were woven into the emerging rural-urban link. Individuals and groups involved in the maintenance and restoration of African health had to respond to this "relocation" of health. Between 1891 and 1911 the urban population of South Africa increased by 200 per cent. The increase in the urban presence of unskilled African workers was met by a rapid urbanisation of coloureds and impoverished rural Afrikaners who were flooding the emerging centres. One effect of industrialisation was that towns became the main area of racial conflict. The problem of white poors contributed to the making of a racially stratified urban setting. High wages were provided for skilled white labourers, while low wages were available only for unskilled African labour. The poor white problem became a problem of unemployment.69 In the 1920s Africans belonged to the city. They occupied menial positions, and were conceived of as non- permanent members of the urban communities. Africans were accepted as an economic factor in the towns, but not as their dwellers. And yet, between 1921 and 1936 the African urban population increased by a further 94.49 per cent.70 In addition, between 1910 and 1930, the poor white population was targeted by slogans, urged to return "back to the land". Against such fundamental changes in the composition of South African society healers had to carve out new fields for themselves and their practices. And yet, healers' legitimacy has since been framed in terms of rural culture.

Traditional Healing A last trope that must be mentioned in this chapter, and that is inextricably interwoven with notions of healers' legitimacy is the trope of traditional healing. It represents a trope that only

69 Welsh, David. 'The Growth of Towns', in: Wilson, Monica/ Thompson, Leonard (ed). The Oxford History of South Africa. Vol. II: South Africa 1870-1966. Oxford 1971, pp. 172-243. 70 ibid., p. 188. 62 came into existence in recent decades, mainly in the 1970s, and that has developed a strong rhetoric of its own ever since. At the end of a long process of denying African healing its appropriateness for the times, its public repute, its ethic merit and economic value, there occurred a break-through in so far that African therapeutics came to be labelled as traditional healing and that its protagonists became known as traditional healers. "Traditional healing" and "traditional healers" both were epistemological constructions which basically originated from the medico-culturally systematising vocabulary of the mid-1970s. The terminological convention arrived at delimited the activities and the protagonists from witchcraft, and assigned to healers and their craft a marginalized, albeit protected, niche in the South African health culture. The counter-category of traditional healing was modern health care. African healing was considered traditional, while Western traditions of healing were considered modern. Both became categories of a universal discourse in which different medical systems were juxtaposed to one another. Notions of traditional healing triggered a connotation of benign activities, a scene of communally arranged social consensus that included social reform for the better. Traditional healing was an adjunct to areas and spheres where modern medicine was unable to reach. Yet that healing is coupled with the exercise of power is frequently blended out.71 Therefore descriptions and analyses frequently show a tendency to emphasise the "traditional" and to neglect the patters of power involved in it. As one observer put it,

in our eagerness to preserve the traditional medical system for cultural reasons, we must not forget that although many of the healers are respected local leaders with great knowledge of the people, they are also often feared as experts who can deal with witchcraft. To many patients, modern medicine thus comes to represent a possibility to distance oneself from exactly this aspects of a village life which may not always be as peaceful seen from the inside as it may look like to an outsider.72

The Westernisation of medical discourse, it could even be argued the "WHO-sation" of the discourse, impacted on many alternative medical cultures all around the globe. Traditional Chinese Medicine, for instance, as it is known and systematised today owes a lot to the challenges of Western impacts.73 Chinese Medicine tried to set itself apart from allopathic medicine by calling itself Chinese Medicine (after it had been termed just "medicine"). Later

71 Vaughan, Megan. 'Healing and Curing: Issues in the Social History and Anthropology of Medicine in Africa.' Social History of Medicine 7: 2 (1994), pp. 283-295. 72 Ingstad, Benedicte. 'Healer, Witch, Prophet or Modern Health Worker? The Changing Role of Ngaka ya Setswana', in: Jacobsen-Widding, Anita/ Westerlund, David (ed). Culture, Experience and Pluralism: Essays on African Ideas of Illness and Healing. Uppsala 1989, pp. 247-276, quote pp. 273-274. 73 Taylor, Kim. 'Divergent Interests and Cultivated Misunderstandings: The Influence of the West on Modern Chinese Medicine.' Social History of Medicine 17: 1 (2004), pp. 93-111. 63 it was denominated Traditional Chinese Medicine instead of Chinese Medicine even though the systematised body of knowledge was not intended as a collection of traditional knowledge but, just the other way round, as a body of older therapeutic techniques that had undergone a process of modernisation. The West misunderstood and misinterpreted, and assigned this kind of medicine the status of a traditional art, as a counterpart to "Western" medicine. Following on from the strand of argumentation above, the experience of African medicine could be taken as just another example. But the discursive traditionalisation of African medicines differed significantly from the discursive traditionalisation of Chinese Medicine, and had a particular edge to it. One of the central questions that have persistently been asked about African healing focuses on the ways in which African therapeutics may be compared to and contrasted with the superior art of Western science-based medicine.74 African medicine has not been understood as an integral part of colonial, imperial, and postcolonial medical settings in Africa, being discriminated against by the state, the church and medical institutions, but sought after by actual health-seekers. Rather, it has been understood in terms of difference – of difference from colonial medicine, of difference from allopathic medicine, and of difference from purely curative medicine.75 Here, yet again, the perspective of religion lies intertwined. For those who approach healing from the perspective of religion rather than from a medical viewpoint, and hence for those who think in terms of social reform and the saving of souls, one of the central questions that need to be asked is how healing can be understood as a traditional element in African Religion, which either prepared the ground for the spread of Christianity, or which strengthens the so-called African side of present Christianity in South Africa. Notions of traditional healing have been used to define healing as a contrast to mainstream ecclesiastical developments. Studies on African religious innovation touched upon African healing in many instances, and they came to understand healing as a sub-system of a larger, more encompassing African religious system. Tradition is not only a counter-category to modernity. The notion of tradition also denies healing a proper history. Things which are traditional, which are diffusedly ancient, are without time because they have always existed and will not change. The notion that certain aspects of healing have existed "since times immemorial" appears as a popular formulation in quite a number of texts. Traditions, which do not possess a history, are static and closed systems. The only dynamic and liveliness they achieve is that they develop according to their

74 Feierman, Steven. 'Explanation and Uncertainty in the Medical World of Ghaambo.' Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74: 2 (2000), pp. 317-344. 75 Vaughan, 'Healing and Curing', pp. 287-295. 64 own logic. This misconception leads to the neglect of the crucial fact that African healing systems have never developed in a vacuum. Histories of healing have quite conversely, shown that "tradition" furnishes nothing but a flawed concept for understanding the social role of healing, cults and ceremonies.76 This has provided a strong, seemingly logical framework of prejudiced views directed against healers and their legitimacy. This study will endeavour to contribute a small step towards restoring historicity to South African healers and their activities.

76 Wallace, Marion. '"Making Tradition": Healing, History and Ethnic Identity among Otjiherero-Speakers in Namibia, c. 1850-1950.' Journal of Southern African Studies 29: 2 (2003), pp. 355-372; Hunt, Nancy Rose. A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. London 1999; Janzen, Lemba. 3

Attempted Professionalisation Formal Presentations of Healers' Associations to the Authorities

Reading the Archive Contrary to the potentially entertained expectation that African healing is an orally performed and ritual culture, healers used pen and paper, typewriter and printing facilities to articulate, realise and defend their aspirations. Ever since the first professional associations of healers began to take shape in the early 1930s, their functionaries became assiduous scribes, producing pamphlets, petitions, bylaws, requests and resolutions, on the whole a multifaceted correspondence. Quite often rendered in rather an eye-catching fashion through the use of images, emblems and arrangement of slogans, this material was directed by healers of various associations at the authorities of the South African state. Healers submitted self-legitimising documents such as licences, certificates and membership cards which the associations issued to their members while the state showed reluctance to provide the aspiring profession with such documents. These documents were texts in which the authors represented their profession in terms that engaged with the language and documentary styles of an official bureaucracy which claimed cultural superiority. Keeping to the official channels of communication for their correspondence with the government, the petitioners directed letters, information and requests to either the Department of Native Affairs or the Department of Health in Pretoria. In the state departments the "Minister of Health", the "Minister of Public Health", the "Secretary for Public Health", the "Medical Minister" and the "Secretary of Native Affairs" received over the years virtually hundreds, if not thousands, of petitions. The officials in the departments named above were politically responsible in the two major departments which provided social welfare to Africans. Many petitions and similar documents were drawn up not by individual healers but by healers' associations, or their legal brokers, who requested the official recognition of healers and their activities in the various towns of the country. At some point the administration filed the bulk of the material into card folders which they captioned "Ethnology and 66

Customs: inyangas and herbalists (Dingaka Associations)", "Inyangas and Herbalists: Licences", "Dingaka Associations", or "Inyanga Licences". Further documents were scattered over the files of other departments and had to be located after some scrutiny. Most of the documents available were written in English, the preferred language of the urban and the socially aspiring. The few documents submitted in African languages were frequently translated for official use.1 As members of a community whose discourse was marginalized in South Africa, a variety of health practitioners and ritual specialists raised their voices self-confidently and articulated their concern in order to achieve official acknowledgement of healers' professionalisation. They faced the problem, however, that the wider political establishment did not take immediate notice of this specific concern. Hence the files of the administration became an archive of voices, with healers vying for recognition, while the state demonstrated its reluctance to assist the process of professionalisation. Despite this failed communication healers adhered to this form of presenting their concern for a couple of decades. After the voices started to relapse into silence towards the late 1950s, the documents remained an historical legacy indicating today that a group of people, which by common perception, has often been stylised as traditional, uneducated and secretive, resorted to this formally sophisticated way of presenting the case of their intended yet thwarted professionalisation which was, in addition, consciously carried out in the public arena and, therefore, highly transparent. The source material does not allow one to arrive at final conclusions about the significance of literacy in the African healing profession, but it stands as a reminder that literacy played a part in this profession, whose protagonists have commonly been considered "uneducated", "pagan" and illiterate. The archive which historians are able to access today consists of letters, requests, leaflets, constitutions and certificates. The documents resemble the title deeds, certificates, exemption papers and "letters" which formally helped create social and economic differentiation among black Africans. Towards the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth centuries, the acquisition of such documents was vital for being granted exemption from the provisions of "native laws". After the passing of the Urban Areas Act of 1923, a process that had started as a matter of prestige, and that had promised the holder to be of "civilised" status, started to take on a new significance. The possession of letters and

1 South African National Archives, Pretoria (SAB), Department of Health: GES 1783 25/30D, GES 1784 25/30E, GES 1785 25/30G, GES 1786 25/30H, GES 1786 25/30J, GES 1787 25/30K, GES 1788 25/30M, GES 1789 25/30S, GES 1834 74/30; Department of Native Affairs: NTS 7275 537/326, NTS 9302 1/376, NTS 9302 2/376, NTS 9303 4/376, NTS 9303 7/376, NTS 9303 9/376, NTS 9305 12/376. 67 certificates became critical in the achievement of upward social mobility. Letters helped with the acquisition of land, and were useful for the conduct of business outside the locations. Documents could liberate individuals from irksome restrictions on movement.2 As a result, letters and certificates promoted and propelled the emergence of a privileged group of people in urban black communities. The correspondence of individual healers and healers' associations illustrates the conscious effort to counteract discrimination, and to make use of potential loopholes in the system. It also shows how, in the face of frustration, associations submitted to the ideology of racism, segregation and apartheid, and renounced any activity that could have brought them into line with oppositional groups. Certification also played a significant role for ordinary Africans in contexts of health. Mine workers on the Witwatersrand were exposed to particular health risks such as tuberculosis. Medical screening was debated controversially between various parties in the 1920s. African workers could be compensated for TB if they were diagnosed and certified by the Miner's Phthisis Bureau before death or upon discharge from their job or from the hospital. A piece of paper, albeit hard to obtain, could provide financial security for the families of men who were no longer able to work underground.3 Between the 1930s and the late 1950s healers presented, yet again, a very particular concern. They wished to discuss the professionalisation of their craft, and intended to redefine their relation to those in political office. Their arguments were largely indicative of an urban understanding of power and social relations. They point to the fact that the process of healers' professionalisation was, in places, driven away from the former, and still existing, rural bases of healers' activities. Out of this process new concerns were emerging that related to the profession's legitimacy in urban settings and the commercialisation of medicine. The associational correspondence was authored by healers who spoke on behalf of a fragmented group of men and women, medical practitioners, seers, diviners and spiritual leaders, all of whom claimed either intimate knowledge of herbs and medicines, or the personal capacity to communicate with the other world, or both. But they were without official rank. Irrespective of their ethnic background, these individuals could become members of the newly forming professional associations which envisioned an umbrella function regardless of the ethnic or regional origin of the practitioners. Almost indiscriminately, the almost exclusively male writers called themselves izangoma, izinyanga, herbalists, dingaka, "native doctors" or "native race doctors" and depending on context, they conceived

2 Cobley, Alan Gregory. Class and Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950. Connecticut 1990, p. 67. 3 Packard, White Plague, p. 181 68 of themselves as a "nation" or a "profession". Some used titles such as "Herb Dr., non- medical". With regard to gender, it has been noted that female healers hardly left any traces in the archives.4 This also holds true for the associational correspondence: women were not particularly visible as correspondents and holders of office even though generally they were not discouraged from participation in the professionalisation process.5 Members and functionaries of healers' professional associations wished to convey a specific image of themselves – as skilled specialists, masters of wisdom and knowledge, and of steadfast servants to a society in need. They emphasised loyalty to those who held power, and were eager to fulfil public expectations. Healing has been described as conservative in nature, and as a mixture of ideology and practice aimed at the restoration of power structures rather than their disruption.6 Urban environments did not basically alter that fundamental constituent of healing activities. More importantly, associations denoted healers' efforts towards the consolidation of a fragmented body of specialists. In their correspondence with the authorities, healers' associations therefore stressed commonalities, equal status and the wish to unite rather than a desire to create hierarchies or distinctions amongst themselves. One society, for instance, whose history will be followed up at a later point, called itself the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalist Midwives Sangoma Society of Sophiatown. This was an integrative umbrella designation for the plethora of highly divergent specialisms in the profession. The lengthy name remained precise in terming the variety of specialists encompassed, and it attempted to stress the inclusiveness towards the many specialists to whom the association offered a joint institutional background. Other associations named themselves as African Dingaka Association, the African Herb Specialists Association, the African Herbalists' and Inyangas' Board of Control, the African National Native Herbs Doctors of South Africa, the African National Native Herbs Doctors of South Africa, the African United Herbalists Board of Control, the Bantu Medical Union Club of South Africa, the Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association, the Natal Native Medical Association, the Natal and Zululand Inyangas and Herbalists Association, the Natal Native Medical Association, the Orange Free State African Herbalists Association, the Cape Province Herbalists Association, the South African Elephant Herbs Medicine Society 'Iitzanuse', the South African Native Bantu Dingaka, or the Untu

4 Burns, Catherine. 'Louisa Mvemve: A Woman's Advice to the Public on the Cure of Various Diseases.' Kronos 23 (1996), pp. 108-134. 5 Quite the contrary was true: the professionalisation process would have been unthinkable without the professionalisation process of African nurses – see further below. 6 Schoffeleers, 'Ritual Healing', pp. 1-25. 69

Bantu Coloured Native Victoria Memorial [Association]. Virtually all of them stressed their specialisation in herbalism, for reasons that will be elaborated on later in this chapter. In its formal aspects the correspondence was highly official and it conveyed, apart from a willingness to engage with colonial formats, professional self-esteem that was derived from just these forms. Where possible, healers used type-writers or printing facilities. They validated their documents through stamps, official emblems, carefully arranged slogans and trademarks. The stamp has been identified as a very typical symbol as regards documents which combined literacy, orality and visuality.7 This observation can be extended to emblems, slogans and trademarks as well, and explains why the documents healers sent in to the authorities were so multi-layered in their expression. By and large, the documents could well have competed with the professionalism of mission publications, government gazettes, and office stationery. It is though, feasible that competition was not a priority on the associations' agendas. As a rule, healers tended to take on board what others did, adjusted it to their own needs and assumed that healing techniques and explanations of health coexisted and complemented each other. Producing leaflets which would perfectly have suited direct campaigning, they advertised their cause to the many who would possibly need their services and ministrations when they were searching for answers to their personal ailments. Unfortu- nately, it is difficult to reconstruct exactly how the associations distributed their printed material and yet it is possible to imagine that they took it from street to street. The correspondence between healers' associations and the authorities was extensive, but it is important to note that none of the associations' correspondence extended consistently across the whole period under review. Most typically, it spanned a few years, and it appears as if there were phases during which government officials collected correspondence with particular eagerness. At some point the case would be dropped, only to re-emerge maybe some ten years later. Fragmented though at times taken up once more, or fragmented and continued by another association in a different place, correspondence sprang up all over South Africa and added to a virtually town-based geography of healers' associations in the country. One association, the African Herb Specialists, was based at Ficksburg/ Basutoland Bridge and connected healers travelling from Natal via Leribe in Lesotho to the Orange Free State and back home again.8 The Cape African Dingaka Association was established in Kimberley.

7 Hofmeyr, Isabel. 'The Letter and the Law: the Politics of Orality and Literacy in the Chiefdoms of the Northern Transvaal', in: Gunner, Liz/ Furniss, Graham (ed). Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature. Johannesburg 1995, pp. 35-46. 8 Not much is known about a geography of healing in South Africa. Pilgrimages and hybridisations of religious practice of more recent nature have been recorded for this area by Coplan, David B. 'Land from the Ancestors: 70

Other associations opened head offices and branches in townships such as, in the case of the Orange Free State African Herbalists Association, in Four/ Six Location of Bloemfontein, or, as in the case of the African Dingaka Association, in Bochabelo Village nearby Bloemfontein. The African Dingaka Association had another main office in Pretoria, where, as well, the South African Native Bantu Dingaka Association operated out of 205 Church Square, 110 Mutual Buildings. Several associations were based in Durban such as, for instance, the Natal & Zululand Inyangas & Herbalists Association, and the Natal Native Medical Association. They had rented offices in 105 Umgeni Road, and a telephone connection. The Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association opened its headquarters in Orlando East/ Johannesburg, south-west of Johannesburg and became, in the early 1930s, the crystallisation point around which Soweto grew. Other associations in Johannesburg, such as the African National Native Herbs Doctors of South Africa, could be found in New Clare, a freehold area west of central Johannesburg, and, in the case of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, in Sophiatown. Lady Selbourne, yet another area of African freehold rights, was the basis of the African Dingaka Association near Pretoria. Founded in 1905, Lady Selbourne was the oldest township of the capital in the north, situated on a hillside seven miles north-west of the city centre.9 Kroonstad harboured the Free State Bantu Medicine & Herbalist Practise Association. The offices of the African Inyangas' and Herbalists' Board of Control, U. of S.A. could be visited in Pinetown, and the Bantu Medical Union Club of South Africa in Mooi River, Natal. In East London healers gathered in the Cape Province Herbalist Association (Pty) Ltd., whose president resided in 20 Clarkes Lane. From 278 Gale View in the African village of Boksburg outside Johannesburg, the African United Herbalist Board of Control – South Africa, launched its operations. Viewed from a spatial perspective, a net of healers' associations dotted the South African landscape of urban centres. Many of the associations may have been short-lived, but over the years they mapped out a network of officially unrecognised healers' associations with nodal points in various places. In their correspondence healers' associations tried hard to arouse interest, attention and appeal. Self-confidently, they expected the addressees to respond. Yet the authorities did not commit themselves to debate. Because they were in a position of power, they issued orders and expected the recipients of their orders to follow the instructions given. Hence, it is not

Popular Religious Pilgrimage along the South Africa-Lesotho Border.' Journal of Southern African Studies 29: 4 (2003), pp. 977-993. 9 Lodge, Tom. 'Political Organisations in Pretoria's African Townships, 1940-1963', in: Bozzoli, Belinda (ed). Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives. Johannesburg 1987, pp. 401-417. 71 always easy to determine to what extent the arguments put forward by the healers can be taken at their face value. They may have exaggerated their ambitions. They may have played with the authorities. They may have been guised and expressed their arguments in a more submissive style than that in which they actually intended to behave. For similar situations, when people had to articulate themselves in the face of power, threat and injustice, it has been suggested that, at least publicly, ordinary men and women resorted to a language of humour, grotesque and obscenity.10 It has been argued that domination produced the "arts of resistance".11 As a consequence, the analysis of healers' correspondence with the authorities has to be pursued with caution.

Sophiatown, 1937-1938: The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society One of the exceptionally articulate professional associations of healers was the versatile South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalist Midwives Sangoma Society. Based in Sophiatown, they virtually bombarded state authorities with requests, leaflets, resolutions and information between 1937 and 1939. Most of their correspondence was produced on a malfunctioning typewriter which rendered the image of a technically imperfect typeface, and which at the same time splendidly conveyed the determination of its authors. The name of the umbrella organisation suggested an integrative, though certainly uneasy alliance between a broad variety of specialists, including diviners, herbalists and obstetrically skilled women, who in the South African context are called and call themselves "traditional birth attendants", and who came from different cultural backgrounds where they practised in different fields of health. Through the inclusion of midwives and izangoma several women must have been part of the association, even though they do not figure in the correspondence. For Zimbabwe it has been argued that European rule and Christianity undermined the long-accepted methods of indigenous female healers and midwives and ousted them from professions of high prestige.12 Whether this argument can be directly transferred to the South African contexts remains, due to the lack of evidence, a problematic question. In South Africa, the professionalisation of nurses fell into the same period in which the formation of the association took place.13 The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society wished to promote its

10 Mbembe, Achille. 'Provisional Notes on the Postcolony.' Africa 62: 1 (1992), pp. 3-37. 11 Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven and London 1990. 12 Schmidt, Peasants, pp. 86-67. 13 Marks, Shula. Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession. New York 1994. 72 members' multifaceted interests and wanted to achieve a legally valid definition of qualified health practitioners and their respective fields of expertise. In South Africa it was impossible not to identify oneself in racial categories. The heterogeneous corpus of men and women considered themselves nationally South African and accepted that, from a racial perspective, they were classified Bantu. In their presentations they obediently restricted themselves to stating that they were serving only African people. The practitioners thus signalled that questions of race, segregation and racial discrimination were part of their own concerns, but they were cautious to campaign for racial equality too openly. Whereas individual healers often stressed that among their patients there always was a number of people who were not black, healers' associations officially projected of themselves the image of a non-white profession devoting themselves to non-white patients suffering from non-white health problems.

Illustration 1: Correspondence of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society of Sophiatown with the Minister of Public Health, 8 Nov 1938.

The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society of Sophiatown envisaged to operate on a Union-wide basis, and they accommodated health specialists of various cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Dingaka and izangoma represented different health cultures in South Africa. The decision to span different health cultures was probably a pragmatic one because people often went to see diviners and herbalists who did not come from their own homes and their own cultural backgrounds. It cannot be repeated often enough that the medicines of others were often deemed more powerful. In urban as well as in rural contexts, usually a person's first divination was observed with care, and his or her reliability was judged on the basis of this.14 Patients and prospective clients determined a healer's standing, and it is easy to imagine that in a setting such as Sophiatown in the 1930s this was not a foregone conclusion.15 Hence, official recognition would have helped healers to present themselves to their patients in a more consolidated fashion and with an additional appearance of legitimacy conferred upon them by the state. Sophiatown, some four and a half miles west of central Johannesburg, had attracted to its area of roughly 240 acres urban dwellers and migrants interested in freehold rights because, when in 1933 Johannesburg had been proclaimed as falling under the scope of the Urban Areas Act of 1923, this township had remained exempted from its restrictions. With the expansion of manufacturing in the 1930s the demand for black working class housing increased. Tenants and landlords in Sophiatown began to take in sub-tenants housing them in rows of backyard shanties.16 In 1928, the year when the Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act further marginalized itinerant and community-based healers,17 an estimated 12,000 people lived in Sophiatown and the neighbouring western areas. By 1937 the number had more than doubled into probably 28,500 dwellers. A freehold area and a place where, for a couple of decades, people had moved in and out, Sophiatown embodied a sense of permanence and self- direction. People developed different organisational patterns as much as outlooks on city life. A new synthesis of cultures sprang up there, shouting for recognition.18 It was a composite culture bearing the dual stamp of poverty and racial admixture.19 In this environment healers

14 Hellman, Ellen. 'Rooiyard: A Sociological Survey of an Urban Native Slum', in: International African Institute (ed). Social Implications of Industrialization and Urbanization in Africa South of the Sahara. Lausanne 1956, pp. 179-190, here pp. 188-189. 15 Murray, Colin. 'Sex, Smoking and the Shades: A Sotho Symbolic Idiom', in: Whisson, Michael G./ West, Martin (ed). Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa. Cape Town 1975, pp. 58-77. 16 Lodge, Tom. 'The Destruction of Sophiatown', in: Bozzoli, Belinda (ed). Town and Countryside in the Transvaal: Capitalist Penetration and Popular Response. Johannesburg 1983, pp. 337-364, here pp. 339-344. 17 For the details of this law see further below. 18 Coplan, David. In Township Tonight! South Africa's Black City Music and Theatre. London 1985, pp. 143- 182. 19 Bonner, Philip. 'African Urbanisation on the Rand Between the 1930s and 1960s: Its Social Character and Political Consequences.' Journal of Southern African Studies 21: 1 (1995), pp. 115-129. 74 must have been challenged to develop new remedies for the peculiarly new afflictions arising from and being attendant to daily life and work. Quite naturally, a range of new ailments and diseases sprang up all over the place and women, for instance, were deemed to bewitch others by post.20 People needed protection from unemployment and from rivalry at the workplace.21 Sophiatown, teeming with expectations and aspirations, was a fertile ground for healers' activities, which in the wake of the 1928 legislation, were threatened to come under more repressive control. Like other places, Sophiatown overflowed with voluntary associations which were, in particular, suited to urban demands. Aiming at the formulation of "progressive" cultural goals, voluntary associations in urban settings became expressions and indications of the cohesion and vitality of social life in the locality and, at the same time, indicative of class formation.22 At about this time, landlords, for instance, formed the Non-European Ratepayers Association. As from 1921 teachers united in the National Federation of African Teachers Association. Lawyers and doctors organised professional bodies which catered for the interests of their professions, even though, because they were so few in numbers and scattered in the geographical sense, there was no formal association for African doctors before the Second World War. Nurses, in contrast, could, since 1935, register with the Bantu Trained Nurses Association.23 Mutual aid societies and friendly societies were features of urban life as were spontaneous associations of women joining their forces in their protest against the demolition of shacks. On the religious side, associational life included churches, the Transvaal Inter- Denominational African Ministers Association, mothers' unions, and other off-shoots of church activities, plus a number of recreational and sporting clubs in the early 1930s.24 The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society eschewed the clear-cut categories into which most of the associations fitted, but against the backdrop of a rich associational life they added to the variety. They were not really anything that much out of the ordinary. In November 1937, the officers of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society approached the Minister of Health. Including midwives among

20 Hunter, Monica. 'An Urban Community (East London)', in: International African Institute (ed). Social Implications of Industrialization and Urbanization in Africa South of the Sahara. Lausanne 1956, pp. 191- 199, here pp. 198-199. 21 Hellman, 'Rooiyard', pp. 188-189. 22 Lodge, 'Sophiatown', pp. 344-345; Cobley, Class and Consciousness, p. 70; Kuper, Leo. An African Bourgeoisie: Race, Class, and Politics in South Africa. New Haven and London 1965, pp. 81-94; International African Institute (ed). Social Implications of Industrialization and Urbanization in Africa South of the Sahara. Lausanne 1956, pp. 220-221 23 Foundation of South African Trained Nurses Association (SATNA) in 1914. 24 For Durban see Kuper, African Bourgeoisie, pp. 309-322; Welsh, 'Growth of Towns', pp. 172-243. 75 their members, they contended how closely related the formation of the society was to the professionalisation that was underway in the nursing sector. The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society requested an interview with the authorities to discuss the work of "native ngaka, herbalists and miwives [sic]". They hoped to receive "isolated privolege [sic]" and recognition as an institution on a par with the bodies recognised under the Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act of 1928. A pledge to obedience concluded the letter:

It is our firm conviction that the minister for public health will give this memorandum his full consideration. God save the king. Nkosi sikelela, Africa. Your obedient servant, S. P. D. Madiehe.25

The Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act, to which the chairman referred, was a serious impediment to any unregistered health practitioner, in particular to African healers. Through the Act the state claimed legal authority for itself and demanded commensurate obedience from the African healers. This body of legislation consolidated sixteen previous regulations which had, over the decades, been enacted, often only on a regional level, to whisk African healers out of public visibility. In parallel with a general tendency towards the licensing of African businesses and petty enterprises, merely a small number of registered health practitioners were allowed to practice publicly, and for gain. Herbalists found themselves in an ambivalent situation: if licensed, they were allowed to dispense, but not to diagnose for a fee. Diagnoses were not their original occupation anyway, but the law considered it as such and outlawed it. Within South Africa, Natal continued to form an exception. In the former colony, whose early governors had once started to codify customary law, izinyanga zokwelalpa and izinyanga zemiti, herbalists of different specialisation used to be allowed to practice for gain after 1891 provided they possessed a licence.26 In 1909, 755 licences were officially issued in Natal, an additional 683 in Zululand. Five years later, in 1914, 1,924 healers held official licences in both Natal and Zululand.27 Since then the Department of Native Affairs worked towards a reduction in the number of licences. In 1929, one year after the consolidating legislation had been passed, the Native Affairs Department registered 1,352 licences. They

25 SAB, GES 1786 25/30J Memorandum of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, stamped at the Dept. of Public Health 17.11.1937. 26 1928 Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act. For colonial administrative system in Natal see Welsh, David. The Roots of Segregation. Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845-1910. Cape Town 1971. 27 Gower Jackson, 'Medicine Man', p. 194. 76 were reduced to 566 licences in 1932 with a further decrease down to 322 in 1934.28 The huge balance of the African health specialists went without licences. Their number must have been immense as otherwise the African Inyangas and Herbalists Board of Control in Pinetown, Natal, could not have pointed out, in 1959, that their membership amounted to 28,787 individuals. Herbalists, diviners and obstetrically skilled women of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society did not act purely on medical grounds. Their approach was more general, as for them health meant order, or, the other way round, order was synonymous with health. The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society provided, consequently, a broad range of options for restoring order in response to the challenges, opportunities and shortcomings of the new era. If needed, they provided practical advice, gave insights about disease and claimed expertise in ritual practice and communication with the ancestral world. If theirs was a commercially successful business, they would employ assistants and secretaries in much the same way as lawyers, doctors and entrepreneurs did. The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society started an initiative – though not a social movement – to tackle the lack of school education through the combination of business and charity activities. The same association hoped to become a forum through which people invested money dedicated to the future of their children. Their plan was to open a network of "native co-operative stores" throughout South Africa run by "the Bantu women" and society members. If enough people bought shares in the enterprise, the society would send about twelve children overseas for higher education. Bazaars on which women would sell items cheaply were envisaged as another fundraising strategy.

The Conference has two objects to descuss [sic]. The first is to open Native Co-operative Stores, over the whole of the Union and these stores will be named the South African Dingaka Aid Society, which will be run by the Bantu Women, and all the members will be allowed with shares, and the Society is intended to send about 12 children overseas for higher education, mostly commercial, and we want to give every African the chance to educate his/ her child. […] The Bantu Ladies will give a bazaar where everything will be obtainable very cheap. Come and see the original Native customs. This is the day to see things that you have never seen before in the present generation. Don't fail to see wonders of Natives, Please come!29

This invitation addressed a wider community which comprised many of those who had become alienated from traditions, including Christians, who in their urban surroundings often

28 Simons, H. J. 'Tribal Medicine: Diviners and Herbalists.' African Studies 16: 2 (1957), pp. 85-92, here p. 86. 29 SAB, GES 1786 25/30J Conference announcement of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, 28.07.1938. 77 had to realise that churches were different to what they used to be in rural areas. As Christians, many did not know the customs of their forefathers anymore; as slum yard residents they were, at the same time, alienated from the white man's religion.30 The healers offered them to retrace their roots and hoped they would be interested in traditions which would now be in accordance with the times as they were formulated in the spirit of "progress" and "civilisation". This invitation was probably aimed at Christians who, in the towns, had started to reconsider the customs and philosophies of their forefathers from whom they had become estranged. Religion, racism and community assumed a different countenance in towns which certainly led many to listen to diviners and herbalists who claimed expertise in a knowledge, for which a demand had only recently arisen.31 It is of interest to note African healers' attitudes to education. At about the same time when the proposal was brought forth to raise money for the education of their youth, a popular medical doctor in the Bushveld, Louis C. Leipoldt, who carried our medical examinations amongst the rural Afrikaner population, argued that the government ought to channel money into health care provisions rather than into inefficient educational endeavours which, according to his understanding, made the white Afrikaner race in the rural areas weak and inferior to Africans.32 The African health practitioners of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society held quite a different view. They prioritised education and saw no need to campaign for the physical health of their clientele. In fact, in their response to this view of the problem of health as well as of education they argued that in the 1930s the education of African children was left to mission societies, whose resources were very limited, so that, for instance in 1939 fewer than 30 per cent of African children were receiving any schooling at all.33 Concerned with the health of society rather than of individuals, it made sense that the society positioned themselves in the debate about African schooling which discriminated against Africans and wished to relegate it into the reserves.34 Yet again, they did not struggle for the pursuit of their goals against all odds, and against existing relations of power as the formation of a social movement was never within the scope of the association.

30 Hellman, 'Rooiyard', pp. 188-189. 31 ibid. 32 Leipoldt, Bushveld Doctor, p. 254 ff. 33 Thompson, Leonard. A History of South Africa. New Haven 1990, p. 164. 34 Krige, Sue. 'Segregation, Science and Commissions of Inquiry: The Contestation of Native Education Policy in South Africa 1930-36.' (paper no 398 read at Wits Institute for Advanced Social Research, Johannesburg 1996).; Kros, Cynthia. 'Origins of Bantu Education: The Prelude.' (M. A. thesis Wits University, Johannesburg, 1994); Molteno, Frank. 'The Historical Foundation of the Schooling of Black South Africans', in: Kallaway, Peter (ed). Apartheid and Education. The Education of Black South Africans. Johannesburg 1984, pp. 45-107. 78

The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society was self- confident, but, at the same time, always eager to meet public expectations. At a time when the Johannesburg city council forcibly removed inner-city black communities because it wanted to create space for white working-class housing schemes and business development,35 the healers' association argued that they themselves would create business activity and take on responsibility in teaching their youth the skills which they needed to become prospective business people. This was less a strategy of counteracting the political decisions of the day, but rather one in which they seized upon the argument of the authorities and, hence, tried to offer their collaboration as best as they could. Yet the government showed no interest. Healers' strategies to mobilise the economic potential of their people were rather akin to Afrikaner efforts of repositioning their people in a rightful economic place. The National Party mobilised Afrikaners across the divides of region and class, and the Afrikaner Broeder- bond succeeded in defining and propagating Afrikaner culture and the idea of volkskapitalisme.36 In a similar fashion, the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society considered it to be important to further an African identity in connection with economic activities. Healers were also aware of the shortage of staff in hospitals.37 Again, they offered co- operation. "The public say the European Doctor can treat the mother in a scientific way; the Native herbalist can attend according to Native custom and can administer medicinal herbs as his predecessors have done for centuries."38 In their parlance custom and science, rather than custom and modernity, or custom and Western medicine, formed opposites which had to be reconciled. They were prepared to share expertise and to learn from scientific ways, as they put it, if this was the way to achieve recognition. The strategies to achieve their goals were at no stage confrontational or conflictual. Quite to the contrary, they permanently and consistently demonstrated their disposition towards collaboration. To start this co-operation, the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, for instance, sent in to the Department of Health six bottles containing various substances. They explained the process according to which they had extracted the substances from afflicted people, and, in

35 Maylam, Paul. 'Explaining the Apartheid City: 20 Years of South African Urban Historiography.' Journal of Southern African Studies 21: 1 (1995), pp. 19-61, here pp. 26-27. 36 O'Meara, Dan. Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934-48. Cambridge 1983; Adam, Heribert/ Giliomee, Hermann. The Rise and Crisis of Afrikaner Power. Cape Town 1979, pp. 145-160. 37 Marks, Divided Sisterhood, pp. 1-14. 38 SAB, GES 1786 25/30J Conference announcement of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, 28.07.1938. 79 return, asked the Department of Health for "scientific" assistance through a laboratory analysis:

I am here with sending you 6 bottles containing snakes, which was extracted by native Doctors from different native peoples stomach, who stated that they have been suffering for years, and we are sending these to you for examination. What sort of snakes are these? And what are they called, please? The people who had these snakes stated that before they meet the native DRS, they were suffering daily pains in their stomach. They say after these snakes has been extracted they are able to eat and to do their day's work without pain in their stomach, so we believe many native people got these snakes.39

The laboratory results identified the contents of said bottles as a snake, two roundworms, and some undigested matters of vegetable origin. The files do not indicate, however, whether the authorities would have accepted and pursued this offer for co-operation as a starting point for further communications. And yet the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society never lost heart. They continued to demonstrate obedience to the bureaucratic state in South Africa, and insisted upon their right to be an acknowledged and recognised part of the nation's history and its future. They claimed distinct cultural rights just at a time when Afrikaner class formation was deeply inscribed with the fabrication and restructuring of ethnicity.40 After the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereenigings and the Afrikaner Broederbond had organised a memorial ox wagon trek from Cape Town to Pretoria and had laid the foundation stone of the Voortrekker monument in 1938, the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society seized upon this debate of the day, remodelling it according to their own ideas as regards claiming respect and proving their worthiness:

May we give you an incident of the year 1834, when the identical thing had happen, about, on that year of 1834 on the 1st, of December, emancipation of slavery, was declared, under the provision of the ordinance 50 of magna charta, and the said, magna charta was called the native magna charta, and the said magna charta has brought about a great innovotion, which had deeply, wounded the Dutch government, a feeling which had even cause, the Burghers, to Emigrate towards the North, for their custom's sake 10,000. people are believe to have left the cape they went in variou, parties, under the lead ship of those who were believing in custom, the emigration of the custom lover commence, from 1936 to 1839 and those who were Emigrating, many were grave, they left their homes, and their beautiful country of the cape, for the simple reason, of their custom's sake only to fulfil, the God's will and by which they march forward knew not what fierce native tribes they may meet but they believed in the power of prayer, according to their custom they thought that they should rather die than to remain custom less but

39 SAB, GES 1787 25/30K South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society to Minister of Public Health, 13.12.1939. 40 Hofmeyr, Isabel. 'Building a Nation from Words: Afrikaans Language, Literature and Ethnic Identity, 1902- 1924', in: Marks, Shula/ Trapido, Stanley (ed). The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth- Century South Africa. London and New York 1987, pp. 95-123. 80

what was in the front of them was that they would not depart with their custom and adopt a new custom in life which will not be known to god nor that they were wishing to change their colour when they were facing, the world difficulties, they could of done so, but since they knew that their, colour represent. their custom, since we all know that we can only be identified, by our colour, and custom by god that is the only mark that god has made to identify his people with. and we are much proud, of the Burghers, of those days when we see that other people were even slain only to keep their custom we as natives were proud to see the dutch people who had adhering to their god given custom that was the purpose of their emigration and therefore we believe any sensible person can be proud of such people that proof their loyaliety and bravery, and discipline who left their beautiful country, and emigrate to the unknown country for only one simple reason of keeping their custom.41

The head of the society, Madiehe, was probably aware of the different situation as compared to the Afrikaners situation. The Burghers had been free to opt for the Great Trek in order to defend their cultural practices. This was not the case with the healers. Healers, conversely, had to ask for permission to reassert their customs. For that reason Madiehe showed empathy towards the ambitions of the descendants of the originally Dutch immigrants of achieving cultural separateness and ethnic distinction. He combined subservience with his conviction that African customs could compete with the standards of European "civilisation" and "progress", two further cultural imperatives of central relevance besides "science" and "education" and just as much embodied by Europeans. Hence Madiehe demanded recognition. Such recognition would entail that African people would be treated like Europeans and would even adopt European customs, but not at a lower level, rather "on the same stage", that is face to face with Africans and Europeans.

And if the Government is unable of refusing us with the right of our ancestor's custom we shall therefore have the full right to claim the European ancestor's custom in full, together with the European's stages, to enter where Europeans enter, so to be able to learn European custom as they want us to become black Europeans and so we must be able to have the same privileges as the Europeans in their customs, because we are forced to be European, but not in custom, because if native act according to their custom they are insulted by being called barbarism custom which is nothing less but pure insulting God's work, in other words is criticism of God's plan; who planned the native custom. You must remember that we have been with the white people over 200 years; they have never shown us their custom, how can one learn if you are kept far from your teachers.42

Even though Madiehe's aspirations were thwarted, this caused only a certain degree of frustration and of disappointment as regards the hopes that he shared with all those who, in these years, would try hard to gain an understanding of the colonisers' behaviours as much as to gain access to their institutions. Madiehe knew that acknowledged African cultural

41 SAB, GES 1787 25/30K South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society to the Minister of Public Health, 12.11.1938. 42 SAB, GES 1788 25/30M invitation of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society for a General Meeting to take place on 11.12.1938. 81 practices, which he likened to Afrikaner cultural ethnicity, would probably only find a place to flourish in the niche of tradition. He, consequently, requested the establishment or granting of a protected sphere of custom within the broader system of racial inequality. The term custom appears four times within just a few lines of his request quoted below. From within that sphere healers of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society hoped to establish their status.

The custom is very important to the Native although the custom may not serve any useful purpose in the European's eyes, but they are an essential part of the Native life even if the Native could not be allowed to practice their medicine as Doctors who are treating sick patients but only allowed them to carry out the customal herbs according to Native custom and tradition.43

The South African authorities were reluctant to extend recognition to healers' associations. Despite the overwhelming correspondence with which the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society presented itself to the bureaucrats, responses were delayed. More than once the Society had to ask for the acknowledgement of their letters,44 but often they did not receive any notification from the authorities at all. A casual note, "Let me know how the matter was disposed of"45 suggests that healers' efforts towards professionalisation did not receive the attention they wanted to attract. That was a disillusioning experience especially as the associations proved their willingness and ability to adopt almost perfectly the forms of official correspondence with the government. After a few years it became evident that within the Departments of Health and Native Affairs there was no room for articulating healers' interests which would have helped to reshape the profession in an innovative way and to root and anchor it within the context of society as a whole.

Professional Associations Healers' attempted professionalisation was intended to function through the formation of associations. For this reason, associations are important as a concept as much as an actual historical development, both of which help to understand and interpret more generally the aspirations involved in the process which were, in the end, thwarted by the authorities. The formation of professional associations is tackled in literature that was based on fieldwork and that concerned itself with the "adaptation" of Africans to new environments. Voluntary

43 ibid. 44 SAB, GES 1786 25/30J South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, Sophiatown, to the Minister of Public Health, Cape Town Parliament, 28.07.1938. 45 Handwritten notice on a letter in which healers requested to be admitted to Parliament, dated 01.08.1938. 82 associations were understood as a "mechanism", a mediating structure, through which adaptation and accommodation were achieved.46 After the 1920s the increase of registered voluntary associations active in urban surroundings was notable all over southern, eastern and western Africa. Moreover, the immense number of unregistered groupings is virtually unknown.47 Multifaceted in their goals, urban voluntary associations attracted migrants and groups who remained permanently in the colonial, settler and industrial towns and who, in the course of this developing process, became involved in the restructuring of social relations.48 As regards concepts of power, urban-based associations tended to differ from their rural counterparts. "Urban power spoke the language of civil society and civil rights, rural power of community and culture. Civil power claimed to protect rights, customary power to enforce tradition."49 In the transition to urban living the wide social significance of many roles people pursued in rural surroundings changed. Many roles became socially appropriate only when roles that made sense in rural contexts were subdivided. In this process of transition, all sorts of new combinations became possible.50 Urban movements and associations, amongst whose number the hardly ever noticed healers' associations featured as well, accommodated themselves to exactly this scenario, and most of these associations showed themselves eager to achieve legal recognition at the expense of individual healers' charismatic reputation, and they were keen to modify any former dependence on the authority of traditional leaders as much as on the knowledge in commonly held possession by the members of their communities. Some associations intended to structure urban life as closely as possible along the lines of familiar concepts of social relations as existent in rural surroundings. Among them were those institutions which, in academic literature, have been classified as "near substitutes for kinship".51 In the towns, however, this often proved itself to be a limited option. Consequently, the majority of associations, especially in Southern Africa, stressed the

46 Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. 'The Process of Urbanization in Africa (From the Origins to the Beginning of Independence).' African Studies Review 34: 1 (1991), pp. 1-98, here pp. 39-41. 47 IAI, Social Implications, pp. 470-471; Banton, Michael. 'Adaptation and Integration in the Social System of Temne Immigrants in Freetown.' Africa 26: 4 (1956); Lombard, J. 'Cotonou: ville africaine.' Journal de l'Institut Français Afrique (Dakar) 16: 3-4 (1954); Brausch, G. E. J. 'The Problem of Elites in the Belgian Congo.' International Social Science Bulletin 8: 3 (1956), pp. 452-458. 48 Epstein, A. L. 'The Network and Urban Social Organization', in: Mitchell, J. Clyde (ed). Social Network in Urban Situations: Analyses of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns. Manchester 1969, pp. 77- 116, here pp. 107-108. 49 Mamdani, Mahmood. 'Historicizing Power and Responses to Power: Indirect Rule and Its Reform.' Social Research 66: 3 (1999), pp. 859-886, here p. 866. 50 Banton, Michael. 'Urbanization and Role Analysis', in: Southall, Aidan (ed). Urban Anthropology: Cross- Cultural Studies of Urbanization. New York 1973, pp. 43-70, here p. 49. 51 Little, Kenneth. 'Urbanization and Regional Associations: Their Paradoxical Function', in: Southall, Aidan (ed). Urban Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies of Urbanization. New York 1973, pp. 407-423; Little, Kenneth. 'The Role of Voluntary Associations in West African Urbanization.' American Anthropologist 59 (1971), pp. 579-595. 83 importance of neighbourhood and fellowship, instead of, or in addition to kinship. The newly entertained values of neighbourhood and fellowship and the redefined practices of social bonding worked on supra-ethnic levels.52 In regional contexts outside the borders of South Africa associations sometimes eased commercial relations between antagonistic people, or ethnically-based trading parties. This was, in particular, the main goal of associations which were aimed at breaking down the isolation of lineages and at turning different interests into trading partnerships. Such associations were especially numerous where, historically, towns had grown out of the confederations of lineages.53 In South Africa this was hardly the case. Once such associations turned into occupational ones, they often controlled the prices of commodities and discouraged competition between trading parties. They focussed on and concerned themselves with the status and the remuneration of their members, easing tensions in the towns with their growing, relatively unstable and socially heterogeneous populations.54 Such functions could have been important fields of activity for professional associations of healers in South African cities of the twentieth century as well. An overwhelming number of associations were constructed as mutual aid or entertainment societies geared towards the integration of their members into the social life of an urban milieu. As instruments of the promotion of social issues, some associations set up strict hierarchies, with functionaries occupying positions as presidents, vice-presidents, treasurers and secretaries. Furthermore, these associations frequently maintained a complex network of clientele as much as patronage. In some instances, police officers and public relation managers were appointed for special events. Clubs, yet again different in their set-up, imaginatively appropriated American forms of entertainment and social life. They often put a strong emphasis on music and alcohol.55 Such associations were less, if at all, concerned with processes of professionalisation, and aspiring professionals may not have featured prominently among their members but, like professional associations, they experimented with new forms of organisation, emerging from new demands for different styles of recreation, entertainment and social grouping. And any group of people aspiring to professional status, or considering the formation of a professional association had, at least, a knowledge of such associations, and drew inspiration from them.

52 IAI, Social Implications, pp. 220-221. 53 Krapf-Askari, Eva. Yoruba Towns and Cities: An Enquiry into the Nature of Urban Social Phenomena. Oxford 1969. 54 Little, 'Role of Voluntary Associations', pp. 581-588. 55 Meillassoux, Claude. Urbanization of an African Community: Voluntary Associations in Bamako. Seattle 1968, pp. 76-142. 84

In many places the growth of voluntary associations created the basis for the emergence of trade unions and nationalist parties, especially in such associational environments in which the new African elite sought to meet and articulate local demands. They formed the backbone of the emergence of modern politics. Urban associations were often not confined to just one locality; they formed parts of wider, trans-local networks, and accommodated members on the move between places. Among the trans-local networks religious associations featured prolifi- cally. If headed by Africans, colonial governments in sub-Saharan Africa tended to consider them potential threats, as they frequently suspected them of linking up with groups in other cities. They sometimes feared that African-lead movements could command access to intellectual, cultural and material resources from other parts of the world which would be outside the sphere of control exerted by the colonial governments.56 African history is, therefore, denoted by a plethora of administrative efforts to control and contain the emancipation of religious movements.57 Healers were not automatically considered religious actors, but if they were, they almost certainly attracted the suspicious eye of the government. The South African government carefully watched the urban associations which involved Africans, and discouraged, wherever possible, associations which, directly or indirectly, helped people accommodate permanently in urban surroundings. Interference with associational life was easier in smaller towns than in bigger ones. East London, a port and commercial centre, remained a place where as late as the 1960s and 1970s the government retained control over authorising and prohibiting associations, especially since returning to the villages and farms, whence people came from, remained easy for the town's labour force. Whereas the government encouraged Africans in the rural areas to express "their own interests" in ethnically-bound and tradition-conscious terms, it was eager to discourage such assertions of identity in the towns, where they feared that associations could gain political momentum.58 In South Africa, an array of British and Afrikaner-led voluntary associations emerged of which Africans took notice. As in the African milieu, and almost concomitantly with it, a number of Helpmekaar organisations were established which provided mutual aid to their members. Cooperative movements were launched in agriculture. Moreover, burial societies

56 Balandier, Georges. The Sociology of Black Africa: Social Dynamics in Central Africa. London 1970 [orig. Sociologie Actuelle de l'Afrique Noire (1955)], esp. pp. 329, 390. 57 Anderson, David/ Johnson, Douglas H. 'Revealing Prophets', in: Anderson, David/ Johnson, Douglas H. (ed). Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History. London 1995, pp. 1-26; Peires, Jeff. The Dead Will Arise. Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856-7. London 1989. 58 Mayer, 'Migrancy, p. 582. 85 and insurances attracted the savings of their members.59 Academic associations such as the South African Academic Association of Science began to systemise ethnological and anthropological knowledge and gained institutional recognition from the 1920s onwards.60 This was an important step to further monopolise the knowledge about Africans and of keeping it firmly in the hands, and institutions, of people who were not African. Africans, who were subject to this development of science, encountered a new language in which knowledge about them was created, circulated and re-created. More particularly in the context of medicine, medical research and medical practice were organised within the context of professional associations. In 1913 the Chamber of Mines funded the establishment of a medical research centre, the South African Institute of Medical Research.61 The South African mining industry was regarded, by the 1930s, as a model of enlightened worker management. The number of hospitals established at the mines increased and the Mine Medical Officers Association, created in 1921, attempted to coordinate medical knowledge available as much as the care provided at the mines.62 The professionalisation of nurses took off rapidly in the 1930s, and academically trained social scientists went to the townships, in the name and on behalf of the universities and paternalist health institutions, to collect data about the ways people spent their budgets on food and drink.63 In Durban, a range of commercial associations was established which impinged upon the possibilities African medicine traders' had when it came to marketing their produce. The Indian Farmers' Association was launched in 1908 in order to request trading licences and a protected Hindu market on behalf of its members. Among the products harvested from small- scale gardening, medicinal plants were marketed as well.64 These competed directly with African herbal products. The Indian Agricultural Association was established in 1919 and concerned itself in particular with trading hours and the safeguarding and promotion of the interests of the agriculturally active section of the Indian community. Stallholders, in contrast, organised themselves in the Indian Market Stallholders' Association to claim privileges against street traders and squatters. As a counter-response, the Indian Morning Market Association, started to look after vendors in the street.65 The founding and existence of these associations indicates that the market for produce, which included medicinal plants, became

59 Adam/ Giliomee, Rise and Crisis, pp. 145-149; Vahed, Goolam H. 'A "Public Health Nuisance": The Victoria Street Early Morning Squatters Market, 1910-1934.' South African Historical Journal 40 (1999), pp. 130-153. 60 Dubow, Saul. Scientific Racism in modern South Africa. Cambridge 1995, pp. 1-19. 61 See further below the formation of the" Isambane Medicines: Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association" in Orlando. 62 Packard, White Plague, pp. 159-160. 63 Marks, Divided Sisterhood; Wylie, Starving, pp. 91-124. 64 Vahed, 'Public Health Nuisance', pp. 130-153. 65 ibid. 86 highly competitive and immensely regulated, a development with which African herbalists had to catch up. As from the last decade of the nineteenth century, on the level of trans-local associations, African Methodism and other independent churches began to attract large numbers in South Africa.66 Many of these movements linked South Africans to the wider world in ways which were different from what the original mission churches would offer.67 Often reclaiming Africa from the Europeans, the independent church movement addressed issues of African education, land ownership and spiritual responsibility. They were also looking for ways of eradicating "witchcraft". More importantly, though, the movements were offering unique chances of communication and exchange with respectable African Americans and church leaders in the United States. The lack of education for the African popularion had been bemoaned since, at least, the final years of the nineteenth century. The wish to overcome this dilemma was a driving force for the emergence of many independent churches, be they organised on a local level or trans-locally. Various prophets motivated criticism of the existing order in the 1920s and 1930s. Enoch Mgijima, Garveyism and Nonthetha Nkwenkwe challenged the authorities and the state resorted to repressive action in order to contain these movements. Male prophets were often put in jail, while female prophets possibly ended up in mental asylums.68 In fact, by 1945 the African Independent Churches, keen on gaining status in society, had succeeded in achieving state recognition in only 1% of all cases.69 The majority of the churches were feared by the government as "national churches", which they suspected of entertaining an inclination towards the achievement of independence from colonial rule as well. Churches sought legitimacy as African churches, in which Africanised Christianity was practised. Schism and fragmentation in black South African churches continued at a bewildering pace during the 1930s. The movement crystallised the efforts of African petty bourgeois intellectuals to redefine African culture.70 But the South African government was unyielding. In all their variety, associations were more than adaptive mechanisms of caste, ethnicity and culture in emerging and intensifying urban contexts. They promoted their own aims and assumed bridging functions between different positions and conflicting parties. Sometimes

66 See also chapter 2 for debate of the issue of legitimacy. 67 Campbell, Songs of Zion; Rüther, Kirsten. '"Sekukuni, Listen!, Banna!, and to the Children of Frederick the Great and Our Kaiser Wilhelm": Documents in the Social and Religious History of the Transvaal, 1860-1890.' Journal of Religion in Africa 34: 3 (2004), pp. 207-234, here pp. 224-229. 68 Edgar, 'Prophet Motive', pp. 401-422; Edgar, 'Garveyism', pp. 31-57; Edgar/ Sapire, African Apocalypse. 69 Claasen, Johan W. 'Independents Made Dependents: African Independent Churches and Government Recognition.' Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 91 (1995), pp. 15-34, here p. 25. 70 Cobley, Alan Gregory. 'The "African National Church": Self-Determination and Political Struggle Among Black Christians in South Africa to 1948.' Church History 60 (1991), pp. 456-371. 87 they acculturated low-caste elements as well as ambitious aspirations for prospective goals. Social practices were reformed, statuses defined and preserved, the acquisition of higher status envisaged. Frequently, because they formed a body of people developing a profile of their group, associational and political activities intersected. Urban associations in which a potentially wide range of healers assembled have not been studied in any either in historical or anthropological or social scientific detail. These associations were an indication of the professionalisation of African medicine, stimulated by its commercialisation in the 1930s and 1940s as well as by the many other motives which generally provided the momentum for the increase in urban associations. While medical doctors were accorded the highest position among all the professional statuses in South Africa, izinyanga were assigned a low occupational status.71 Their professionalisation would have involved the definition of a body of knowledge, and would probably have led to the assertion of a monopoly on competence in a particular occupation, or field of operation. Training, examination and registration would have been a means of asserting control within the profession, and associations would have been a means through which to achieve these. Healers began a process of professionalisation and started to form professional associations in a climate that was often hostile to them. Convinced of their own superiority, both in medical and moral terms, generally neither Christian churches nor medical doctors displayed towards them any spirit of tolerance, or the will for co-operation. Medical schools did not consider the possibility of training doctors or nurses in complementary medicine – an aspect that could have bridged the gap vis-à-vis African medicine. Teachers, nurses and medical students conceived of themselves as the new elite, and were largely members of the established Christian denominations.72 They did not want to be confounded with the practitioners of African medicine. In addition, Independent African Churches actively prevented their members from becoming herbalists and diviners.73 Attention has been drawn to the "gendered professionalisation" in South Africa's health profession and to the impediments laid into the path to the formation of its associations.74 Healers were not even given the possibility to follow that constrained path. As a concept, professional associations point to the fact that groups and people who became involved in their formation sought organisational structures through which they could express a new sense of social coherence, and through which they furthered a cause designed

71 Survey conducted among school children in 1959-60, in: Kuper, African Bourgeoisie, pp. 118-139. 72 Kuper, African Bourgeoisie, p. 99. 73 See for instance, Schmidt, Peasants, p. 148; Scarnecchia, 'Mai Chaza', pp. 87-105. 74 Walker, Liz. '"They Heal in the Spirit of the Mother": Gender, Race and Professionalisation of South African Medical Women.' African Studies 62: 1 (2003), pp. 99-123. 88 to fit into the present as much as the future, rather than remaining locked in tradition. Associations were forms of social organisations in which rules between groups and between people were redefined and endowed with new solidity. They were forms of social organisation in which cultural backgrounds and aspirations could be expressed within a new framework. Urban professional healers envisaged for themselves a place in such a scenario.

Urban Transformations and Increasing Racism: The Intended Profession- alisation of South African Healers For the period between the 1930s and the late 1950s, a time when rural, non-reserve house- holds supplied large proportions of migrant labour to urban areas,75 the licence to heal came to be identified as a key issue around which healers negotiated their legal status, their professional ethos and their wish to be visibly re-integrated as respectable members into South African society. They wanted to be recognised less within the narrower confines of "medical actors" but, instead, they aspired to be recognised as broadly acting social players. Licences were envisioned and envisaged as a step towards the acknowledgement of that role. They were legitimising, bureaucratically approved documents not only for ambitious healers, whose legitimacy had once relied exclusively on the achievement of merit, or charisma. The aspiring new African elite, such as traders, needed licences to sell their produce in stores and on markets. It was through licences that they claimed access to formerly openly accessible, now bureaucratically regulated space.76 Licences were also issued by religious or charismatic movements to demonstrate their well-functioning administration. Members of many such organisations, who perceived themselves as part of the new African elite as well, had to buy membership cards and to wear badges in public in order to demonstrate their official belonging to a particular, respectable movement.77 Healers, quite in line with this style of demonstrating legitimacy and respectability, decided to structure their desire for professionalisation around licences and certificates which they could carry with them. They also framed them and used them to adorn the walls of their practice rooms. It cannot be emphasised strongly enough that rather than clothing, ritual or therapeutic techniques, licences and certificates became the markers of status, official recognition and formal qualification. The symbolic importance of such requested certification was probably greater than its practical

75 Mabin, Alan. 'Dispossession, Exploitation and Struggle: An Historical Overview of South African Urbanization,' in: Smith, David M. (ed). The Apartheid City and Beyond. Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa. London 2001, pp. 13-24. 76 Vahed, 'Public Health Nuisance'. 77 Edgar, 'Garveyism, p. 41. impact. And yet, the wish for certification indicated healers' changed self-conception of their own legitimacy. It demonstrated a tendency among healers towards defining their role more stringently on the basis of the colonial state's acceptance rather than upon charisma and relation to traditional authorities. In addition, licences became important to facilitate movement in the many situations where healers had to produce passes, especially after the 1930s when the influx control system was tightened up and laws were passed and controls installed to regulate movement and the African urban presence.

Illustration 2: Certificate of the Cape Province Illustration 3: Certificate of the Isambane Herbalist Association, African Medical Research valid 29 Apr 1957–28 Apr 1958 Institute's Association, valid 19 June 1958-19 June 1959

When associations started to request licences on behalf of their members, rather than individual healers making such an application for themselves, they hoped for more success as they considered the standing of associations an improvement over individual acting. In addition to this perception, the actual decrease in licenses issued and which has already been mentioned at the beginning of this chapter has to be borne in mind. As a body of professionals, they had given themselves institutional frameworks which they considered

90 appropriate for addressing state authorities on equal terms. As befitted professional associations, a hierarchy of officers managed the representation of each association. The majority of associations installed a president and a secretary as chief officers who acted as General Managing Directors, Managing Directors, or President for Manager.78 One association, the African Dingaka Association, included a chairman among its triumvirate of power holders.79 The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, portrayed earlier in this chapter, frequently changed the designation of its key representative. Depending on the respective occasion, the head of the Society termed himself secretary, chairman, manager, and even King of Native Custom. Some associations, such as the South African Elephant Herbs Medicine Society "Iitzanuse", elected into its executive committee a chairman, a vice chairman, a secretary and assistant secretary plus a treasurer and three members of the association.80 The Bantu Medical Union Club chose from among its members a General Secretary who was the superior of various Branch Secretaries and Managers. Just like the South African Elephant Herbs Medicine Society "Iitzanuse", the Bantu Medical Union club installed an executive committee into which the president, the vice-president, the general secretary, a treasurer and four members of the association were delegated. Among its rank and file the Bantu Medical Union Club included a number of teachers and assistant teachers.81 To stress the formal character of the association, healers' associations labelled themselves clubs, boards of control, societies and associations. These names point to a variety of other contemporary groupings, co-operative, commercial, political, and entertainment, on whose forms of organisational structures they modelled of their own respective associations. It has been mentioned above that the formation of healers' associations occurred in towns all over South Africa, in industrialising centres as well as in administrative locations and port cities. In addition, the strategic ambition of some associations to open branches in several places and in different regions of the country, points to the intended network character of a trans-locally, if not trans-regionally, organised profession. The African Dingaka Association was the association which, when comparing it to other associations, branched out most successfully. They maintained offices in Lady Selbourne/ Pretoria, Orlando East/ Johannesburg, 4/6 Location/ Bloemfontein, Bochabelo Village/ Bloemfontein, Kimberley,

78 SAB, NTS 9302 1/376 African Inyangas and Herbalists Board of Control, U. of S. A., Pinetown 06.05.1959; SAB NTS 9302 2/376 African United Herbalist Board of Control – S. Africa, Boksburg 11.03.1958; SAB, GES 1789 25/30S member certificate of South African Native Bantu Dingaka Association, Pretoria, 18.02.1946. 79 SAB, NTS 9305 12/376 leaflet of the African Dingaka Association, 22.05.1956. 80 SAB, NTS 9303 7/376 charter document of the African Elephant Herbs Medicine Society "Iitzanuse" Emjanyane, 20.12.1954. 81 SAB, GES 1787 25/30K charter document of the Bantu Medical Union Club of S. A., not dated. 91

Leribe/ Basutoland and Ladybrand. It is not possible to derive from the material actual communications between either the branches or the different individual societies, especially as it seems that they were active at different times. Viewed spatially over the map of South Africa, however, the associations and their branches suggest, as shown on the map overleaf, a virtual network of healers' associations, marking the intended process of healers' professionalisation from a trans-regional perspective. In the 1920s and 1930s segregation increased in urban areas. It developed as a feature of urban planning in ports and commercial centres in Cape Town, Durban, East London and Port Elizabeth and as an underlying characteristic of the expanding administrative centres such as Pietermaritzburg, Pretoria and Bloemfontein. In Johannesburg and Kimberley segregation gained a particular momentum because here it occurred in tandem with the industrialisation process embodied in the growth of the mining industry.82 As a general observation, from the 1930s onwards, informal settlements began to become common features of the fringes of cities and many towns.83 Towns and their immediate surroundings became the main arena of racial conflict and developing ethnicity.84 The industrialising sites especially became crucibles for the formation of class, the rise of capitalism and racism. City planning, consequently, pursued the question whether "contact between the races" would result in conflict or co-operation. The idea of "race-zoning" reflected the ambition to perfect the control of urban settlement.85 The diversity of languages spoken in towns added to a climate of cultural competition and admixture. Movement, the key characteristic of urban development, became more and more restricted for Africans, as urban segregation and labour influx controls were implemented on a broad scale.86 At the same time, and almost like an experience running contrary to the official differentiation of space, new urban cultures developed and African people appropriated urban space through many cultural activities among which counted that of becoming permanent, even though discriminated against, residents of the towns.87 The numbers of Africans in South African towns and their proportion relative to the white population differed. Everywhere the urban presence of Africans rose significantly in the 1930s. In 1934, East London had a registered population of 19,900 Europeans plus an

82 Welsh, 'Growth of Towns', pp. 172-243. 83 Mabin, 'Dispossession', p. 17. 84 Vail Leroy (ed). The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. London 1989. 85 Kuper, Leo/ Watts, Hilstan/ Davies, Ronald. Durban: A Study in Racial Ecology. London 1958, pp. 21-42. 86 Sapire, Hilary/ Beall, Jo. 'Introduction: Urban Change and Urban Studies in Southern Africa.' Journal of Southern African Studies 21: 1 (1995), pp. 3-17; Harries, Patrick. 'Histoire urbaine de l'Afrique de Sud: nouveaux axes de réflexion.' Le mouvement social 204 (2003), pp. 17-33. 87 la Hausse, Paul. 'The Struggle for the City: Alcohol, the Ematsheni and Popular Culture in Durban, 1902- 1936', in: Maylam, Paul/ Edwards, Iain (ed). The People's City: African Life in Twentieth-Century Durban. Pietermaritzburg 1996, pp. 33-66; Erlmann, ' Hope Does Not Kill', pp. 67-101. 92

Illustration 1: Healers' Professional Associations in South Africa

• Ficksburg/ Basutoland Bridge (African Herb Specialists), connected healers travelling from Natal via Leribe in Lesotho to the Orange Free State. • Kimberley (Cape African Dingaka Association) • Four/ Six Location of Bloemfontein (Orange Free State African Herbalists Association) • Bochabelo Village nearby Bloemfontein (African Dingaka Association) • Pretoria (African Dingaka Association, South African Native Bantu Dingaka Association) • Durban (Natal & Zululand Inyangas & Herbalists Association, Natal Native Medical Association) • Orlando/ East Johannesburg (Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association) • Johannesburg (African National Native Herbs Doctors of South Africa) • Sophiatown (South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society) • Boksburg (African United Herbalist Board of Control – South Africa) • Lady Selbourne, (African Dingaka Association) • Kroonstad (Free State Bantu Medicine & Herbalist Practise Association) • Pinetown (African Inyangas' and Herbalists' Board of Control, U. of S.A.) • Mooi River/ Natal (Bantu Medical Union Club of South Africa) • East London (Cape Province Herbalist Association (Pty) Ltd. 93 estimated number of 20,000 Africans.88 The preservation and development of the rural home- steads from which people originally came remained a major preoccupation for the majority of migrants until far into the 1960s.89 In and around Durban the African population grew tremen- dously in the first half of the 1930s, and in the course of this process social stratification increased.90 Roughly 44,000 Africans were reported to live in this port town and commercial city by 1932. Four years later, in 1936, some 71,000 Africans were estimated to be residing in Durban. The African population grew further, so that in 1949, 150,000 Africans were registered in the city.91 In a small freehold township such as Clermont near Durban 1,100 people had taken up residence in 1936 some 2,800 people dwelled in the same place in 1939.92 The same period saw an African population outside the mines of the Rand that was overwhelmingly migrant or first-generation immigrant in character.93 Urban life remained conditional for them. As early as in the 1940s, a second-generation of African residents in municipal locations took in the new arrivals, who moved from the mines into the towns. Orlando, to the outskirts of central Johannesburg, counted more than 35,000 people.94 In Lady Selbourne, township of Pretoria, African healers worked among the aspiring urban elite. Ten African doctors served the three African townships of Lady Selbourne, Atteridgeville and Vlakfontein in the 1960s, tending the health needs of roughly 200,000 inhabitants.95 The 1950s and 1960s were a period denoted by a dramatic shortage of trained medical doctors.96 It would have been lucrative, and pragmatic, for African healers to practise under such circumstances, yet their position was far from secure. It was characteristic of any healers' association that they were culturally and ethnically open, and that they invited a range of diverse healers into their midst. Self-descriptions along the lines of ethnicity and culture became latent features in their repertoire of self-definition, but these were only rarely used systematically, and even more rarely with the intention to

88 Hunter, 'Urban Community', pp. 191-199. 89 Mayer, Philip. Townsmen or Tribesmen: Conservatism and the Process of Urbanization in a South African City. Oxford 1961; Beinart, William. The Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860-1930. Cambridge 1982; Delius, Peter. 'Sebatakgomo: Migrant Organisations, the ANC and the Sekhukhuneland Revolt.' Journal of Southern African Studies 15: 4 (1989), pp. 565-580; Harries, Work, Culture. 90 la Hausse, 'Struggle for the City'. p. 37. 91 Maylam, Paul. 'The Evolution of Urban Apartheid: Influx Control and Segregation in Durban, c. 1900-1951', in: Guest, Bill/ Sellers, John M. (ed). Receded Times of Empire: Aspects of the Economic and Social History of Natal and Zululand since 1910. Pietermaritzburg 1994, pp. 263-282. 92 Swanson, Maynard W. 'The Joy of Proximity: The Rise of Clermont', in: Maylam, Paul/ Edwards, Iain (ed). The People's City. African Life in Twentieth-Century Durban. Pietermaritzburg 1996, pp. 274-298. 93 Bonner, 'African Urbanisation', p. 117. 94 Beinart, William. Twentieth-Century South Africa. Oxford 1994, p. 122. 95 Lodge, 'Political Organisations', pp. 401-417. 96 Walker, 'Spirit of the Mother', pp. 107-108. 94 exclude others. Theoretically, any healer qualified for membership who, from the perspective of those who admitted the applicants into the associations, was considered to be neither an unauthorised trader, nor a charlatan nor an evil-doer. One of the major aims of the associations was to neither discriminate against particular culturally defined practitioners nor to recruit on an ethnic basis, but to admit members on a basis as broad as possible.97 As if to demonstrate this, in their official documents the associations used a multi-lingual approach and illustrated in this way that they held no notions of linguistic exclusivity. Slogans in two or three languages underpinned their integrative credo. The slogans translated definitions of healing into a variety of languages and cultures which according to the notion of ethnic diversity would have belonged to systems of health management of distinct ethnic units. "Tsoha O Itirele. (Motto) Vuka U Zenzele" became the motto of the African Dingaka Association.98 Proclaimed in seSotho and isiZulu it meant "Wake Up and Do It Yourselves". The motto summoned the rise of a joint consciousness among African healers and emphasised that health could be achieved out of African people's own responsibilities. The rest of the document was in English, and hence intelligible, firstly, to doctors and patients who had no background in either Sotho or Zulu culture, and secondly, to white authorities which could have demanded the certificate as a document legitimising the healers' presence in town and which, in the case of bureaucracies, had to arrive at a decision as regards the legitimacy of the association. The document illustrates that healers positioned themselves firstly vis-à-vis their patient-audience and secondly in relation to the state authorities. They communicated in two directions, addressing themselves to two publics. Their communication indicates, however, less the existence of a "primordial public" that was contrasted with the "civic public".99 It denotes, rather, that the public sphere in urban South Africa was structured according to "races" and, more importantly, according to different understandings of African health and material well-being.

97 Another policy of recruiting has been identified in the Ugandan context, Whyte, Susan Reynolds. Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda. Cambridge 1997. 98 SAB, GES 1783 25/30D stationery of the African Dingaka Association, 1931; SAB, NTS 9303 7/376 announcement of annual conference of the African Dingaka Association, 1952. 99 Ekeh, Peter P. 'Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement.' Comparative Studies in Society and History 17 (1975), pp. 91-112. 95

Illustration 5: Motto of the African Dingaka Association printed in their forms for official correspondence

The Untu Bantu Coloured Native Victoria Memorial [Association] used a motto which was broad enough to address more than one particular clientele, and that asked for support from both members of the association and from the state. "Esivivaneni" translated into "helping in any possible way", be it through a donation (which healers were probably asked for when they joined the association), or through any other effort.100 The Orange Free State Herbalists Association, again, worked with a SeSotho motto translated into English,

Ha esale re hlaha mahlo re fumana bo Ntate-Moholo mehleng ea khale ba ntse ba itsebeletsa ka meriana ea bona ea hlaho ea Sesuto kantle ho khatello - Since we saw the light of day did we find our great Grand-Fathers dispensing and administering African Medicines of African origin without repression.101

100 SAB, GG 1216 33/311 stationery of Untu Bantu Coloured Native Victoria Memorial Edifice, 1912; Interview Wiseman Masango with healers in Pietermaritzburg, August 2002. 101 SAB, GES 1788 25/30M stationery of the Orange Free State African Herbalists Association, 1940. 96

Illustration 6: Motto of the Orange Free State Herbalists Association, printed at the side of their official letters

Self-confidently, their motto highlighted the repression which healers endured, and reminded the critics of African healing that Europeans had not laid the foundations from which African people's health and well-being sprang. The Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association translated their motto into three languages: "Molimo ke oa rena bohle – Like God, love all His people – Impilo yomuntu isezimpandeni zemithi", and thus presented themselves as an interest group which acted across several ethnic, cultural and linguistic boundaries.102 The mottos were programmatic statements in a reality that looked starkly different.

102 SAB, NTS 9303 9/376 certificate of the Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association, Johannesburg, June 1958. The Natal Native Medical Association worked with a motto through which they, in parallel to the Orange Free State African Herbalists Association, campaigned for the rights of African medicine. They used a multi-lingual motto so as to draw attention to the wide area of influence, and attached to it an almost universal claim for recognition.

Illustration 7: Motto of the Natal Native Medical Association, printed at the side of their official correspondence

"Izinyanga Zokwelapa": Zonke Izizwe Zine Zinyanga Zakubo Inyanga e Nkulu U Nkulunkulu, Owa Dala Zonke Izizwe Wazi dala Nemithi eqondene Nezifo zaleso Sizwe Naweke Muntu O Ntsundu uyo kwelashwa Ngu Muntu Ngemiti yakini. "Vikelani amalungelo emiti yakini" translated into English as

"Native Doctors": All the Nations of the World have their own Doctors. The greatest Physician is God who created all the Nations, and also created along with them the Right and Exact Cures capable of Suppressing all the Diseases available in that Country or Continent Therefore the Success of a Native's Health lies through The Administration of his Native Medicines. Preserve S. A. Native Medical Rights.103

The translation provided by the izinyanga zokwelapa themselves illustrated once more that academic and legal distinctions between the established analytical categories of diviners and herbalists were not of primary concern in the language of healers themselves. Izinyanga zokwelapa, who translated their own designation as "native doctors" to their audience, proclaimed they had the right to be treated like doctors in "all the nations of the world". Legitimated by God, the Ultimate Authority, they had the capacity to deal with diseases "available in that country or continent". Legitimation by the state would hence only concede belatedly the legitimacy they already had been endowed with. Other associations, such as the African Dingaka Association stressed, to a minor extent only, the issue of previous legitimacy through divine forces. Their crucial focus was to "improve the present state of 'Dingaka' and strive for its recognition by our Union Govern- ment and the European community right across Africa."104 They wanted others to take note of the changes that had transformed African healing practices in the course of the colonial period, they aimed at reforming and restoring old practices, and they wished to have them universally acknowledged by other agencies apart from God, African elders and the chiefs. The South African Native Bantu Dingaka Midwives Sangoma Society displayed a similar self-confidence in its universal healing capacities. On their membership cards they displayed a roaring lion which they captioned

Health Cure the peoples association in the World. Johannesburg, Tvl, Orange Free State, Durban, Natal, Capetown Bloemfontein, Basutoland Swaziland, and Harrismith. And to go all over the world to cure health of the people.105

103 NAB, CNC 50A: CNC 43/35 Natal Native Medical Association, Durban, 15.03.1935. 104 SAB, GES 1783 25/30D African Dingaka Association, Lady Selbourne, to Minister of Health, Pretoria, 15.12.1931. 105 SAB, GES 1789 25/30S certificate of the South African Native Bantu Dingaka, Pretoria, 1947. 99

Illustration 8: Membership card South African Native Bantu Dingaka

Laying claim to the world, or to the continent, and thus postulating a universal consciousness and claiming universally accepted rights, was an idea rather than a reality. The claim showed, however, that healers conceived of themselves not merely as local actors. By expressing their ambitions in terms of the desire to be licensed, healers proclaimed that they conceived of themselves as part of the new elite. The licence was important for the new African elite, men who were educated, urbanised and Christian and who tended to be small entrepreneurs or landowners but who were also professionals, court interpreters, teachers or priests. From the 1920s onwards their economic independence was, however, undermined as the government reserved certain jobs for whites or refused to grant trading licences, so that in spite of their aspirations they experienced hardships and poverty similar to that of the working class. The new African elite saw themselves as "civilised", respectable and "progressive", attributes which in the course of this analysis will feature in more detail than hitherto. They believed in hard work, self-improvement and the assimilation of Western 100 norms. Hence, it was only logical that they sought acceptance by white society, in the pursuit of which they realised that they could not achieve this on the basis of individual merit but that this required the "upliftment" of the "race".106 Healers had to engage in the double process of requesting the conferring of status upon their profession on the one hand and of arguing on the other hand that through the recognition of their profession they would achieve a contribution to the improvement of their patients' health and well-being. In the academic literature a notion of culturally corporate, ethnomedical systems of healing prevails.107 Within such systems, therapy management, which lineages and kinship groups cultivated, was analysed in extensive detail.108 This insightful literature helped understand how healing worked in contrast to public health services, which the state was starting to build up at around this time. The provision of an array of preventive measures was identified, the techniques of diagnosis elaborately shown, the nature of therapy defined, and the meaning of ill-health interpreted. Broader social forms were reiterated in which the systems of healing have traditionally and also historically been embedded. In contrast to this hermeneutical strand a more interactive pattern of healing philosophies was recorded as entrenched particularly in the west of the continent. In Western Africa it was called into question whether neatly defined, centuries-old bodies of knowledge existed after all.109 Through the interaction of many bodies of expertise health knowledge became fractured. The transmission of neatly bounded and contained bodies of knowledge was interrupted because people did not even care to know, and experts borrowed and took in from others what they saw worked for them. It is tempting to relate this argument to the South African urban context of the first half of the twentieth century. In the view of the official documents of the South African healers' associations it becomes evident that, in an urban and trans-local environment, yet another understanding of health evolved. The health practices may in many instances have concurred with rural health practices even though they may have revolved around new, urban-rooted issues. It is crucial to note, however, that a new awareness of health and healing evolved in the urban environment of South Africa, in the development of which experts strove for organisational structures through which they hoped to adjust to transformations underway in the understanding of health.

106 Eales, Katherine. 'Patriarchs, Passes and Privilege: Johannesburg's African Middle Classes and the Question of Night Passes for African Women', in: Bonner, Philip/ Hofmeyr, Isabel/ James, Deborah/ Lodge, Tom (ed). Holding Their Ground. Johannesburg 1989, pp. 105-140; Maylam, Paul. 'Introduction: The Struggle for Space in Twentieth-Century Durban', in: Maylam, Paul/ Edwards, Iain (ed). The People's City: African Life in Twentieth-Century Durban. Pietermaritzburg 1996, pp. 1-29, here p. 8. 107 Yoder, P. Stanley. 'Issues in the Study of Ethnomedical Systems in Africa', in: Yoder, Stanley P. (ed). African Health and Healing Systems: Proceedings of a Symposium. Los Angeles 1982, pp. 1-20. 108 Janzen, 'Pluralistic Legitimation', pp. 105-122. 109 Last, 'Importance of Knowing', pp. 393-406. 101

Healers who worked in the name of such transformations were interested in authoritatively defining the body of knowledge they represented. In contrast to individual healers who approached the authorities, associations defined to a lesser extent the local practices, or the individual illnesses for which they could provide remedies and, in addition, they did not refer to their mentors or the witnesses of their success.110 The system of reference employed by the associations was different. They worked towards endowing African healing with a claim to universality. One element of this universality was that representatives of the knowledge of African healing restored health throughout South Africa, and that they were part of a profession recognised all over the world. To assert this claim or, in other words, to put discourse into practice, the associations had, in fact, to unite a fragmented profession still consisting of many individual health practitioners. Read against the issues that dominated the public health scenario, it appeared looked as if healers pursued an agenda that was completely unrelated to the diseases which medical doctors tried to combat. While healers fought with the government over rights of recognition, the government was challenged to respond to the appalling health conditions in rural and urban areas. They were confronted with high mortality rates, widespread malnutrition and alarming morbidity rates for diseases associated with poverty.111 The 1919 Public Health Act decreed, at least theoretically, free and voluntary treatment were to be made available to the population of South Africa. It also helped to affirm white racial identity and privilege. The Health Act led to the establishment of free clinics for whites. In the medical discourse it marked a shift towards a moralist and racialist approach towards health. Even in those institutions which had a reputation as being the vanguard of modern health management, it could not be taken for granted that medical examinations, mining conditions, housing and diets were debated from scientific vantage points.112 Between the 1920s and 1940s doctors sought explanations for diseases brought about by hunger and malnutrition, syphilis or tuberculosis in the inherent racial difference of Africans people rather than in the aetiology of diseases.113 The racistically motivated and rooted assumption was put forward, for instance, that Africans did not wear European clothes properly. Furthermore, the biological presumption was argued

110 The evidence for this is abundant. See, for instance, NAB, 1/MAT 6/1/201; N1/12/8 Chief George Muoshesh, Great Place 21.07.1960, about Alexia Makorohana Moati; SAB, NTS 9301 1/376 translated request for a licence of one unnamed healer, Mathealiras, Gumtree (OFS), to Secretary of Native Affairs, 11.09.1925; SAB, GES 1782 25/30A 10.03.1960; SAB, NTS 9304 10/376 Tomas Ndlovu to SNA, Johannesburg 09.05.1938; SAB, GES 1783 25/30D A. Matibela, on behalf of Qobo Dlamini, to Secretary for Public Health, Durban 15.06.1932; NAB, 1/MAT 6/1/201; N 1/12/8 M. Bhengu & Comp., House, Land, Estate and General Agents. Durban, 06.08.1959; SAB, GES 1782 25/30A. This is just a small number of samples taken from the almost abundant requests. 111 Jochelson, Colour of Disease, p. 93. 112 Packard, White Plague, p. 175. 113 Jochelson, Colour of Disease, pp. 111-140; Wylie, Starving, pp. 91-124; Packard, White Plague. 102 that Africans might have a different genetic make-up so that they fell ill more easily with certain diseases, such as tuberculosis for instance, than white people did. The decades from the 1930s to the early 1960s were, in particular, characterised by serious health implications in the industrialising centres. Housing, diets, working conditions and poor medical services contributed to an array of ill health conditions from which African people suffered in urban environments. In slum environments the lack of sanitation translated into parasitic diseases and diarrhoea, and even fatalities due to these ailments. Healers also did also not refer to major diseases such as tuberculosis or major health ailments as for example malnutrition. Healers were not expected to make any contributions in this scenario. In their submissions to the authorities they did not offer any. Actors on the margins, African healers concentrated on their own people's diseases. The public health debate did, though, spill over into their discourse. Ideas of race left quite a mark on their arguments, but healers also tried, wherever possible, to abstain from the racialisation of health issues. From the healers' perspective African health and illness were denoted and characterised differently. They became concerned if order was at stake. In urban environments "drinking, gambling and whoring… became largely divorced from the broader mediating influences of family life, and thus assumed a central role in the lives of thousands of skilled and unskilled miners."114 The number of unattached women in town increased between the 1920s and the end of the interwar years.115 The growing presence of African women in towns was an indication of the increasing stabilisation of the urban African population.116 Apart from this, women represented tradition and order in the discourse of both African men and administrators. If they stepped outside this role of societal stabilisation they provoked reflection about social disintegration, and were apportioned the blame for the physical and moral decline of the African population.117 African healers seized upon this perceived interconnection between the female role and the well-being of people, sought an alliance with the authorities and reassured them that they would not compete with the economic interests of white doctors, when they railed against the lucrative sale of love potions. Such medicines "can be used to any women to white and Black".118 Government officials were, indeed, concerned because white people sought treatment from African

114 Onselen, Charles van. Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand. vol. 1. Harlow 1982, p. 5. 115 Phillips, R. E. 'The Bantu in the City: A Study of Cultural Adjustment on the Witwatersrand', in: International African Institute (ed). Social Implications of Industrialization and Urbanization in Africa South of the Sahara. Lausanne 1956, pp. 174-179. 116 Maylam, 'Introduction', p. 16. 117 Jochelson, Colour of Disease, p. 113. 118 GES 1786 25/30J South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, Sophiatown, 08.07.1938. 103 healers, so that white doctors lost sources of income.119 Of course, healers could not escape the language of race, and stated explicitly that even though they had internalised the norms derived from Europeans, they had, at the same time, no inclination to compete with European superiority. Healers were asked to operate according to their own cultural logic and amongst their own people, and they were prepared to do so. As one of the certificates indicated, their philosophical credo was "Ye shall not kill nor give false evidence against others but ye shall save humanity from the sting of death whenever possible."120 (European culture needed at least three vows, namely two biblical commandments and the Hippocratic Oath, to carve out a similar philosophy.) When this universal, Christian and health-oriented credo boiled down to practical agendas as they were pursued by healers in local contexts, it translated into the right to sell indigenous medicines. The entrepreneurially oriented herbalists easily found a vocabulary and language with which to advertise the skills and medicines they had to offer. This was basically possible without reference to any philosophies about race. They benefited from the circumstance that health legislation, especially in Natal, had presented them with many loopholes and that their health activities overlapped substantially with a biomedical understanding of medicine. As far as pragmatic approaches to health were concerned, African herbalists offered a service, the background of which was formed by a philosophy even though this philosophy did not need to be constantly stressed. The Natal and Zululand Inyanga's and Herbalists' Association, very pragmatically, promoted their image through a list of diseases they were able to handle and of cures they had to offer. The left hand margin of their official stationery used for correspondence bore the following imprint:

Yonke Imiti Yesintu. Insizi Zokuncinda. Inzinsizi Zokubhema. Izinyamazane. Imikhando. Amakhubalo. Izintelezi. Amaxolo. Ubulawu beSidine. Obumhlope be Nhlanhla. Izizwe. Ufufunyane. Isipoliyane noku nye okuhlanyisayo. Amafuta Ezinyamazine. Ukubetela Umuzi Isibaya naMasimu. Eyenyongo yesi Zulu. Izeluleko Ngesihle.121

119 Flint, 'Competition', p. 209. 120 SAB, NTS 9303 9/376 certificate of the Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association, 19.06.1958. 121 SAB, NTS 9302 1/376 stationery of the Natal and Zululand Inyanga's and Herbalists' Association, 1942. 104

Illustration 9: Stationery of ngaka I. J. Ndhlovu, scientist and president of the Natal and Zululand Inyangas and Herbalists Association, Durban, 16 Sept 1942

This statement contained simple and straightforward information for those who needed assistance, and it ignored race. It explained that the Natal and Zululand Inyangas and Herbalists Association specialised in reproductive healing, which need not necessarily be reduced to biomedical cures. In addition to an array of medicines and potions they also promised to restore and reconstruct gender relations as much as relations between different generations. With this information they probably addressed prospective clients rather than government officials. And yet, government officials could not have taken real offence had they read this information. The meaning of the medicines employed have perhaps undergone a change over the decades, but all the medicines are still known today.122 They often alleviate pain and symptoms of affliction indicative of the ailments of our current times, but it is possible to assume that they helped in similar situations further back in history. Healers in Pietermaritz- burg explained their medicines in the following way:

Izinsizi zokuncinda nekhubhema are subsumed under izinyamazane. Some of the medicines help when a person is having a terrible headache or pains in the body, others are specifically designed for children. Amakhubalo is used in many distinct ways, always depending on the inyanga who administers the treatment. We found that especially ikhubalo likatikoloshe is used by people who do bad things such as bank robbery, break into other people's houses, car hijacking. The medicine is believed to make those who take it invisible. In its form as udosi lwempisi thieves can burn it before they embark on stealing. As a result people in the house will fall asleep so that the thieves get out the desired goods without anybody noticing. It can also be used as a fortifier. Applied to your own body, it can make an attacker freeze, that is: unable to move. Sometimes that person will even forget that he wanted to kill the person. There is a wide range of intelezi. It protects people from bullets in wars. If mixed with water in a bucket and

122 Historical compilation of medicines, see for instance, Bryant, Zulu Medicine. For changes in application of medicine see Jolles, Frank and Stephen. 'Zulu Ritual Immunisation in Perspective.' Africa 70: 2 (2000), pp. 229-248. 105

sprayed with a broom, it chases away potential abathakati from your house. In that case it is similar to amafutha ezinyamazane. It can also protect deceased or their family from abathakati, and is applied with funerals. Amagxolo designates a medicine to be peeled from stems, branches and the roots of trees. Ubulawu besidina obumhlope benhlanhla are medicines for good luck, and come nearest to love philtres. There are specific rules how to apply, and not to overuse them. Finally, a number of diseases such as izizwe, ufufunyane and isipoliyane nokunye okuhlanisayo are mentioned. All of them are mental, or psychological diseases which make people scream loudly, run away. Eyenyongo yesi zulu are laxatives which clean the body and make it strong and energetic. And finally, izeluleko ngesihle are free advice, usually from adults to younger people on how to behave.123

In the struggle for privileges, which healers fought, on the one hand, on the basis of categories of universality and, on the other, as well in material local contexts, an amalgamation of race, culture and elitist aspirations did, inevitably, sneak in. In particular, African herbalists distanced themselves from Indian traders, who were more readily licensed than African herbalists. Traders obtained General Dealers Licences which disadvantaged "many of the old Inyangas" who subsequently associated themselves as "genuine Inyangas" in the Natal Native Medical Association founded by Mafavuke Ngcobo in 1930.124 The licensing policy barred Africans from a lucrative market in which, in concurrence with the rest of the African elite, they wanted to participate, and through which they promised to develop the less advanced African part of the population. Native Commissioners sometimes took note of the fact that the herbalists who addressed the authorities were "educated native[s] with – for a native – an extraordinary business ability."125 To prove their elitist status, herbalists produced income tax receipts, and some associations allowed for the registration of taxpaying healers only. And yet the restrictive licensing of African herbalists proved to be an ongoing dilemma. "It would have the effect of giving the European, Indian or Coloured medicine man the free run of the African market at the expense of the African practitioner," the Natal Mercury reported.126 Due to the licensing policy of the government, African herbalists identified non-African traders in medicinal plants as rivals rather than as registered apothecaries or doctors. The Natal Native Medical Council

view[ed] with alarm that a practice has arisen amongst certain Natives and Indians in obtaining a 'General Dealers License' to cover their activities in dealing with Herbs, and compounding

123 Interviews Wiseman Masango with various healers of Pietermaritzburg, August 2002, translations by Wiseman Masango. 124 GES 1785 25/30G J. D'Alton, solicitor and conveyancer, on behalf of Natal Native Medical Council, Wilton Court, to Minister of Health, 29.08.1936. 125 NAB, CNC 50 A; CNC 43/25 Natal Native Medical Association, Native Commissioner, Durban, 12.02.1935. 126 GES 1834 74/30 Jordan K. Ngubane for Natal Mercury, 09.05.1951. 106

liquid medicines from these herbs, practically in the same way as an apothecary and dispose of them to whomsoever may come along to purchase.127

The harsh realities of competition were local in their extent. They formed an integral part of healers' wider search for the recognition of their rights. And yet the associations knew that if they wanted to promote more fundamental redefinitions of African healing, they could not rely exclusively on the advertising of marketable medicines. To truly reformulate the significance of African healing meant to carve out a social and a scientific place for it. Healers' associations started, as a first step, to describe and assess the state of the art. At this stage they often arrived at the conclusion that African healing had been subjected to pressure from colonial misinterpretations and because of changing of times. Secondly, they outlined steps towards the improvement of the current situation. More particularly, they wanted to reform African healing practices and they expected the authorities to grant their official recognition to this endeavour. Thirdly and finally, African healers campaigned for a standing of African healing appropriate to and commensurate with the times in South Africa's philosophies of health, order and prosperity. Frequently, they pondered about the niches of tradition in which African health activities would find protection, having in mind the advance of scientific medicine. All in all, healers never lost sight of their envisaged re-integration into the social and intellectual elite of the country. To the alarm of healers, neither bureaucrats who legislated against the practice of African healing, nor the officials who applied the laws and regulations were sufficiently knowledgeable or even adequately informed about the art of African healing. For this reason healers' associations explained the state of their art in their charter documents. The president of the African Dingaka Association, Shipe L. D. Ditshego, elucidated that the term ngaka was derived from the words for stone and ground. "Stone means ground from which a stone is formed; Out of which different roots and herbs are found. Ground – Stone and the two together produce different roots and herbs."128 He went on to explain that

'ngaka' in Native Custom is far different from that of a Medical Practitioner, a Native Ngaka is in fact a herbalist. Unfortunately when it comes to the European language we share the same word to express two different things.129

127 SAB, GES 1785 25/30G J. D'Alton, solicitor and conveyancer, Wilton Court, to Minister of Health, 29.08.1936. 128 SAB, GES 1783 25/30D resolutions of the African Dingaka Association, c. 19.10.1932. 129 ibid. 107

This was, in fact, a complaint about the confusing and distorting European labelling practices, albeit couched in very friendly terms.130 The problem was that healers hardly ever had the chance to explain to the authorities from their own vantage point, what they were experts in. The members of the African Dingaka Association regretted that

Europeans who have no knowledge and idea of what our profession is ... have taken [knowledge about our bongaka] out of the hands of the owners, by saying it is 'WITCH-CRAFT' and at the same time taking advantage of it.131

Not every association was as outspoken as the African Dingaka Association. Some were more cautious when it came to apportioning the blame for the existing confusion about terms and practices exclusively to failures on the part of white people. In their view the deterioration of knowledge about African healing was due to the change of the times and they interpreted the fracturing of knowledge as a result of interaction with the modern world. "The function of 'ngakas' under old traditions and primitive sciences of medicine has sunk down to hatred which has renamed them 'witch-doctors', by the civilisation as if is true."132 It is of interest to note that the association equated "old traditions" with "primitive science", and thus indicated a development, or an evolution, rather than a contradiction between tradition and science. The current times were denoted by civilisation – a cultural achievement towards which Africans and white people alike were striving. It was the elite, black and white, whom the Lady Selbourne branch of the African Dingaka Association wished to reassess the civilisational and scientific foundations of African health practices. The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society also noticed a "mysterious change of natives back to their old custom" and argued that, so as to improve the situation, "let all the intelligent, man and women, not trample the work of god under their feet… what we require is the aid of God in this great downfall of our native race."133 Healing was in a disastrous state, it was misinterpreted and misunderstood, and the associations set out to change this. The aspiring profession outlined plans about how to tackle the dilemmas outlined. By and large, they promoted the modernisation of African healing practices, through which they would make African healing fit for the present time. Their starting point consisted in the creation of the awareness that "immense ideas as known by the African primitively before

130 See chapter 2. 131 SAB, GES 1783 25/30D African Dingaka Association, Lady Selbourne, to Minister of Health, Pretoria, 15.12.1931. 132 ibid. 133 SAB GES 1788 25/30M conference announcement of South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, Sophiatown, December 1938. 108

Europeans where known to this continent" still existed and needed to reappear in public.134 In particular, they aimed to "improve the present stage of Dingaka", and they conceived of themselves as advocates to "prevent African Dingaka from using primitive science".135 Such an ambition should not cause problems for an innovative, industrious and aspiring profession, which, in Johannesburg for instance, had chosen the isambane as its mascot. "Isambane above, like us, thrives on roots and rests not on its laurels," stated the motto of the Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association.136

Illustration 10: Motto of Isambane Medcines: Isambane above, like us, thrives on roots and rests not on its laurels

Many associations argued for a new understanding of an old and already successfully transformed craft. The Orange Free State African Herbalist Association emphasised the seniority of African medicine in comparison to the medical knowledge introduced by Europeans. They reminded their interlocutors of the fact that European medicine had not been fundamental to bringing about the health of African people. Yet it had been crucial in effecting change. From this seniority of African medicine they derived not its superiority, but its dignity. They explained that the "vast knowledge and experience in the physical Art of healing" had been

handed down from posterity to the present generation, and no power on earth could decidedly determine to obliterate this tradition. […] Before the advent of the Whiteman into Africa, the Native people were not immune from divers diseases which afflict body and health and no authority on medicine and rudiments of healing physic could gainsay the fact that the Natives had their own doctors who were learned in the medicinal art of healing by herbs, roots and barks and who were then and there guardians of the ills, diseases and health of their people.137

134 SAB GES 1783 25/30D African Dingaka Association, Lady Selbourne, to Minister of Health, Pretoria, 15.12.1931. 135 ibid. 136 SAB, NTS 9303 9/376 certificate of the Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association, Johannesburg, June 1958. 137 SAB, GES 1788 25/30M resolutions of the Orange Free State African Herbalists Association, Bloemfontein, 13.12.1940. 109

This rather lengthy elaboration epitomised the self-confidence of African healers and the dilemma the profession was fraught with since the "authorities on medicine" denied the worth and legal status of African healing. Most healers' associations therefore campaigned for more than merely a re- acknowledgement of older traditions of African knowledge about health and disease. They emphasised that they had updated older forms of health knowledge, and that, in fact, they bridged the gap between the ancient roots of healing and the professional outlook healing was currently assuming. The South African Bantu Dingaka Midwives Herbalists Sangoma Society, which had taken note of the regression of African people to outdated health practices, campaigned for the twofold goal of, firstly, informing government authorities about recent developments, and secondly, renewing the instruction of Africans who had lost, through forgetting, their knowledge about matters of health. Their official stamp which they placed on all their correspondence proclaimed: "To Introduce Native Custom".

Illustration 11: Stamp of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society: To Introduce Native Custom

Most associations realised that in "the present days which are of progress"138 they needed to discharge themselves of "the works that want to be progressive, qualified through their beauty which has been observed by the civilised nation as good to the public".139 They accepted the values of the present day and had no ambition of swimming against the stream. Their ambition was not to distinguish themselves from white people, Christians and medical professionals. Quite to the contrary, their intent was to reconcile. In order to refurbish older knowledge, the African Dingaka Association wanted to "collect as much knowledge about our 'Bongaka' and as much researchers as can be possible, to prepare for the future generation of

138 SAB, GES 1783 25/30D African Dingaka Association, Lady Selbourne, to Minister of Health, Pretoria, 15.12.1931. 139 ibid. 110

European Medical practitioners of Africa."140 This can be read as an offer to share knowledge and insights. It can also be understood as the determined response to take up the challenges scientific medicine had brought to South Africa. Whatever the motivation, healers actively sought the debate with "European medical practitioners of Africa", and thus articulated their desire to interact, not to separate. Research and "the Preservation and Advancement of Primitive Medicines"141 were sub-headings of one and the same, vast and overarching programme to rehabilitate, re-introduce and reshape African healing. "Science" and "research" were more than merely reoccurring slogans in the language used by healers' associations to describe the aspriations of their members. They were, in fact, central categories through which healers perceived and conceived the transformation of their craft. Individual healers such as "Ngaka I. J. Ndhlovu (Scientist), President of Natal and Zululand Inyangas' and Herbalists' Association" clearly considered themselves as scientists.142 Others termed themselves experts in the "science of circumcision" and were keen on proving "Knowledge and Efficiency."143 Some associations chose names that were modelled upon scientific organisations, such as the Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association, which obviously copied the name of the South African Institute of Medical Research. The African Dingaka Association wanted to work as distinguished "scientists" as well, and declared that they were prepared to co-operate with universities.144 The need to stress the scientific nature of African medicine probably also resulted from the "conversion" of many socially aspiring African families to science. When, in East Africa, families sent their sons to hospitals for circumcision, they were called "converts to science".145 The situation in South Africa was perhaps similar. In the academic literature the necessity to "translate" African systems of knowledge and to convey to western audiences the significance African healing had for the participants themselves has been stressed. As one author once put it,

especially the anthropologist's ability to act as a medium through which the religious concepts of African people are made accessible to a western-educated audience, in Africa and elsewhere… the anthropologist… is in a position to describe and translate these immediate data on

140 ibid. 141 SAB, NTS 9303 9/376 certificate of the Isambane African Medical Research Institute's Association, Johannesburg, June 1958 142 SAB, NTS 9302 1/376 Ngaka I. J. Ndhlovu, scientist, president of Natal and Zululand Inyangas' and Herbalists' Association, Durban, to Deneys Reitzs, M. P., Minister of Native Affairs, Pretoria, 16.09.1942. 143 SAB, GES 1786 25/30J resolutions of South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, Sophiatown, 08.07.1938. 144 SAB, GES 1783 25/30D African Dingaka Association to Minister of Health, 15.12.1931. 145 Ranger, Terence. 'Godly Medicine: the Ambiguities of Medical Mission in Southeast Tanzania, 1900 - 1945.' Social Science and Medicine 15 B (1981), pp. 261-277, here p. 273. 111

African religion, and to explain the significance they have for the participants themselves – before these data become systematised, and more likely than not violated, in the process of scientific generalisation and abstraction.146

Healers who grouped themselves together in the professional associations of South Africa between the 1930s and 1960s would probably have considered such a statement patronising in that, while it referred to African religion rather than African ideas of health, it assumed that Africans themselves were not capable of translating the knowledge of the tradition they represented. South African healers were, quite conversely, eager to systematise their knowledge about health in terms of science. The scientific nature of African medicine could not be completely disregarded or even discarded. Medical experiments had been observed in the East African kingdom of Bunyoro towards the late nineteenth century in a polity that had virtually had no contact with European scientific traditions. In Bunyoro the king ordered his chief healers to carry out experiments on patients to avert a health crisis. He asked them to devise, through practical "trial and error" and observation, a cure for serious and often fatal epidemic disease in the region.147 Of course, this case cannot be generalised to apply to South African conditions as well, but it does show that scientific medicine was not the exclusive realm of Western health practitioners, neither in Bunyoro nor anywhere else. The claim of African healers, that through the advent of European science, different scientific traditions had started to interact with each other, is therefore not completely far fetched or even abstruse. This is important to note against the South African backdrop where people were convinced that natural powers drove the properties of medicines. They were wondrous, but not miraculous.148 The approach of the Lovedu in the northern parts of South Africa were termed scientific as well because doctors were experimentalists, tried out new substances and antidotes to diseases. The difference between the approaches was not that one was "scientific" while the other was "irrational" but, again in the opinion of the Lovedu, it rather lay in the fact that Europeans handled disease mechanically, paid attention to superficialities, and never attempted to go to the real roots of the matter.149 Both Europeans and Africans aimed at controlling nature, and of using insights – at which they arrived through different techniques – for the more pragmatic ends of curing and healing. Europeans and Africans both provided evidence of an enquiring mind, which

146 van Binsbergen, Religious Change, p. 178. 147 Davies, J. N. P. 'The Development of "Scientific" Medicine in the African Kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara.' Medical History 3 (1959), pp. 47-57. 148 Krige, J. D. 'The Magical Thought-Pattern of the Bantu in Relation to Health Services.' African Studies 3: 1 (1944), pp. 1-13, p. 5. 149 ibid., p. 10. 112 employed and involved trial and error.150 Supernatural beliefs had been relegated to the periphery of practical life, they continued to regulate ethics and to buttress social institutions, but they had no place in the urgent matters of producing and of selling goods, of waging war and preserving health. All these areas had become the domain of science, where the scientist, exercising supreme authority, performed wonders that gained him the explicit credulity hitherto reserved for the diviner priest.151 Outlooks on problems were changing, and African healers themselves were very well capable to translate their medical traditions into the new terms of science. As has been mentioned in connection with the debate about public health issues, notions of science were intimately tied to concepts of race. In the late 1920s and early 1930s a coherent policy of race emerged in South Africa.152 Notions about race were reflected in medical discourses about health. Competition between white and African therapeutics translated into the biomedical community turning to the language of racial science. It was argued that African doctors were perhaps intellectually capable and astute enough to "learn" biomedicine, but were not morally fit to tend white patients.153 Venereal diseases among Africans were explained in moralistic terms until far into the 1940s.154 Experts on malnutrition were instrumentalising science to make moral assertions which, in an earlier age, would have belonged to the realm of religion.155 It can be argued that African healers set a counter- narrative against this at rather an early stage. Their emphasis on African medicine as a science was brought forward at a time when the Department of Health and the Native Affairs Department were still imbuing diseases with an aura of morals as much as attributing them to issues of morality, if these diseases were encountered in African environments. Healers' discourse aimed for its orientation towards the Western and colonial definitions of science. They used a terminology clustered around "research", "efficiency" and "knowledge" rather than to utilise a vocabulary that would have been derived from their own tradition of science. Making reference to science was a mechanism also designated to lend legitimacy to a political agenda. Healers used this language and technique to deduce from it as much advantage as anyhow possible. They hoped to achieve separate admission to a profession that was already predominantly defined by people of European ancestry. In the context of racism and oppression in South Africa, healers conceded that white people had not come to destroy all

150 Simons, 'Tribal Medicine', pp. 89-90. 151 ibid., p. 91. 152 Dubow, Saul. Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919-1936. London 1989. 153 Flint, 'Competition', p. 214. 154 Jochelson, Colour of Disease, pp. 136-139. 155 Wylie, Starving, p. 5. 113 that was good in African ways of life, but that they had brought the benefits of another civilisation. Healers hoped that they would be able to convince white people that, as representatives of the African elite, they themselves had arrived at a truer understanding of their own customs, and that they had adapted their own concepts, and thus "raised" them to the white man's level. In the words of the Orange Free State African Herbalists Association the hope was that "fair justice will be accorded to the Free State herbalists primarily under Government protection and recognition at the earliest momentous time when calm atmosphere prevails again in this sunny land of South Africa where Blacks should be encouraged by the Ruling class to adopt and retain those finer arts of their Native customs."156 Submission to political overrule, as it was, became more evident the further the course of the racist project proceeded in South Africa. On their fifth annual conference, in 1932, the African Dingaka Association had formulated in a direct and straight-forward manner that "this Conference considers it advisable that the authorities formulate conditions and terms as the fundamental basis of [our desired] recognition."157 Even though this resolution left the eventual definition of terms to government officials, they requested that the authorities should act on their behalf. The tighter the restrictions of apartheid became, the more subserviently healers tended to present themselves in their efforts to achieve recognition. In 1948, the President General of the African National Native Herbs Doctors of South Africa requested

a ruling from you as to our defination. […] We like to have unrestricted rights to practise healing work among our own people as according to the 'apartheid Policy'. We are asking for the right to work with our own people in all the Provinces.158

In a similar vein, though maybe with even more modesty, Timotho Hlobo, herbalist and member of the South African Elephant Herbs Medicine Society "Iitzanuse", explicitly stated in 1954 that the association on whose behalf he submitted the founding documents intended to serve Africans only. They wanted "to promote knowledge of African herbs", to "co-operate with our fellow-Africans" and to "aid them in their weaknesses".159 Healers in the associations did not rebel against acknowledged officialdom. They offered their co-operation.

156 SAB, GES 1788 25/30M resolutions of Orange Free State African Herbalists Association (OFSAHA), Bloemfontein, 13.12.1940. 157 SAB, GES 1783 25/30D resolutions of the African Dingaka Association, c. 19.10.1932. 158 SAB, GES 1834 74/30 African National Native Herbs Doctors of South Africa, New Clare, to Minister of Health, Pretoria, 07.10.1948. 159 SAB, NTS 9303 7/376 draft constitution of the South African Elephant Herbs Medicine Society "Iitzanuse", Timotho Hlobo, herbalist, Emjanyane (Cape), 20.12.1954. 114

Loyalty to the state also entailed that healers who considered themselves to be respectable distanced themselves from so-called charlatans, who were often termed "bogus doctors". The President of the African Dingaka Association recognised the problem,

I admit that ther are mistakes done by other Dingaka among the nation; those are the mistakes which have to be corrected instead of judging the whole nation through the mistakes of few people who are to be taken care off and taught the rights way by the Courts of Law.160

Witchcraft, of which African healers were frequently accused if they wore white coats or used a stethoscope, one of the important technical improvements of modern colonial medicine, and of which they were accused just as well if they committed themselves to "bone throwing and smelling out" could be controlled, as Shipe L. D. Ditshego, president of the African Dingaka Association, proposed. He, personally, distanced himself from such malpractice that could in fact "cause disturbance and great trouble". Two decades later the African Inyangas and Herbalists Board of Control, Union of South Africa, explicitly stressed that "certificates will not be issued to the Witchdoctors. or Izanusi. or Izangoma. as these People are Practising the Practise which is Illegally to the Government."161 Obedience to the government was also expressed by R. S. Zama, "founder and managing director, herbalist" of the African United Herbalist Board of Control – S. Africa, who explained that his organisation had especially been formed to eradicate malpractices among herbalists.

We have Builded such an organasation as to help the government and Public against Bogus Doctors. The Board intends to Protect the Public against such Herbalist who Pretend to be Inyangas wheres being criminals. […] The Board has learned that the Government is ignorant on the practises of Arts of these uncivilised People. So they be not even Inyanga or Herbalist to deal with Herbs.162

Versed in the art and prepared to aid the state, especially in matters where it was weak, they wished to have anyone whom they detected as a pretending to be a doctor arrested and would have liked to see them charge for "Robboring the Public".163 In the late 1950s the argumentation revolved more and more stringently around policing activities, much in accordance with the tightened political climate in South Africa. The police, composed of the lower strata of petty officials, but accorded high racial status, was one of the

160 SAB, GES 1783 25/30D African Dingaka Association, Lady Selbourne, to Minister of Health, Pretoria, 15.12.1931. 161 SAB, NTS 9302 1/376 African Inyangas and Herbalists Board of Control Union of South Africa to South African Police, Pinetown, 06.05.1959. 162 SAB, NTS 9302 2/376 African United Herbalist Board of Control – S. Africa, Boksburg, to Chief Native Commissioner, Maritzburg, 11.03.1958. 163 ibid. 115 few, but intense, zones of contact between black and white people. They became the main agents of racial aggression, and were therefore interesting addressees for healers' associations and here especially from those associations which conceived of themselves as "boards of control" and offered policing services. The African United Herbalist Board of Control considered acting independently as a policing agency, or, if preferred by the authorities, as assistants to the state police. "When the Government has approved our Requist we the Board will ask the Police to keep eyes with Peaple Pretending to be Inyangas and they will be not even one Inyanga or Herbalist to Practise without Reporting himself to the station commender of the Area and the Chief and district Commissioner."164 The African Inyangas and Herbalists Board of Control, Union of South Africa, described a scenario with which the South African police could not cope on their own account.

There are Natives they are calling themselves Inyangas or Herbalists going up and down doing Mischief of Stock theft. Robbing and Forgering in the whole Union Native Areas. Because of the fact that they will be trusted among their own People which is then very easy to do any Mischief they like. Among the parcting Inyangas and Herbalists the above Board has founded that any Native Male who things of Mischief or to get Money by folse pritence he is to call himself Inyanga or Herbalists. in this there a re sort of Gang stars staying the native Locations or Domestic Servants. every Month ending they have to parcte in the other Domestic Servants where their are known and in these Gang stars there are five to ten groups. and in there will be a Leader among them who is a big Boss who passed this Native Practise Medicines so far as Southern Rhodesia. once they praise themselves like this they will now start to work and they will Practice Witchcraft.165

In addition, the board of control intended to check on and to contain alcohol and dagga consumption in the rural areas and to collaborate with the police. As the board knew the area, they assumed that the police could provide the telephone line. Healers' associations envisioned their contribution to society in acting as doctors, police and collaborators. They wanted to work towards the restoration of order. Yet the authorities were not convinced. As political collaboration did not prove a worthwhile path to pursue, healers tried to regain social visibility in cultural terms. In the cultural arena healers developed a different attitude compared to the stance they took in the political one. While healers showed political subservience to apartheid, they did not, as has been elaborated above, succumb to apartheid- determined notions of racial purity as an ideal to be preserved. Their public visibility in places, out of which they had been relegated due to specific legislation, spoke not only to prospective clients, but to the urban environment more generally. Healers invited members of the association and the general public for gatherings in public buildings such as town halls,

164 SAB, NTS 9302 2/376 African United Herbalist Board of Control (Union of South Africa), 11.03.1958. 165 SAB, NTS 9302 1/376 African Inyangas and Herbalists Board of Control, 06.05.1959. 116 markers of civic culture, rather than to gatherings in the streets or in private backyards. It would be too strong an assertion to suggest that healers declared such buildings as "their territory". They did, after all, not commit themselves to protests opposing the tighter regulations of African people's lives exerted by the state, just as much as they did not become visible in struggles around issues relating to the workplace, aspects which were important markers of the exploitation of political space.166 More generally, it ought to be taken into consideration that healers did not claim urban space as a particular field of activity which they wanted to shape. It remains a difficult task to ascertain whether or not they really wished to contribute to town culture. Certainly they added to it. They used urban space, particularly buildings, to their own advantage. Clubs, shebeens, beer-halls and dance-halls were not only the cultural space of working class culture, but in the 1930s they provided a fertile ground for the fusion of elite culture and working class dance and music. Attempts were made to transform popular ngoma dancing into some sort of "harmless form of energy release". This attempt was not entirely successful, as ngoma performances continued to express an oppositional cultural form.167 The major associations promised intellectual gatherings with only a limited portion or element of entertainment. Annual meetings, numbered consecutively and announced publicly a couple of months in advance, were an occasion for healers to present themselves. The African Dingaka Association of Orlando East sent out invitations for their annual conference in the P. L. D. Hall in Alexandra Township.168 By 1952 this had become a tradition of twenty years' standing, as one of the first annual meetings had been scheduled in 1932 in the Ebenezer Hall of Bloemfontein.169 The South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangomas Society sent out intivations for a General Conference at the Red School Eerste Rust in Pretoria.170 Another one of their general meetings was scheduled to take place at the corner of Good and Edward Roads in Sophiatown.171 Yet another society, the Orange Free State Herbalists Association, used the Bantu Social Institute Hall in Batho Village, Bloemfontein.172

166 Maylam, 'Introduction', p. 7. 167 Erlman, 'Hope does not Kill', pp. 69, 89-92. 168 SAB, NTS 9303 7/376 invitation of the African Dingaka Association for annual conference Nov 21-23, 1952. 169 SAB, GES 1784 25/30D resolutions of the African Dingaka Association, 27.10.1932. 170 SAB, GES 1786 25/30J announcement of general conference to be held on June 30, 1938, by South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangomas Society. 171 SAB, GES 1788 25/30M announcement of General Meeting to be held Dec. 11, 1938 by South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangomas Society. 172 SAB, NTS 9305 12/376 leaflet announcing a conference to be held Dec. 11-12, 1953. 112

Illustration 12: Call for conference of the South African Bantu Dingaka Herbalists Midwives Sangoma Society, scheduled for 11 December 1938

118

Illustration 13: Call for conference of the Orange Free State African Herbalists Association, scheduled for 10 Dec 1953

In the context of these conferences members were expected to pay their fees and renew their licences.173 The correspondence with the authorities from the previous year was read out.174 Conferences were also occasions for inviting the public who were given the opportunity of watching healers in action, of marvelling at their extraordinary skills, and of seeing how they examined initiands. "We invite all our church ministers, teachers, Blockmen and all leaders of African organisations to attend conference and help us attain our rights".175 Healers addressed the new African elite and hoped that their attendance at the conferences would, in turn, enhance their own reputation. The Bantu Medical Union Club of South Africa counted teachers as members of their association, others invited the "petty bourgeoisie" to their meetings and conferences. Emulating the rituals of academic conferences, the administrative staff of the association issued registration tickets with names of the association

173 SAB, NTS 9303 7/376 announcement of annual conference to be held Nov. 21-23, 1952 by African Dingaka Association. 174 SAB, NTS 9305 12/376 announcement of Annual General Conference to be held Dec. 11-12, 1953 by Orange Free State African Herbalists Association. 175 ibid. 119

for each participant. Conference participants pinned the tags to caps, sleeves and chests, a gesture that gave distinction and a sense of fun to the gathering, as one journalist opined.176 Professional concerns were as important as features of entertainment, as both would enhance the publicity the event received. As a strategy to endow a group of people, or a profession, with respectability, the gathering in public buildings was an almost universal strategy. All over the world urban and small-town bourgeoisie have been observed to crystallise their nascent claims to social primacy by congregating in exclusive social units, matrices for the formation of a local elite, and all of them were eager to acquire their own buildings.177 There they organised activities such as balls, banquets and lectures, depending on the style and context of the association. Healers' associations engaged in comparable activities. They were, however, far from having been granted the actual status of recognition of which they already tried to exhibit all the attendant "trimmings". Healers wished to be publicly visible. They showed a strong inclination towards being apolitical. In the end they had to submit to the state and the dominant cultural trends. Hopes were dashed, resulting in disappointment. "This Organisation is not a Political Board. The Board takes everything to your hands", was the explicit claim of the African United Herbalist Board of Control.178 But all the efforts were to no avail, and did not lead to the intended and hoped for success. The state refused to extend official recognition to African healers' professional associations. Individual healers had met ignorant government officials at the beginning of the century, and they still were confronted with the same attitude and level of informedness half a century later. The frustrations and disappointment of some of the individual petitioners were repeated in the experience of the associations.

Properly speaking the formation and existence of the Native Department was for the benefit of the Natives generally, but to our disappointment the result is the opposite. All impediments are placed in our way and we are driven to desparation. To make my point clear: a Native who knows from his boyhood herbs such as itshonwe-umfesi, inyongwane, magagana, umvawenyati - snake bite etc. etc. which herbs were known by our forefathers - and fathers and also by our people - and yet when we apply for a permit the Department which is supposed to know our wants and asperations after chopping and changing flatly declines to grant such a permit.179

176 SAB, GES 1834 74/30 extract from The Friend, 13.10.1950 "Native Medicine Men seek State Recognition" sent in by African Dingaga Association, Kimberley. 177 Eley, Geoff. 'Nations, Publics and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century', in: Calhoun, Craig (ed). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge 1992, pp. 289-339, here p. 297. 178 NTS 9302 2/376 African United Herbalist Board of Control – S. Africa, Boksburg, to Chief Native Commissioner, Maritzburg, 11.03.1958. 179 SAB, GG 1216 33/311 M. N. Galela, from Untu Bantu Coloured Native Victoria Memorial Edifice, Alice, Cape Province, to Governor General, 26.12.1912. 120

Healers' drives at forming professional associations – their creative responses to the maintenance of urban health as much as their explicit subservience had been to no avail and had not changed anything.

I can hear from the Lord if it would be in wright permission to steal and do wrongfully as other people does because I am try by any all means to get Licence and I am failing. Even if I offer myself to the superior Lords for in my Court they refused, so that is why I wrote to you with much hope as I know that you are the superiors of my Court and the Capital of the Union.180

It became clear that if healers wanted recognition and public acknowledgement, they would probably have to look for other avenues to awaken interest in their projects.

The Certified Healer Doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses and clerks commanded the upper ranks of the hierarchy of professional status in South Africa. Healers in the urban environment aspired to recognition of these ranks, and they wished to be members of a similar profession. Rather than wanting to be competitors, they adopted the rank and file of other professions as their role models. The most prevalent discursive nodes around which they wished to construct the respectability of their profession were the universality of the profession, its compatibility with science and the cultural mandate they embodied. All these discursive nodes were of importance and indicated that healers' efforts towards professionalisation were not a narrowly conceived ambition unconnected to concerns that drove the times. In their appeals to the authorities healers did not intend to promote their religious world view or their understanding of the divine world. Either their understanding of their relation to the supernatural was not affected by their attempts towards professionalisation, or they simply did not consider the state to be the appropriate interlocutor for this part of the transformation underway in their profession. In fact, patients, elders, and clientele may have offered more important criticism in this regard. Presenting moderate and generally accommodationist stances, they offered to the state pragmatic collaboration as the basis for their recognition rather than an oppositional ideology. Given the circumstances of legal discrimination and the tradition of licensing izinyanga in Natal, it was, during this phase, only natural that the professionalisation of healers was visibly driven by herbalists rather than by diviners. Diviners had good reasons to shy away from

180 SAB, NTS 9302 2/376 Bhekinkomo Zondi, qualified herbalist, to Department of Native Affairs, Pinetown, 11.08.1955. 121 appearing in public. Even though they were included in some of the associations, they did not stand out as leading figures. Those healers who turned themselves into the protagonists of their own professionalisation were not only more frequently herbalists than diviners, but amongst them could be found members of the new elite, teachers and small entrepreneurs, for instance, who commanded the skills of reading and writing. Moreover, they were products of urbanisation. Healers who became active on behalf on their own professionalisation did not distance themselves from their rural counterparts, but their arguments, their strategies, and their self-conceptions differed from the ways in which rural healers envisaged themselves. As protagonists of urban scenes of healing, the representatives of the aspiring profession did not reproduce on their written documents the ethnographically recorded regalia and insignia such as goat bladders, white and black beads in the hair, whisks, medicine bags, charms and amulets, or quills. They introduced their very own style of visual self-presentation, which clustered around associational charters, multi-lingual certificates, renewable licences, professionally styled stationery used for correspondence, printed conference announcements, authoritative stamps and much more. In some important regards, they were prepared to subject themselves to scriptural based law, and showed that they were prepared to abstain from an understanding of healing that would be based on the consensus of the health-seekers alone. The community, of course, remained as one of their major. Healers took an interest in the diseases of order, rather than in individual biological ailments, from which the township communities suffered. The 1930s through to the 1950s represent a period of healers' thwarted professionalisation. The immediate value of the documentation which exposes this process is that it shows how professionalisation was envisaged at a time before the South African mass media became involved in the meandering paths of healers' professionalisation and popularisation. From the documents dating from this period and available today it becomes evident that in conceptual- ising their profession healers had intended a macro-narrative rather than a narrative that looked into local specificities, technical details, or paths of individual socialisation. In this regard they differed substantially from the academic discourse that was conducted about them. Healers ideated themselves in the towns and the cities, they pictured themselves in networks irrespective of national boundaries, and they envisaged their task as being instrumental to remedying ailments with a claim to the universality of healing. Moreover, healers displayed ambitions to command the discourse about their activities. Even though ultimately doomed to failure, they tried to interfere with the dominant discourses in which bureaucrats, social scientists, scientifically trained medical practitioners and functionaries 122 engaged. Material dating from a later point in time and through which the thwarted ambitions of healers have to be assessed, and accessed, in a more indirect fashion do, as the subsequent chapters will show, not yield such a multifaceted abundance. These documents are indicative of healers' surroundings and they are, in wide sections, more sensitive as regards the responses to healers' activities as well as regarding the expectations held by people about healers and their activities. The 1930s was also a starting point when many healers realised that, in order to consolidate their legitimacy, they would have to request legal recognition from the state. In Weberian terminology it could be argued that healers emulated a "rule of rationality". They installed constitutional rules and regulations for their associations, introduced a hierarchy of administrative staff and regulated social relations amongst the members of the associations. This "rule" over anyone who was becoming a member of the associations was "impersonal" because members were supposed to exhibit loyalty to the constitution, not to the person of the "president". Healers' associations, in turn, submitted to the rational rule of the state, to which they offered themselves as loyal personnel, as trained and professional personnel rather than as servants, in a diversity of functions which were reviewed in this chapter. They left aside the religious and spiritual aspects of their qualification. It can be assumed that adding an extra legal strand to the legitimacy of herbalists interfered less with the self-conceptions of herbalists' healing authority than it did with the legitimacy of diviners. This period is, again, an indication of an intended professionalisation process driven by herbalists rather than diviners. Neither did the protagonists in this chapter frequently recur to the ancestors nor did they refer to the loyalty they owed to the Supreme Being, or, even more problematically, to occult powers. Whether these aspects were on the wane in the cities is difficult to prove. It was, rather, the discourse that made it appear that way. Anthropological explanations stressed the decline of the pre-occupation with belief in witchcraft in urban contexts. They drew attention to the fact that, because the urban legal system did not permit public accusation of witchcraft and retributive action, sufferers found themselves unable to do anything to counter the causes of their misfortune. As a result of this, people were observed to turn to the ancestors as the cause of their affliction.181 This may be taken as an albeit scant indication of the fact that healers did, actually, renew their role in the urban environment. It is only possible to note that in a later period and in another regional context, when the formation of the Dingaka (Traditional Healers) Society in Botswana was officially sanctioned in 1972, a comparable phenomenon was observed. In the context of the successful professionalisation of

181 Pauw, B. A. 'Ancestor Beliefs and Rituals Among Urban Africans.' African Studies 33: 2 (1974), pp. 99-111, here pp. 99-100. 123

African healers in Botswana it was noted that the badimo no longer occupied as central a position as they had commanded at a previous stage. Instead, a language of public service and of colleague relationships orientated at collegiality was emerging.182

182 Ulin, 'Traditional Healer of Botswana', p. 130. 4 Healers' Popularisation Representations of Izangoma and Izinyanga in Newspapers and Magazines

Browsing Newspapers and Magazines Successful professionalisation depended, amongst other things, upon the dissemination of ideas and values via newspapers, magazines and journals1. Producing their own journals for distribution to members, the main provincial teachers' associations, for instance, had – in the first half of the century – already established a means through which they facilitated the cultural transmission of values as much as their adaptations, which was, at that time, taking place in wider circles of the black petty bourgeoisie. The journals provided these associations with a forum for discussing the role of African traditions, history and vernaculars in black education.2 Nurses in South Africa, to take another example, subscribed to the South African Nursing Record, founded in 1913. As from 1935, the Bantu Nursing Journal was issued, concerning itself with the particular interests of the newly formed Bantu Trained Nurses' Association.3 In spite of the fact that diviners and herbalists, who, as the previous chapter showed, were prolific writers, had themselves not resorted to such a strategy. Some associations had made subscriptions to planned journals compulsory when members joined the associations but these journals, if published at all, did not leave a lasting impact – neither on the profession nor on a wider community of readers. To come devise, realise and publish their own professional journals remained for healers a problematic avenue to pursue. Around the 1970s new possibilities for achieving public attention opened up when popular magazines and newspapers developed a sustained interest in healers' activities. This occurred in parallel to an increase as regards academic interest in the role of spirit medium- ship and in the rapid growth of African independent churches. In the academic realm, these (re-)emerging movements were, to a large extent, considered in terms of a mobilisation of

1 A slightly abbreviated version of this chapter was published as Rüther, Kirsten. 'Representations of African Healers in the Popular Print Media: Inquiries into South African Understandings of Health and Popular Culture in the 1970s and 1980s', in: Falola, Toyin (ed). Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa (forthcoming). 2 Cobley, Class and Consciousness, p. 79. 3 Marks, Divided Sisterhood, pp. 78-112. 125 nationalist consciousness4 or, conversely, as a deficit with regard to that role.5 In addition, less spectacularly, the 1970s were regarded as a period in which, in more general terms, the "shades c[a]me to town."6 It became more strongly evident at that time that in urban surroundings people, prophets and healers were reasserting the aspect of ancestors in South African urban religious practice. They did this in different terms and ways, but many of them identified the ancestors as a useful device in the ordering of life, work and personal relationships, whereby this was often linked to people's efforts of achieving and maintaining health. The South African popular media was careful not to touch on political aspects in too much detail, while it presented and dealt with the topic of healers in people's everyday activities and lives. When voicing discontent, admonishing people to work together with the colonial authorities, or when encouraging resistance, prophets, mediums, diviners and other experts seldom controlled the voice of the media. Magazines and newspapers rarely acted as the mouthpiece of healers. The media, rather than providing diviners and herbalists with a platform from which they could have debated their issues in a realm or space free from official intervention, discovered in healers a prism of popular reflections about African traditions, of social change in the context of a racist society, of health, religion and a growing desire for entertainment. Magazine owners, journalists and readers participated in this process, and even healers, though to a much lesser degree, had a share in it. The magazines engaged, first and foremost, but not exclusively, the interest of a variety of mainly urban readers, and they reflected a range of topics of town and countryside. Topics that ran through informal discourse, among them a number of topics that related to healers, were suited for the articulation of an African identity appropriate for the time, and they let African people's ambitions for upward social mobility appear in a new light. Thus began, some ten years after the "making of apartheid"7, a phase in the course of which the popular print media provided healers with the opportunity to have their image rendered in a more generally understandable way, to have it commercialised and popularly acknowledged in South Africa. This was definitely a step away from any direct negotiation of a recognised role with the authorities, yet it soon turned them into more widely and more vividly debated actors of African society who

4 Lan, David. Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe. Harare 1985; Ranger, Terence. 'The Death of Chaminuka: Spirit Mediums, Nationalism and the Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe.' African Affairs 81 (1982), pp. 349-369; Anderson/ Johnson, 'Revealing Prophets', pp. 1-26. 5 Schoffeleers, Matthew. 'Ritual Healing and Political Acquiescence: The Case of the Zionist Churches in Southern Africa.' Africa 60: 1 (1991), pp. 1-25. 6 West, Martin. 'The Shades Come to Town: Ancestors and Urban Independent Churches', in: Whisson, Michael G./ West, Martin (ed). Religion and Social Change in Southern Africa. Cape Town 1975, pp. 185-206. 7 Posel, Deborah. The Making of Apartheid 1948-1961: Conflict and Compromise. Oxford 1991, 1997. 126 were regarded quite controversially. The debate was carried especially by those who were concerned about their own health. Therefore, representations of African healers in the popular print media opened up a perspective on a South African understanding of health and popular culture as both these aspects were prevalent particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. Quite generally, popular print media, magazines and newspapers, began to assume importance in conveying images, information and values to society in the 1970s. The popular print media's new role was linked to a number of commercial initiatives targeting at advertising and selling commercial products, which have been likened to a "'civilizing' project" in the "mythologized 'African market'".8 African advertising experts held the conviction that African markets did not exist per se, but that these markets were feasible and commercially possible if specific demands were created on the basis of efforts undertaken by manufacturers and parties interested in marketing products. The same concept worked, as well, as an incentive for the press market. By broadening readership bases, newspapers and magazines started fostering a sense of what it meant to be of African culture and mind. Commercially conceptualised, the main impetus of entrepreneurs aimed at "selling new ways of doing old things."9 Popular newspapers and magazines followed the same tack by starting to promote specific clusters of topics to their readers. Most magazines emerged as family magazines rather than, for instance, as publications especially targeting young people or sports enthusiasts. Religious newspapers, with rather a substantial flavour of their own, conceived of themselves as cultural brokers. Keeping pace with evolving marketing opportunities and in order to keep in touch with consumers, mainstream newspapers almost always included a substantial number of responses to tastes and topics from the perspective of their readers. Bilingual magazines and newspapers in English and African languages, again distinct in their style, aimed at improving their readers' language skills. From today's point of view, all these print media are interesting sources for social analysis because they capture the existing social dynamics and, of particular interest for this study, the dominating attitudes towards healers' multifaceted activities. In South Africa, where a wide range of popular and commercial print media contributed to the making of news and to the generation of opinions about healers and their craft, the 1970s constituted a formative period. Readerships were principally defined in racial terms. The popular press, notwithstanding, engaged in vibrant discourses which often cut across

8 Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women. Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. London 1996, p. 126. 9 Maroun, J. E. 'Second Addresss, Bantu Market Session', in: Third Advertising Convention in South Africa. The Challenge of a Decade. Johannesburg 1960, pp. 124-125, quoted in Burke, Lifebuoy Men, p. 127. 127 rigidly defined boundaries of class, religion, and ethnicity.10 In scholarly debates, the role of the alternative and English-language press has, for rather a long time-span, commanded interest and has been the basis for numerous assessments.11 Furthermore, the international media's treatment of South Africa received attention.12 More recent studies on South African media have begun to include popular genres, providing a particular focus on TV, radio and film.13 Analyses of the role of the popular press, however, have remained almost negligible in their number. Representations of izangoma and izinyanga went virtually unnoticed by the academic community, maybe in parts because there was an uneasy feel about the topic due to the fact that the apartheid state manipulated so many notions of African traditions and of their transformation. Yet, as a matter of fact, the print media popularised notions of healing, and over time the popular images of healing impacted upon the profession, its reputation, and its recognition. Consequently, in many ways, healers' popularisation emerged as an alternative scenario to healers' attempts at professionalisation which had dominated previous decades. Bona Magazine, Drum, Echo, Ilanga, UmAfrika and the Weekend World, the newspapers under review in this chapter, addressed African readers. They were not necessarily designed and produced by Africans, and yet they became transparent voices because their debates reached out to a wide and interested, even though particularly defined, readership. They provided protected platforms for debate, as it would have been unusual in South Africa's segregationist climate if many non-African readers had browsed through the papers.14 While Bona and Drum were published as monthly magazines, Echo, Ilanga, UmAfrika and the Weekend World were newspapers which, independently or in conjunction with their mother publications, appeared either on a weekly of fortnightly basis. Employing a combination of text and image, these publications addressed a multitude of readers bringing glamour and excitement into squalid homes, and inspiring the socially ambitious. They turned private

10 Switzer, Les. The Black Press in South Africa and Lesotho: A Descriptive Bibliographic Guide to African, Coloured and Indian Newspapers, Newsletters and Magazines 1836-1976. Boston 1979; Tomaselli, Keyan/ Tomaselli, Ruth/ Muller, Johan (ed). The Press in South Africa. Bellville 1987; Tomaselli, Keyan/ Louw, Eric (ed). The Alternative Press in South Africa. Bellville 1991. 11 Switzer, Les. '"Image and Reality": A Critique of South Africa's English-Language Press.' Rhodes University Journalism Review (1995), pp. 17-19; Petersmann, Sandra. 'The English-Language Press in South Africa on Key Issues of the Apartheid Regime: The Dilemma between Fundamental Critique and Immanent Opposition. (M. A. thesis, University of Hannover, 1997); Switzer, Les/ Adhikari, Mohamed (ed). South Africa's Resistance Press: Alternative Voices in the Last Generation under Apartheid. Athens, Ohio 2001. 12 Sanders, James. South Africa and the International Media 1972-1979: A Struggle for Representation. London 2000. 13 Teer-Tomaselli, Ruth. 'Introduction: Shifting Spaces: Popular Culture and National Identity.' Critical Arts 11: 1-2 (1997), pp. i-xv; Gunner, Liz. 'Wrestling with the Present, Beckoning to the Past: Contemporary Zulu Radio Drama.' Journal of Southern African Studies 26: 2 (2000), pp. 223-237. 14 People in the library still found it strange that I – as a white person – was reading Bona Magazine in the Natal Society Library in Pietermaritzburg. In supermarkets and stationary stores, when I bought current issues of the magazine, people often wondered what I wanted to do with an African magazine. 128 homes and private affairs into public, and sometimes representative, images of social advance and racial order. They proved lucrative for their owners – who were not African. Bona and Drum were the two magazines which most successfully appealed to a trans- local readership in Anglophone Africa. Bona was owned by Perskor, the publishing house of the Transvaal members of the National Party. In 1956, the magazine was first published in Zulu, and a few years later it started already to appear in Xhosa and Sotho/ Tswana as well. In 1964, the English edition was launched to turn the publication into an educational and culturally stimulating mouthpiece of the government. This was, as well, the point in time when readers in other African countries were attracted as readers as well. After a restructuring of the publishing houses, Bona was transferred to Republican Press in 1983. Readership numbers in South Africa had soared to an impressive 3.39 million in 1986. Thus the magazine, headquartered in Durban, was the most widely consumed print item at the time, and has been able to retain this eminent position to this day.15 It commanded one third of the black readership towards the end of the 1990s.16 Bona was a family magazine and appealed to men and women alike, to younger and more mature readers, and to people with different educational attainments. Owned by the state, it influenced and in parts manipulated with notions of African culture and tradition, but it seems as if readers were able to derive from the messages conveyed by the magazine information and inspiration about life-styles which where, nonetheless, independent of the government's views and stances. Bona became successful as a result of its "black" image, and because it suggested that it was not designed for Europeans. The magazine Drum, based in Johannesburg, belonged to Nasionale Pers and targeted readers aged between 16 and 24. When Drum was banned between 1965 and 1968 it appeared as a fortnightly supplement in the Golden City Post. By the 1970s Drum had very essentially changed from the magazine it used to be in its foundational period some twenty years earlier. Drum went with the times and catered for urban tastes. "Originally the content was tribalistic and conservative in tone, but that changed when Sampson realised that jazz, sports, girls, violence and politics were of far more interest than Basuto blankets and outdated rituals."17 Famous for its catch-all editorial policy, it offered its readers a mixture of entertainment, sports, letters to the editor and political news concerning Africans in Africa and in the United States. It had regular advice columns and was a medium through which readers sought

15 Rüther, Kirsten. 'Communicating Issues of Human Concern: Bona Magazine and the Creation of a Site for the Discussion of African Culture and Religion, c. 1970-1990', in: Mitchell, Gordon/ Mullen, Eve (ed). Religion and the Political Imagination in a Changing South Africa, Münster 2002, pp. 57-72, here p. 59. 16 Bertelsen, Eve. 'Ads and Amnesia: Black Advertising in the New South Africa', in: Nuttall, Sarah/ Coetzee, Carli (ed). Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Oxford 1998, pp. 221-241, here p. 229. 17 Addison, Graeme. 'Drum Beat: An Examination of Drum.' Speak 1: 3 (1978), pp. 4-9. 129 pen friends. As much as in Bona Magazine advertising represented an important source of revenue and they had, at the same time, an additional function: ads communicated information and life-style, and promoted a "mission of civilization" of their own.18 Comparable to Bona, Drum focused on ordinary Africans, and responded to their interests, concerns and ambitions. Like many magazines, they appealed especially to new readerships in urban and township areas.19 Ilanga and UmAfrika were Zulu newspapers. Ilanga, based in Durban since 1903 and the oldest Zulu newspaper in the country, was transferred to Inkatha in 1987, whereas UmAfrika, established in 1910 as Izindaba Zabantu, remained the independent newspaper of the Catholic Mission at Marianhill. Ilanga had originally emerged as a publication appealing to the nascent Zulu petty bourgeoisie.20 Echo, the Thursday supplement of the Natal Witness and issued in Pietermaritzburg, published news in English and Zulu. In 1987 a print run amounted to some 45,000 copies of which 16,000 copies were distributed for free.21 The Weekend World was a popular newspaper operating mainly from Johannesburg since 1932. It was regarded as a trend setter in the shift from an elite to a mass audience.22 Until 1976, it had a reputation for reporting along the lines of "soccer, sex and sin". With the beginning of the Soweto Uprisings it adopted an unequivocally political stance and was subsequently banned.23 Healing was a topic which sometimes proved difficult for journalists to research. And even though the popular print media tended to thrive on the sensationalist, healers and their activities were far more than just medially exaggerated events. More often, healers proved to be topics that were appropriate for popular media coverage. On the strength of the continuity in medial coverage of topics that related to healers' activities these stories have turned into a source that assists the historian to unravel a discourse that clearly transcended the rigid boundaries of the sphere of the media. The journalism of the popular print media remained largely unchanged when political events in the country indicated those major changes that were taking place in South Africa. Outstanding events such as the Soweto Uprisings in 1976, the declaration of the state of emergency in 1985, or the lifting of the ban imposed on the

18 Burke, Lifebuoy Men, pp. 125-165. 19 Mutongi, Kenda. '"Dear Dolly's" Advice: Representations of Youth, Courtship, and Sexualities in Africa, 1960-1980.' International Journal of African Historical Studies 33: 1 (2000), pp. 1-24, here pp. 1-2. 20 Hunt Davis, R. Jr. '"Oude maniki!": John L. Dube, Pioneer Editor of Ilanga lase Natal', in: Switzer, Les (ed). South Africa's Alternative Press: Voices of Protest and Resistance, 1880s-1960s. Cambridge 1997, pp. 83-98. 21 Echo 21.05.1987. 22 Switzer, Les. 'Bantu World and the Origins of a Captive African Commercial Press', in: Switzer, Les (ed). South Africa's Alternative Press: Voices of Protest and Resistance, 1880s-1960s. Cambridge 1997, pp. 189- 207. 23 Petersmann, 'English-Language Press'. 130

ANC in 1990, or the first democratic elections in 1994 did not usually result in significant ruptures of the discourse under way. And yet it will be important to read the popular discourse against the background of such events.

More than Transformation into a Commodity: Healers in Bona Magazine, 1979-1986 The emergence of a newly visible debate about healers occurred during a period when the overt articulation of politically critical attitudes did quite easily result in repression from the state. While many were carefully vigilant as to what they said, it seemed much less problematic to put forward an opinion about South Africa's healers. The government-owned Bona Magazine started to promote concise views about healers, and thereby launched a controversy over some of the cultural and national values of the time. Readers were anything but naive consumers of this campaign. They were well aware and knew that the look-and- read-style publication, by and large, acted as the mouthpiece of the government in dishing out the nationalists' ideologies and by trying to contribute to their euphemistic implementation among the African population.24 And yet people enjoyed the magazine for the entertainment it offered, and because it suggested to people how to do traditional things in a new style. Bona was, though, not exclusively dedicated to entertainment. For many years Bona was even regarded an educational magazine and distributed at schools free of charge.25 Officially, it claimed to be apolitical, avoiding critical remarks about government politics and defining its policy as to "tackle life in a positive and constructive way ... in this sad but beautiful land."26 Bona Magazine concentrated on the so-called bright side of life, and editors continued to emphasise the possibilities that the apartheid government held in store for Africans who showed positive commitment to the state as it was. Propaganda intermingled and even merged with informative sections and entertainment. Loyal to the government and conservative in nature, teeming with illustrations and directed at a mass readership, Bona specialised in dealing with "human concerns": journalists wrote about issues that people encountered in their daily lives. Among a multitude of topics their stories also featured izangoma and izinyanga, figures with which Bona Magazine intended to entertain, educate and challenge its readers.

24 For background information see Muller, Johan. 'Press Houses at War: A Brief History of Nasionale Pers and Perskor', in: Tomaselli, Keyan/ Tomaselli, Ruth/ Muller, Johan (ed). The Press in South Africa London 1987, pp. 118-140. 25 Switzer, Black Press, p. 100. 26 Bona, March 1986, pp. 23, 25. 131

131

Towards the end of the 1970s Bona launched an initiative that aimed at transforming izangoma into symbols which were designed to encourage Africans to relocate themselves in tradition and in politically distinct structures. On parallel discourse levels Bona presented two types of izangoma, which had not occupied a place in previous discourse scenarios. One of these types appeared to be grass-roots based and easily accessible, the other commanded a more sinister reputation and was linked to a positive assessment of African political elites loyal to the apartheid government. Both types, each in its own way, conveyed or transported ideas about discipline and social coherence, and were designed to stimulate accordance, rather than critical engagement, with social realities. The presentation of these new types of izangoma soon provoked controversial debate among Bona's growing readership. In June 1979, several Bona readers expressed their annoyance regarding a fellow reader, one Virginia A. Mbhele, who some months previously had criticised a "witchdoctor". They suspected her of having visited the doctor herself to get rich and now, as expressed in the letter of George Tshabalala from Trichardt, accused her openly of denigrating the whole profession as a result of her disappointment which probably arose because the treatment she had received had not brought about the desired wealth. This outraged one healer, Stuurman Skhosana from Nebo, to such an extent that in his letter to the editor he called her a "disgrace to your nation".27 He scolded her for ignoring the differences in legitimacy between genuine and fake healers, one of the yet again recurring tropes in the discourse about healers. The readers' critical assessment of healing reflected a view which Bona Magazine had counteracted in the same issue as, concomitantly in the March edition, "Minah Molebo Moleko, beautiful Sangoma" emerged.28

Illustration 14: Mina Molebo Moleko, Beautiful Sangoma, Bona (March 1979), photographer: Jenny Ntuli

27 Bona (June 1979), p. 4. 28 Nomsa, Maggie. 'Meet Minah Moleko Molebo, Beautiful Sangoma.' Bona (March 1979), pp. 74-77. 132

Symbolising the beauty and complexity of an all-encompassing African culture, and harmoni- ously blending tradition and modern times, she represented the first of the two new types of healers. Minah Molebo Moleko was presented as a young woman who, for part of the week, assisted a manufacturer's representative and who, from Friday to Sunday, devoted herself to her call as isangoma. The article wanted this modern, attractive and friendly woman, 28 years of age, to be understood and regarded as the embodiment of a new African self-confidence. In many ways Minah Molebo Moleko was an average woman just as much as many of the magazine's readers. In addition, she engaged in a profession many Africans associated with backwardness, secrecy and the misuse of power. As a figure, Minah Molebo Moleko transcended this stigmatising stereotype. Her pursuit of two part-time careers, one occupational and the other cultural, seemed to offer a solution to a predicament that she shared with a vast group of women, black and white, in South Africa.29 She pursued an urban life, and in her story, the way in which she blended professional work and her healing commitment was more important than the spiritual side of her activities. Neither her initiation path nor the techniques through which she communicated with her ancestors, tropes that commanded much interest in academic discourse, were mentioned. Instead, Minah Molebo Moleko embodied urban ambitions, and was stylised as a person who had successfully negotiated her place in society. She could easily be read as a belated recognition of the black urban presence as much as an attempt to expand and co-opt a black, skilled middle and working class. The message about this healer was that Minah Molebo Moleko successfully made sense of her African heritage, and did not use her African consciousness to stand up against given realities. Several articles of similar tendency followed. They depicted women who devoted their lives to the maintenance of African culture in present times.30 After several such features some Bona readers voiced their concern:

We have had three sangomas on the cover page in about ten months, yet being a sangoma is not something we look up to! These sangomas lower the dignity of Bona! […] Mr Editor, not all societies are interested in sangoma practices. In some areas a sangoma is looked down upon as a very primitive person who has whims, fancies and imaginations. […] We would like to have more on education, culture, money-making, saving, courtesy, sport and addresses of bursary sponsors rather than sangomas. I mean they don't take us any farther than we really are.31

Resolutely and determinedly, the writer of this letter argued against the notion that African culture was something that related to traditions, and a culture, modern people, educated

29 It was not unusual that a healer would work part-time. Even though I am not aware of any study of the social origins of healers, or their occupational background, it has been observed more generally that healers often have a second job, or respectively, that healing is their second job. See also Iliffe, East African Doctors, p. 10. 30 Mtetwa, Jake. 'Secrets of a Sangoma!' Bona (March 1980), pp. 166-171, quote p. 168. 31 Bona (August 1980), p. 4. 133

Africans and most probably white people as well associated with backwardness and a peculiar Africanness. Many readers of the magazine stressed that they wanted to be "pepped up with ambition",32 and healers clearly contradicted the values of the socially aspiring. To portray divination and healers' activities as part of African culture was interpreted by Bona readers as tarnishing them with a stigma which they bluntly rejected. They wanted information, entertainment and general instructions, directed at preparing Africans for the future. The activities of izangoma fitted into neither of these categories and, consequently, a large number of readers were not interested – neither in the maintenance nor in the revival of this feature of African culture. For them divination and taking herbs probably were, at least in their openly voiced views and on an outwardly directed level, an inappropriate way of producing the truth in African people's lives. Bona editors awarded the letter a prize, reminding their readers that editions with izangoma on the cover page, however controversial, always sold best.33 Their market value for boosting the circulation reserved and safeguarded healers a permanent place in the magazine. Hence, even though many readers would have liked to see other topics being addressed, readers were presented with images of herbalists and diviners and thus challenged into engaging in a debate. Issues of healers' legitimacy and the denial of their appropriateness in the modern age always formed part of that discussion. The tendency towards the definition of both izangoma and izinyanga as a commercial profession raised less of a concern. It was assumed that health practitioners and tellers of truth demanded a fair payment. It was never commented on in much detail. Moreover, it has been observed that newspapers and magazines of that period created needs rather than dealt with pre-existing "real" needs.34 Popular media, in particular, provided their readers with "aspired-to" states of affairs.35 This was a good reason why readers, who wished a truthful and accurate representation of their "human concerns", responded and alerted editors and magazine producers to the fact that from an informed perspective, African needs and tastes required a different representation. In addition to the first type of izangoma, who was portrayed as popular and easily accessible, Bona launched a second type. This type conveyed the idea that a sustained confidence in divination would underpin a stable African national identity. It was a politically significant type because the healers portrayed in this category lent their expertise, their power and their charisma to the government, to some ancient chiefs, or to some other political authority, and they did so in exchange for considerable autonomy in the field of divination. In

32 Bona (July 1977), p. 4. 33 ibid. 34 Burke, Lifebuoy Men, pp. 125-165. 35 Laden, Sonja. 'Middle-Class Matters, or, How to Keep Whites Whiter, Colours Brighter and Blacks Beautiful.' Critical Arts 11: 1-2 (1997), pp. 120-141, here p. 125. 134

Bona's double edition of June/ July 1979 the magazine covered a story about the collaboration between a chief, a diviner and the Chief Minister of the Ciskei. The joint effort of these people to bring back the bones of a "lost Xhosa hero" allegedly contributed to the national unity of an ethnically diverse polity.36 A chief of the Xhosa, Lent Maqoma, had searched for six years for the bones of his warrior ancestor. He knew that about hundred years previously the British had taken his forefather captive and imprisoned him on Robben Island. He was uncertain, however, where exactly his ancestor had died or where his bones and spirit abode. In 1977 Chief Lent Maqoma approached Charity Sonandi, a Catholic diviner. In a vision she received information about the whereabouts of her client's forefather's bones. The story bore political implications because it appeared to be a parallel scenario to African people's opposition to the creation of the Ciskei homeland. Lennox Sebe, Chief Minister of the Ciskei, faced opposition from Xhosa and non-Xhosa people who wanted to be citizens of South Africa rather than re-tribalised Bantu. Bona Magazine attributed this to the lack of a national identity among the Xhosa and suggested the installation of a traditional symbol around which Xhosa identity would crystallise. Chief Minister Lennox Sebe supported the search for Chief Lent Maqoma's ancestor's bones and considered the arrangement of a state funeral. Meanwhile Lent Maqoma and Charity Sonandi had found the bones on Robben Island. Now they had to be moved to the Ciskei where their new burial place was intended to be. The British government flatly refused to transport back the coffin. Finally the South African government stepped in, provided a navy warship and made sure the Xhosa hero's remains returned to their allegedly proper place of belonging. In the history of the Ciskei homeland, this event formed part of a larger "orchestrating [of] symbols and national unity".37 Running parallel to the reburial of Xhosa bones, Mfengu memorial days became banned, and symbols of Ciskei unity were established instead. Charity Sonandi was but one cog in the wheel. She was loyal to the political powers that be and through her activities helped redirect the formulation of African identity where the people who did not want to become citizens of the Ciskei opposed the concept and the very reality of Bantustans. In this process, some healers were closely aligned with chiefs and helped consolidate their power. The main goal of the magazine owners was to instill a culturally imagined, politically consolidating sense of coherence. The magazine repeated the pattern of the Ciskei story when, in 1984, they wrote about the relation of the historical Zulu king Shaka to the izangoma of his kingdom. It was told that he had summoned them and submitted them to a ritual of

36 'And the spirit did speak.' Bona (June 1979), pp. 14-18, 42-43, and Bona (July 1979), pp. 14-18, 21-21, 149. 37 Hodgson, Janet. 'Ntaba kaNdoda: Orchestrating Symbols for National Unity in Ciskei.' Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 58 (1987), pp. 18-31. 135 control in the process of strengthening and reinforcing his own power. According to the story, many allegedly fake izangoma were killed, and Shaka consolidated his reputation as a powerful king.38 As one follows the argument of the magazine, healers were deemed important not only for the preservation of a supposedly genuine African culture but also as a traditionalised backbone of weakly legitimated African polities. Chiefs in need of power required izangoma, a powerful king such as Shaka did not. Moreover, izangoma were re- introduced as collaborators of "big men" who in a long process of colonial subjugation had ceased to be such. Readers did not even once respond to this suggestion. Their silence may be read as an indication of how little scope there was for political controversy whereas in terms of culture people did want to have a say. The healers themselves were presented with an indirect opportunity to reshape their image. Journalists in their quest if not hunt for expert or insider knowledge interviewed healers more often than their clientele, patients or kin. And yet, healers did not manage to form a clearly defined interest-group capable of articulating their views and positions on the pages of the magazine. Against the background of tightened spatial segregation, homeland independence, enhanced militarisation, intensive policing, and mounting popular struggle Bona for many years determined the messages the magazine wished to convey about healers. Journalists and editors resolutely revived the focus on izangoma and promoted an affirmative image of "Bantu" culture and belief. Over time, readers started to appreciate the detailed information they obtained about izangoma, their areas of specialisation and their places of residence. Sometimes readers asked questions about the relation of izangoma to Christianity, and they often reminded the magazine to mention addresses and telephone numbers of the portrayed healers.39 They remained silent when it came to healers who acted according to a political design. Seen in context, Bona Magazine was in the forefront of promoting and furthering the emergence of healers in positive terms at yet another critical phase in South Africa's history. In the long run the magazine determined some important patterns regarding healers' representation, an unprecedented process in South African history, and thus contributed to their renewed surfacing in public.

38 Mokoena, Ally. 'The Brave Sangoma.' Bona (March 1984), pp. 16-17; Mokoena, Ally. 'The Return of the Snakes.' Bona (June 1985), pp. 26-27 did not receive direct comment. 39 Bona (November 1983), pp. 6-7; Bona (May 1985), pp. 6-7; Bona (July 1986), pp. 6-7. 136

Representation in Tabloids The concept of representation is, in fact, a useful hermeneutical device which assists the understanding of the dynamics of a process in the course of which newspapers and magazines constructed a medial image of healers and their activities. The magazines and newspapers brought into existence, in tabloid format, something that had previously been absent in the media or which, at best, had appeared sporadically and had been unrelated to any contexts. When the print media started to cover healers and their activities, they media re-presented persons and activities, in the sense that they made visible again people and a craft that were in dire need of being transferred from one level of presence, namely that of an unrecognised and informal social agency in everyday life, to another level, namely that of official or at least semi-official debate. On a primarily descriptive and symbolic level, newspapers and magazines introduced a representational scheme which assumed a particular shape in words and images.40 They verbally portrayed, declared, set forth and exhibited to other minds in language and in images a topic almost everybody had at least some familiarity with. The images employed marked, at times, a tendency to command and compel the readers' attention rather than to encourage them to reflect the transformations African culture was undergoing. This probably accounted for many of the letters to the editor which readers had composed as reflective responses to what the print media had put up for debate while, at the same time, readers often handed in photographs of themselves to prove who they were. Through the letters to the editor readers tried to readjust the picture of the transformations of African culture, as they themselves interpreted them. Through the media's interest in healers and their activities, the craft received, first and foremost, descriptive representation.41 For the first time ever, magazines and newspapers described, to a growing audience, what people had previously talked about only informally, what they seemed to know anyway, or what they had pushed aside as far as possible in their own lives. From the tabloids, sometimes presented as accurate reflections, sometimes rendered as exaggerated scoops, readers could gather information. Complex pictures of a craft and its place in society were intentionally reflected upon. Naturally, the complex pictures needed more than merely some description, and hence, it does not come as a surprise that the popular print media worked, in addition, with symbolic representations.42 Certain famous persons, men and women, white and black healers alike, were turned into symbols of the

40 For a general discussion see Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley 1972. 41 ibid., pp. 60-91. 42 ibid., pp. 92-111. 137 profession. In their symbolic function they were less a source of information than objects of feelings, markers of an assumed cultural resource in South Africa. From the folio of tabloid representations, this particular emerging amalgamation of reporting and readers' response, it became possible to read popular attitudes towards important aspects of culture and material reality, health and religion, as well as of variants of South African people's self-understandings towards these. Stories concerning themselves with healers suggested that they were about healers and their craft which, in fact, they were. At the same time, the representations were even more indicative of people's attitudes than about healing itself. Healing actually became visible in the magazines, and through it, popular attitudes towards health and culture appeared fractionated – just like in a prism. This did not immediately impact on the profession. It is even probable that many healers felt misrepre- sented because accurate descriptions of their work and the original voices of their clientele did not reach the pages of the print media in the way that they would have expected.43 Journalists may have produced misleading statements and allegations about healers' activities, and hence, healers of various kinds may not have acknowledged the sample chosen for publication as giving information that was either typical or adequate or sufficient. In general, however, one may assume that even though driven only marginally by healers themselves, their popularised description and interpretation would have benefited their cause over the years, especially as some representatives of their profession were virtually turned into much admired symbols. In a discursive setting where, from official sides, healers were denied any participation in medical discourse, where religious discourse effectively marginalized them, and where they themselves did not command the medial means to argue against their stigmatisation, media discourse, tricky as it was, provided a platform from which healers and their activities were communicated in a reciprocating way. Debates about them came to enjoy some degree of official connotation as they were no longer exclusively confined to the settings of informal discourse and common knowledge. Through media interference, at least some healers could launch their ambitions via an alternative mass medial setting. All in all, images, reflections and portraits developed into an amalgamation of descriptive and symbolic representations which the ensuing section of this chapter will focus on in more detail. The question will have to be answered, in the remainder of this chapter, whether their representations opened up a window for public recognition which healers yearned for so desperately. The gradual development of a popular discourse on healers, since the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, went unnoticed by large parts of the dominant discursive groups in

43 Mansusu Mkhulize and Baba Ngubane, [Bulwer], with Nokhaya Makiwane, 23.08.2000. 138

South Africa. This is reflected in academic analyses which have never stumbled across the topic. The situation in the country did, indeed, demand an analytical focus upon the political aspects of the print media's development and, as a result, studies primarily concentrated on the media's direct interventions with politics.44 It was assumed, out of a feeling of commonsense, that popular media contributed little or nothing to bringing about change. The history of popular media in African countries has, as a consequence, until recently remained decidedly sketchy in nature.45 It focuses on case studies rather than theoretical explorations, while methodological approaches are designed in close relation to the particular source material. And yet popular media discourse and political discourse intersected. Newspapers and magazines of tabloid format did not bring about change but they engaged South Africans in a discourse about society, its past and its visions of the future, albeit on a different level and on one that was not always considered sophisticated. As the Bona case study exemplified, popular media, especially if owned by nationalists and groups who wished to instruct their readership in specific political opinions, designed "creative ideological interventions."46 South African politicians' primary field of ideological intervention certainly fell in the arena of political discourse, but they also knew that different, subjected and opposing representational arenas existed in their country which were worth keeping an eye upon. Marginalized discursive communities may not have commanded the means, or the interest, to interfere with dominant discourse arenas. Yet people in power may have had the wish to control these communities, at least partially, so-to-speak as a component of a larger discursive setting in the country, to make sure that, for instance, in the realm of popular discourse, meanings and visions would not develop completely untouched by the grand political designs. Popular cultural articulations and genres may have generated more indirect forms of expressing

44 Mukasa, Stanford D. 'Press and Politics in Zimbabwe.' African Studies Quarterly 7: 1-2 [online] URL: http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v7/v7i2a9.htm]; Odhiambo. Lewis O. 'The Media Environment in Kenya.' African Studies 61: 2 (2002), pp. 295-318 Miescher, Giorgio. 'The Political Significance of the Press and Public Radio (NBC) in Post-Colonial Namibia.' BAB Working Paper 2. Basel 1999; Abuogo, John Baptist/ Mutere, Absalom Aggrey. The History of the Press in Kenya. Nairobi 1988; Agbaje, Adigun A. B. The Nigerian Press, Hegemony and the Social Construction of Legitimacy, 1960-1983. Lewiston 1992; Cavanagh, Kevin. 'Freeing the Pan-African News Agency.' Journal of Modern African Studies 27: 2 (1989), pp. 353-365; Chick, John D. 'Cecil King, the Press and Politics in West Africa.' Journal of Modern African Studies 34: 3 (1996), pp. 375-393; Chick, John D. 'Cecil King, the Press and Politics in West Africa.' Journal of Modern African Studies 34: 3 (1996), pp. 375-393; Heuva, William. Media and Resistance Politics: The Alternative Press in Namibia, 1960-1990. Basel 2000. 45 See, for instance, the few pages in Wittmann, Frank 'Breaking the Taboos: The Senegalese Tabloid Press as a Motor for Social Change', in: Beck, Rose Marie/ Wittmann, Frank (ed). African Media Cultures: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Köln 2004, pp. 43-58. 46 Eley, 'Nations, Publics', p. 294. 139 political stances in societies where instability and violent upheaval made political institutions fragile or undemocratic.47 Popular media discourse accounted for alternative narratives on African society, albeit unrecognised, albeit fractured and albeit with only little impact only upon dominant discursive scenarios. And yet they added to a setting that was not exclusively driven by participants who were dominating the discourse. Popular media discourse retreated from the grand and immediately powerful narratives, and yet remained a crucial arena of representation, agency and mediation.48 As a consequence of the development of urban and metropolitan centres, the press mediated urban experiments together with styles and, at the same time, inspired the emergence of urban life styles. Magazines and newspapers offered fragments of various events and developments in the cities, and thus contributed to an urban discourse that operated in two dimensions: the popular medial discourse was fractured and complementary at the same time. It could be labelled as "progressive" and "modern" because it showed how people broke with traditional life styles and created new options of life. It reconciled diverse features of an emerging popular mass culture and was, therefore, a discourse aimed at presenting an image of a consensual public sphere, which provided room for many varieties of life, experience and culture. To new urbanites popular newspapers and magazines offered orientations in a novel and unfamiliar environment.49 And, as a proof of existing differences, they could be taken back to the rural areas, where migrants were urged to tell what life was like in the towns. As has been mentioned before, the representations may not have been the real thing. And yet, what was represented existed in the real world.50 Popular discourse about healers may not have acted on behalf of them, but it accounted for them in the sense that it stood for them, on a descriptive as well as on a symbolic level. Out of this, healers and their activities were not represented as they existed originally in the real world and, for the readers, the stories about them therefore gave rise to problems regarding truth, falsity or distortion. Yet popular media discourse was always about "things that matter(ed) to people" and which required debate within a "knowledgeable community".51 This, in turn, gave marginalized participants in African society a scope to articulate concerns because they, as members of the

47 Kaarsholm/ James, 'Popular Culture', pp. 189-208. 48 Teer-Tomaselli, 'Introduction', pp. i-xv. 49 Rogers, Geraldine. 'Caras y Caretas en la ciudad miscelánea de 1900: afinidades de un semanario popular con el espacio urbano de Buenos Aires.' Iberoamericana 14: 4 (2004), pp. 29-45. 50 Goody, Jack. Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence Towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality. Oxford 1997, p. 8. 51 Barber, Karin. 'Introduction', in: Barber, Karin (ed). Readings in African Popular Culture. Bloomington 1997, pp. 8-12. 140 knowledgeable community, could not be cheated, nor could they be rendered passive. Discursive interference into medial messages and theatrical performances were not a peculiar feature of the dynamics of representation in South African tabloids but worked in other countries with other discursive settings as well. Vampire stories from a Ugandan village, for instance, could be a means to talk about undue enrichment, then to be turned into comment on royal politics otherwise silenced in the English-language press, and thus act to discipline local royal officials.52 In Zambia, it has been argued, popular media provided discursive platforms for the acquisition of a common vocabulary which could not have been stimulated elsewhere.53 In Nigeria, it appears that reports about witchcraft and other supernatural activities were part and parcel of the steady diet of the popular press, yet local charms and shrines were read about with great affection but little reverence.54 In the popular media, in particular, representation implied a relation between the represented and the presenters. Images and representations of izangoma involved a variety of producers such as healers themselves, journalists, owners of the magazines, and especially readers. They all belonged, with different functions, intents and interests, to the knowledgeable community, and without them the activities of healers could not have been elected a topic of permanent presence in the magazines. Letters to the editor revealed insights into the ways readers adopted and worked with the newspapers' and magazines' messages. These letters were another aspect of the participatory nature of the newspapers, and have been utilised as sources for historical investigation by others as well.55 Moreover, consumers' buying behaviour directly impacted on marketing strategies. And all the time readers remained selective. Many of them picked out the improvement which even popular media were thought to provide.56 Ideas of improvement were also always a component of the stories that related to healing. In many African countries Europeans and Africans read different magazines and hence, made up different constituencies of readers.57 One should be cautious, however, to read responses by African readers to African magazines as unrelated to the broader medial sphere in which opinions formed.

52 White, Luise. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley 2000, p. 268. 53 Mutongi, 'Dear Dolly's Advice'. 54 Bastian, Misty L. '"Bloodhounds Who Have No Friends": Witchcraft and Locality in the Nigerian Popular Press', in: Comaroff, Jean/ Comaroff, John (ed). Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago 1993, pp. 129-166. 55 Iliffe, East African Doctors, p. 55ff. 56 Ambler, Charles. 'Mass Media and Leisure in Africa.' International Journal of African Historical Studies 35: 1 (2002), pp. 119-136. 57 Kallmann, Deborah. 'Projected Moralities, Engaged Anxieties: Northern Rhodesia's Reading Publics, 1953- 1964.' International Journal of African Historical Studies 32: 1 (1999), pp. 71-117. 141

Important as readers' involvement with issues of representation are it is, however, difficult to structure a methodological design which would revolve stringently around readers' interest and readers' strategies as regards the consumption of popular print media. We know that readers' contributions often appeared significantly later than the articles they commented upon. Readers sometimes referred to articles or previous letters to the editor, which in some instances had been published months before. It is also difficult to relate readers' opinions to their social backgrounds, their concrete desire for upward social mobility, or their wider attitudes towards the achievement of health. The writers and the more general characteristics of their letters can no longer be traced nor can the original letters. Newspapers and magazines did not file this type of document in their archives. African readerships and audiences remain intrinsically difficult to reconstruct because, first and foremost, in many African countries the reading of newspapers and magazines has remained a public event, an event in which many partake through reading aloud, mimicking, boasting and showing off, debating and colouring stories with local tastes and vocabulary.58 In other equally indicative cases, magazines which were sold across many cities indicate trans-local reading communities which are equally difficult to reconstruct. We simply lack the data required to design an approach that takes, as its starting point, readers' tastes. What we can do, however, is to take into consideration the sketchy evidence that is available when it comes to the readers' points and opinions and use this to adjust our interpretations of a topic's representation in newspapers and magazines. Tabloids constructed narratives about healers, narratives which unfolded according to a pattern which, at the same time, contributed to a pattern. These medial patterns did not write history, but they contributed to a complex web of clues towards an early interpretation of events.59 Media narratives as a source for historical interpretation are reliable material because, by their conservative nature, they produce or stay within the framework of stereotypes and standardised representations. The narratives are interrupted by "rare but significant adjustments", which act as a frame and an outlet for a "traditional image repertoire".60 The multitude of articles on healers which emerged in South Africa right across a huge landscape of popular media provided such a narrative that created a fragmented, yet historically informative perspective on the significance of healers' activities as well as on popular attitudes towards health in South Africa. The time-span roughly between roughly the mid-

58 Bastian, 'Bloodhounds'; White, Vampires, pp. 250-255; Hofmeyr, Isabel. '"Wailing For Purity": Oral Studies in Southern African Studies.' African Studies 54: 2 (1995), pp. 16-31, here p. 22; Kallmann, 'Projected Moralities'. 59 Sanders, James. South Africa and the International Media 1972-1979: A Struggle for Representation. London 2000, pp. 6-13. 60 ibid., p. 13. 142

1970s and up to the early 1990s formed such a period, during which as regards healers and their activities, a shift of representation took place at the beginning, which subsequently developed into stereotypes and standards. While efforts towards professionalisation were laid to rest for the time being, the popularisation of their image helped to re-introduce healers, albeit in a mediated form, into the public debate. And people's attitudes towards health were given a platform. Around the mid-1990s, again, another "rare but significant adjustment" took place which will be considered in chapter 7.

Apartheid's Underground: Health and Popular Culture Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s health and religion were two important social fields, and two of the most intimate areas of personal experience. Within these healers unfolded their activities in response to people's experiences of pain, recovery, relief and well- being, and they worked to back up people's spiritual condition, particularly in order to fulfil people's expectations of truth. When popular magazines and newspapers discovered healers as a regular topic for the reading market, they transposed many people's personal experiences and, one cannot emphasise this often enough, their expectations of truth. Experiences as much as expectations were brought from the hidden realms to the fore of descriptive and symbolic representations, and thus expanded on, or played with, some of the major tropes of the topic which then had for a long while been in existence. This sold copies, and it reflected upon the conditions people struggled with in their daily affairs. To understand the peculiarities and the attractiveness of the discourse to which the popular media and their constituencies of readers turned and in order to see which of the older tropes were consolidated into a discourse concurrent with the times, a brief recapitulation of its immediate origins may be useful. Before Bona Magazine embarked on firming up and working out more distinctly the image of izangoma and izinyanga, it had talked about healers cursorily and without clearly directed intentions. Conspicuous for their ideological function, many newspapers and magazines used to instruct their African readers on how to behave vis-à-vis the state. Articles encouraged readers to co-operate with the police. The Soweto Uprisings of 1976 marked momentous change. While some magazines abstained from reporting the events, others became involved and risked being banned. While some magazines abstained from reporting the events, others became involved and risked banning. Reports about healers did not change much. Occasional snapshots and brief reports about healers continued to prevail. The texts focused on individual healers – sometimes rather well known, often just one of many – and usually lacked depth and background research. This was not the material to instigate debate. 143

This was not the material to instigate debate. Healers such as Samuel (Bopha Mthakathi) Gumede of Daveton remained a "smiler with a burden round this neck" of whom in a single a photograph was short for the newspapers; others such as Abadaba, a 26-year-old Ugandan, was reported to be fluent in English, French and Swahili, and labelled a "witchdogtor [who] goes mod"; or others yet again were termed "Mother Sangoma"; and along with a photograph of Mrs. M. Khoza and Mrs M. Maphanga from Nelspruit, healers received the mock-honour of being the "professors ... from the University of Witchcraft".61 Even though some of the major discursive tropes such as the denied modernity of healing, healers' suspected affinity with witchcraft and the professionalisation attempts were alluded to, neither the tropes nor the individuals received detailed consideration. This did not signify that editors and journalists considered the topic irrelevant. And yet they did not seek access to healers or attempted to develop the topics that related to them. Much rather they chose to work with easy material such as non-captioned photographs or, sometimes, with interviews of established healers, whom they later turned into symbols. Before 1976 Credo Mutwa was such a prominent and controversial figure.62 He was easily accessible, marketed himself with much vigour and was thus, in turn, easily marketed by the magazines. Through his writings in the 1960s and his tourist attraction in Soweto he contributed to the racial, cultural and religious separations of apartheid.63 In reporting about him newspapers and magazines would certainly not risk offending the authorities. By utilising non-captioned images, the alternative, and generally prevailing strategy for placing sporadic images of healers in the media, involved as well no risk because they did not suggest immediate political messages. In the end it was always up to the readers to either take the representation of the healers seriously, to mock them, or not to notice them at all.

61 Bona (August 1974), pp. 59-60; Bona (May 1972), p. 75; Bona (September 1977), pp. 46-47; Bona (July 1973), p. 56. 62 Articles on Credo Mutwa in Bona (September 1975), pp. 77-81; Bona (January 1976), pp. 40, 42; Bona (July/ August 1976), pp. 82, 84, 86; Bona (January 1979), pp. 56 - 59. 63 Chidester, David. 'Credo Mutwa, Zulu Shaman: The Invention and Appropriation of Indigenous Authenticity in African Folk Religion.' Journal of the Study of Religion 15:2 (2002), pp. 65-85. 144

Illustration 15: Credo Mutwa, (Bona January 1976), unknown photographer

Illustration 16: Smiler with a burden (Samuel Bopha Mthakathi Gumede), (Bona August 1974), unknown photographer 145

The lack of legitimacy was an issue media other than Bona addressed. And yet they never focused on it thoroughly: World and its weekend supplement, Weekend World, produced stories along the lines of "healers, hubbies, haunted homes" coming up with headlines such as "Evangelist hubby sues for divorce."64 An evangelist of King Williams Town had caught his wife having sexual intercourse with an inyanga. The herbalist was reported to have explained that he had been treating the woman. There were similar stories which derided healers and mocked those who believed in them.65 Some articles suggested that izinyanga and izangoma were not only fakers, but that to believe in such frauds entailed serious danger. The Weekend World broke the news that patients of a "bogus doctor" near Umtata, who had sought pricking treatment, had later died in a public hospital. The "bogus doctor", a herbalist called Feke, appeared in court in a black suit where he produced a certificate from the African Herbal College in Pretoria. This did not spare him from being fined.66 When, after the uprising in Soweto, Weekend World adopted a more political stance, they instantly dropped the stories about healers, probably because they did not relate healers' activities to social and political change in the country, and because there were more important items to report about. Drum touched upon yet another aspect of the complex issues regarding healers. Their favourite topic concerned manipulative medicines with which to achieve personal advantages at the expense of others. They sporadically focused on thrilling stories of muti murder and "body butchering" and paid only scant attention to the more revered aspects of healers' activities.67 Manipulative medicines were a topic to which the Natal Witness also occasionally referred, albeit almost always in connection with the Indian population of Pietermaritzburg. More than once they ridiculed those people who had lost fortunes on medicines which people deemed powerful.68 Hence, in the newspapers, the purchase of muti became synonymous with wasting money on futile matters. There is no direct indication as to whether or not these stories hit the nerve of the time, or left an impact on readers. The Natal Witness tried to draw a line between religion and health. Among the multitude of newspapers under review they were the only media which focused on religion as a discrete category. At regular intervals the newspaper included reports on odd "prophets" and

64 Sangotshe, W. 'Evangelist sued hubby for divorce.' Weekend World (18.10.1970). 65 Ngwenya, Benny. 'Hubby's sex urge was too much – inyanga.' Weekend World (16.10.1970). 66 Ngani, Marcus. 'Bogus doctor fined 30 R: Healer's muti put him in hospital.' Weekend World (12.07.1970). 67 Motjuwadi, Stan. 'Mother sold her daughter to a muti murderer.' Drum (February 1976); Heyns,Jackie. 'The body butcher of Uniondale.' Drum (April 1978); Motjuwadi, Stan. 'Who is hiding the muti murderer?' Drum (December 1977). 68 'Evil muti - the cure costs Pietermaritzburg Indians thousands of Rands a Year.' Natal Witness (27.4.1972). 146

"soothsayers" who, for instance, dug for treasures in public gardens.69 These individuals appeared as strange figures to those who were situated well in everyday life. For a large proportion of the African population, however, fortune seeking may have been a euphemism for beggary as a means to cope with overwhelming poverty. The newspapers also focused on the supernatural powers through which some persons claimed to direct their activities, and thus established a focus on beliefs. At the same time, the newspaper reported, in a serious tone, about the internationally unfolding debate in which "witchdoctors" were promoted as providers of useful herbal medicine and alternative psychiatric treatment for African people.70 A sustained interest developed about what diviners and herbalists did in therapeutic terms. However, neither herbal medicine nor supernaturally inspired prophets and treasure-hunts were issues that really interacted with or impinged upon the daily concerns of the majority of the local white population, who were the targeted interest group of the Natal Witness and such reports. In the academic literature of this time izangoma were also noticed in urban environments. They were understood and regarded as "adaptive agents", who were finding new roles for themselves and who were, moreover, helping Africans adapt and adjust to urban environments.71 A case study on Kwa Mashu revealed, for instance, that apart from the fact that every city block housed at least one person who was recognised as inyanga or isangoma, these izinyanga or izangoma were, as well, involved in the development of an urban popular culture. They gave, for instance, medicines and charms to choirs who participated in all night choir competitions, which were particularly popular then and there in Kwa Mashu. If choirs failed to win, izangoma would, after the event, divine the causes for failure.72 In the 1970s the medial discourse about healers was still casual, loose in structure, superficial and had not yet caused broader public concern. Individuals portrayed were known locally, often for their oddities. Discourse vacillated between uncoordinated tropes and did not knit them into topics. Indeed, news about diviners and herbalists were scattered like colourful dots all over the existing landscape of the media. Sometimes they amounted to witty remarks in connection with eye-catching photographs, and often they operated on the basis of

69 'Prophet digs in city garden.' Natal Witness (07.08.1976); 'Garden-Digger Prophet goes.' Natal Witness (18.08.1976); 'Soothsayer in the making.' Natal Witness (29.01.1979); 'Forsooth, so they say.' Natal Witness (09.02.1979); 'Strange Powers of Greytown's Jane.' Natal Witness (12.03.1970); 'The strange message found in a cow's hoof.' Natal Witness (26.01.1973). 70 'Witchdoctors are not redundant.' Natal Witness (27.09.1973); 'Witchdoctors cannot be pushed aside.' Natal Witness (14.04.1973); 'Your ally - the witchdoctor.' Daily News (17.0.1973); 'Give witchdoctors credit.' Natal Witness (10.04.1974); 'Accept traditional healers – WHO.' Natal Witness (27.01.1976). 71 Du Toit, Brian M. 'The Isangoma: An Adaptive Agent Among Urban Zulu.' Anthropological Quarterly 44: 3 (1971), pp. 51-65. 72 ibid., pp. 59-60. 147 slogans. News about healers, izinyanga, witchdoctors, bogus doctors, soothsayers, izangoma and prophets entertained, and were largely un-informative in nature. The terminology employed by the media was rich and varied, while the articles and snap-shots produced glimpses, not representations, of healers and their activities. The photographs did, however, contradict the old image of the rural healer and offered a new one. They roused curiosity with the readers and were news insofar as they produced images previously unseen in South Africa's papers. Change occurred after the Soweto uprisings, when in a quite straightforward manner the discourse about healers became more poignant. This occurred at the height of apartheid when magazines worked hard to broaden their market acceptance among the rapidly growing number of African readers.73 Magazines had to respond, one way or the other, to the mounting political and economic instability of the time, which many South Africans experienced as personal insecurity. By the early 1980s, in fact, domestic opposition was beginning to link up more efficiently with the banned political movements. Simultaneously South Africans witnessed how the state renewed its efforts towards the achievement of spatial segregation and homeland independence, a political turn that correlated with militarisation and intensive policing. Popular struggle reached a nation-wide crescendo in 1985 and began to attain its aim of ungovernability. Violence among African groups exacerbated the situation many individuals and communities found themselves in, and a state of emergency was declared. This did not take away or dissipate the intense political pressure exerted from below.74 Apartheid policies were partly proposed anew in terms of reform, but it was totally impossible to discuss in a constructive manner the ludicrousness, the broad injustices and the personal suffering resulting from the imposed supremacy of the white population in South Africa. Responses to revolutionary opposition provided, therefore, merely short-term relief.75 In many rural homeland villages up to half of the families were without land. The old African chiefdoms were losing much of their distinctiveness and increasingly reflected the predominantly urban and wage-based culture. Competition for new resources and control over the local states played a crucial role for families locating themselves in their surroundings.76 Against this background Bona, quite in the vanguard, resolutely and valiantly revived topics that related to healers and started a process which has been described in a previous section of this chapter. In parallel with Bona, Echo also depicted two different types of

73 Interview with Willie Bokala, former sub-editor of Bona Magazine, Sowetan Main Office, Johannesburg, 22.08.2000. 74 Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa, pp. 212-235. 75 Worden, Nigel. The Making of Modern South Africa. Oxford 21995, pp. 121-126. 76 Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa, pp. 188-211. 148 healers. One was a continued representation of the weird and dangerous type of which the mother paper, the Natal Witness, had established a tradition, especially in connection with African spirituality.77 In contrast to the mother paper Echo now started to extend beyond the boundaries of religion and included in its representations cannibal "witchdoctors" who ate their patients, sinister men who kidnapped people and killed them for muti purposes, as well as dubious prophets who claimed to be church leaders.78 Echo distinguished only marginally between the spheres of religion, medicine and magic. The producers of the newspaper supplement knew that for the majority of the readership these spheres all intersected and combined with each other into one field in which, according to their view, people fell prey to dubious individuals who had a destructive impact on human life. In addition, they stressed an aspect which, up to that point in time, had not been readily developed. Echo began to report more consistently about healers' activities that took place publicly in streets and which, as in the case of Msamariya of Cancele, a wounded-healer type, attracted large numbers of followers and adherents. Nomapuleti Florah Ludlolo, known as Mother of Cancele, Msamariya, or Ma-Radebe, worked in a village in the Transkei, Cancele, where she was the centre of a popular movement. Having managed to cure and overcome her own sickness, she felt compelled to heal other people by water and prayer in the name of uThixo and Yesu. Msamariya stressed the three topics of money, health and peace, as a Christian pastor observed in an academic article. All of these were areas which, according to his interpretation, promised relief for many people's lives and which, for many, were difficult to obtain in the material world.79 A visitor of Msamariya's explained the purpose of calling on her in different terms. He explained that if a person went to see that woman he or she could have three or four objectives, namely "to punish yourself in the body with the sins of the flesh, ask for forgiveness for the world, increase the popularity of God through Maria, and to ask for talented volunteers since we are running short of priests."80 It seems that one could see different things in what Msamariya offered, and probably she did, in fact, offer a multitude of things.

77 'Treasure hunt.' Echo (04.08.1983). 78 'I ate six people – witchdoctor.' Echo 28.04.1988; Mkhize, Khaba. 'Muti rumours: Man vanishes.' Echo (15.07.1982); Mkhize, Khaba. 'Muthi mystery deepens after body found.' Echo (12.08.1982); 'Gogo carved up for muthi – evidence.' Echo (25.11.1982); 'Family shocked at mutilation of body.' Echo (05.06.1986). 79 Becken, Hans-Jürgen. '"Give me Water, Woman of Samaria"'. Journal of Religion in Africa 14: 2 (1983), pp. 115-129. 80 'Uhambo oluyingcwele kwabomdabu.' UmAfrika (22.06.1985). 149

Illustration 17: Face to Face with Msamariya, Echo (18.06.1981) 150

The majority of people who formed an opinion about Msamariya's activities, and who reflected upon them in the context of what, in their own view, their friends, families, neighbours and work colleagues sought from her, did not write academic texts. Some of them expressed their notions and ideas in newspapers, where they not only documented their views, but tried to reach out to people who also debated, or would engage in a debate about Msamariya and the implications of her activities. It was significant of the South African popular press that its commercialisation in the 1970s and 1980s did not undermine the participation of its readership. Quite to the contrary, it stimulated readers' involvement and asked in particular for the submission of letters to the editor. The purpose of such material lay with the collective thought and consumer tastes of the groups and communities that grew up with the ever expanding papers and which were attracted as regular customers. Letters to the editor were part of the popular media's diet, and were, in some magazines, published together with photographs of the persons who had written them.

151

Illustration 18: Various letters to the editor, illustrated with photographs taken by the readers themselves 152

At this point, when articles became more than mockery or reproach, when observers were allowed to describe what they had seen, or overheard, or thought about, articles began to yield content. For readers, it became possible to gather information from the newspaper texts themselves. When in the texts Msamariya's activities were assessed, this particular healer was as much the focus of the reports as were the crowds which flocked around her.81 Mockery and dismissal remained undercurrents of the picture, but the picture as a whole became broader. In addition to older styles of reporting the representations began to leave space for wonder and astonishment at the dozens of buses which took people to Msamariya's place where for many months a spiritually gifted woman healed and sought for truth with water and prayers. Newspapers showed that healers acted not only in backyards and hidden spaces, but that they were active in schools, public squares and township homes, where mysterious and life- threatening events impinged on people's lives. Bona and Drum drew attention to healers' interventions when stones flew through the classroom or dropped on the roofs of houses.82 Echo explained incidents when healers were called to alleviate mass headaches which caused havoc, at Tugela Ferry for instance, among pupils at examination time.83 The newspapers also reported about people from Mpophomeni who finally resorted to healers from Sweetwaters and Curvall near Donnybrook when tokoloshe disturbed the peace of homes and public places.84 Several of the stories and brief comments were follow-up sequences, and often they filled the gaps between the more informative parts of the newspaper. At the same time, articles about healers made available information about the profession such as healers' particular skills as much as and individuals' telephone numbers or addresses.85 Thus, healers, who were not officially represented in political or medical discourses, received attention at the level of popular representation, where over time they developed an image of the profession and where people could turn in order to obtain advice or pieces of information. The texts, as superfluous to major news and as gap-filling as they remained, could be read and their protagonists could be mocked but, at the same time, they began to claim permanent space in

81 Mshengu, Bonginkosi. 'Superstition.' Echo (18.06.1981); '"They are all lies", say the "victims".' Echo (02.07.1981); 'The superstitious are unbalanced.' Echo (30.07.1981); 'Man dies after trip to Cancele.' Echo (30.07.1981); 'Cancele bus crash victims identified.' Echo (01.10.1981); Moses, Thandi. 'Face to face with Msamariya.' Echo (18.06.1981); 'Buses still full for visits to the "holy lady".' Echo (21.01.1982); yaseGoli, Intshebe. 'What has happened to Cancele's Msamariya?' Echo (12.07.1984); 'Banner torn up - but message will out.' Echo (08.10.1981); '"Message" delayed through illness', Echo (15.10.1981). 82 Barritt, Dave. 'Horror in their home!' Bona (March 1981), pp. 16-19, 21, 23; Mngoma, Amos. 'The Stone- Throwing Tokoloshe of Kwamakhutha.' Bona (November 1982), pp. 16-17; Barrit, David. 'They Live in Terror.' Bona (October 1983), pp. 20-23; Mngoma, Amos. 'Terror in a haunted home.' Bona (September 1986), pp. 111-113; Kumalo, John. 'The Durban tokoloshe defied the Archbishop.' Drum (July 1980). 83 Mkhize, Piwe. 'Msinga High School hit by mystery headache epidemic.' Echo (28.07.1988). 84 Mkhize, Khaba. '"Into" causes school havoc: Pupils run screaming for their lives.' Echo (22.09.1983). 85 See also 'The adviser advises those who are accompanied by the ancestors.' Ilanga (25.-27.1988). 153 the media. They made known features about healing in public places, and the news about healers and their activities acted like public notices drawing attention to the events people had known about, seen, heard about, but not read about. The texts conveyed the message that afflictions of various kinds happened to individuals and families. People burned their legs and could not find treatment except with Msamariya. Some burnt their feet while walking on simple forest ground. Painful needles stuck in people's bodies and needed to be extracted. Fires in wardrobes which nobody had laid robbed people of all of their clothes. Children died in car accidents, and their voices screamed on through endless nights. In such circumstances neighbours, kin and spiritual experts were called in to alleviate the situation. Journalists were invited to witness. But to no avail. At the end of the day, suffering people were left to their own devices. They had to organise the rearrangement of their own health scenarios and to re-establish order in their lives and could expect little assistance and expertise even from the willing. The magazines' focus was founded less on ways of actually healing a specific situation, but more on uncovering vulnerabilities and on making these visible in all their occurring varieties. What often mattered to readers was that, in whatever healers engaged, they suspended the rules, or that people themselves, who went to see healers, did not obey the rules which normally guided interpersonal relationships. A reader of the Catholic newspaper UmAfrika criticised the behaviour of people who sought relief from Msamariya. He observed that, as a rule, people using public transport between Pietermaritzburg and the townships would queue at the bus stop. When they waited for the bus for Cancele, however, they jostled and even fought each other and became particularly ruthless.

Those who ride trains to the locations behave in a better way because they wait for those who leave, then enter, ride and go. But those who come to pray [at Cancele] behave like animals. They push others with the intention of pick-pocketing them. If you fall in that scenario, you may die instantly as you will never be able to rise.86

The picnic scenes at Cancele reminded the writer of the letter of frenzied markets rather than of orderly health-seeking endeavours, and in his opinion people deviated substantially from acknowledged spiritual activities. "If you are a sinner, where do you get time to do all the [bad] things I mentioned? […] When a person dies, you'll see the trip was nothing because it was never appreciated neither by the people [who went] nor by God."87 For him healing activities at Cancele were a central, even pivotal point around which a breakdown of social

86 'Uhambo oluyingcwele kwabomdabu.' UmAfrika (22.06.1985). 87 ibid. 154 behaviour and religious activities occurred. Disorder was more contentious to him than the issue whether people resorted to either hospital treatments to African medicine. This draws attention to the experience that for many people health-seeking was not merely difficult due to a lack of experts and devoted helpers, but that in the context of health-seeking per se even more chaos was produced. In the literature it has been argued that around this time throughout the African continent "healers of all kinds – whether doctors or 'traditional healers' – have been less influential than we commonly think".88 The reason for this, however, was only partly due to the fact that communities wished to control the process of healing based on some form of a popular command. Often they struggled for control out of desperation, trying to assume the role of controllers because they were left with no other choice. The popular media repeatedly published stories according to which un-sanctified health- seeking strategies did not only cause disorder as much as the inability to regain health but where – following the argumentation brought forward – cause and effect were inverted: because public places and people's lives were already in disarray, people incurred an even further loss regarded their health and property. Places that ought to be safe, were not. Homes, normally the spheres if not sanctuaries of personal shelter, became places of affliction because such agencies charged with the maintenance of order as, for instance, church officials, educational authorities and police were unable to provide relief. Schools, for instance, which should have been institutions entrusted with instilling knowledge and moral principles, became insecure and threatening when headaches ravaged, or when stones flew around. The police, who was, given ordinary conditions, acting as an agency of order, was unable to solve the chaos. They were able to disperse people, but could not stop the stones from flying. Under normal circumstances, healers were known, not only in South Africa, to be able to help solve criminal cases or to uncover thieves.89 In South Africa, if people turned to healers, they ended up being mugged by others. Church people and neighbours congregated in each others' homes for reasons of protection and in order to defy tokoloshe and spirits that burned people in their beds, after even archbishops had been unable to control the situation. These were desperate responses owing to the fact that order had collapsed because ordering forces and ordered space had retreated; and people were permanently exposed to extreme anxiety, sickness and defeat.

88 Feierman, 'Struggles for Control', p. 73. 89 Swantz, Medicine Man, pp. 121-124. 155

A report about the availability of muti medicine on local African markets published in UmAfrika (29.05.1993)

A sensationalist scoop published in Drum (January 1995)

A report about one of the famous and rich herbalists of KwaZulu-Natal, Mighty Sosobala, who flew his own plane published in Drum (August 1991)

A report about afflictions wrought upon people by tokoloshe published in Drum (July 1980)

Illustration 19: Various reports: images and stories of the popular media

156

In such a predicament many people found that they had to look after themselves out of their own resources so that they, consequently, designed their own strategies of protecting their surrounding to the best of their abilities. Looking for solutions, it was less important for people to know about the initiation procedures and the making of healers, to be informed about healers' self-conception and the cultural symbolism of which they derived their expression. These were concerns of an academic discourse, and of healers themselves who sought to mark the legitimacy of their call, their command of the spirits, and who needed for themselves to be inscribed into the "ritual charter of the profession".90 The press, always in touch with the tastes of its readers, looked into a different and likewise marketable direction. Medicines could be a remedy to protect oneself, to manipulate others or to counteract problems one no longer wanted to endure. In this spirit Drum intensified for its younger readers a one-directional sensationalist message of scurrilous "killer inyangas", "witchdoctors", "muti killers", "witches", "zombies" and "unpaid sangomas" who were involved in muti murders, revenge activities and the witch-hunts in Venda and Lebowa, as well as in other deadly ordeals.91 The magazine operated with a diffused but rich terminology and lumped together vocabulary which, in terms of analysis, did not necessarily interrelate. And yet they provided a window to the world of lost health, greed and mishaps, and formulated ideas about the responsibility they expected individuals – rather than herbalists and diviners – to assume, as in fact, emphasis on individual suffering greatly increased, not only in the 1970s, and not just in South Africa.92 Responsibility became a key concern in this respect. Drum's stories confirmed this concern about responsibility over and over again. Most of their articles were modelled upon similar patterns. One example was Amon Faro Mabuza, inyanga of Mgobothi in Nelspruit, who was convicted for murder. His family and patients, and a Drum reporter, visited him in the cell the day before he was executed. There and then he gave final instructions as to how his wives and children ought to go on living. In particular, he asked them to

90 Hammond-Tooke, W. D. 'The Initiation of a Baca Isangoma Diviner.' African Studies 14 (1955), pp. 16-22; Hirst, 'River of Metaphors', p. 239; Farrand, Dorothy M./ Holdstock, T. Len. 'Dreams of a Sangoma or Indigenous Healer.' Journal of Southern African Studies 9: 3 (1982), pp. 68-75. 91 Sekgalakane, Emelda. 'The last will and testament of a convicted murderer: the Killer Inyanga of Mgobothi.' Drum (February 1980); Jacobs, Sipho. 'The Beast of Lovers' Lane: If only I had listened to the witchdoctor.' Drum (May 1980); 'Secrets of the Muti Killers.' Drum (April 1981); 'Venda's muti killings.' Drum (April 1983); Sello, Sekola, 'Venda's Double-Edged Fear.' Drum (April 1983); Motjuwadi, Stan. 'The Witch Hunt.' Drum (December 1983); Motjuwadi, Stan. 'Tree of Death - Land of Witches.' Drum (March 1984); Phasa, Mmutle. 'Tzaneen's Zombie.' Drum (September 1984); Tsuai, Victor. 'Victim of the muti men.' Drum (September 1984); Ngwenya, Kaizer. 'Unpaid Sangoma hits back from his grave.' Drum (August 1982). 92 van Binsbergen, Religious Change, p. 233; Swantz, Medicine Man, pp. 135-148. 157

forget about ancestors, but to trust in God who had forgiven his sins. The medicine with which he used to cure his patients was to be burned, including the priesthood gear. The hut in which the medicines were kept was also to be burned down.93

The journalist's investigation revealed that the murder case was related to a love story, in which Amon Faro Mabuza, the reasonable murderer, had commissioned somebody else to kill his uncle with whose wife he had fallen in love. There was suspicion, and some evidence, that the murderer himself had been put under the influence of love potions. This reconciled him with his fate. For if manipulative medicines were involved, what actually could individuals do? At the end of his life he could only emphasise that the best thing others could do was to abstain from involvement with medicines as best they could and as far as possible. This could be read as a lesson that responsibility lay with the individual, and must not be expected to be borne by herbalists. Drum was the magazine which probably most unswervingly and unremittingly related healers' activities to the spheres of witchcraft and manipulative medicines, which healers themselves would certainly not have accepted as a proper representation of their craft. Most healers would have objected to the image that cast them as sinister protagonists who acted in an unsophisticated world which left a lot of space for human agency and where, at the same time, human agency did not bring about any change whatsoever. On the one hand, according to this image, people expended a lot of energy on manipulating objects, things and persons, hoping to bring about change towards a better life. At the same time and on the other side of the coin, they exposed themselves to others who did the same. One individual counteracted the activities of another, any calamity was caused by others, and thus all questions about what one could do, what to live up to, what to repent, and where one had to just accept fate remained endless and unanswered. This pattern or "argumentation" was, as well, a way of debating the use of medicines in the popular sphere. At this time the academic debate revolved around slightly different issues. Generally, the 1980s were identified as a period when a further step towards the commodification of the various types and forms of African medicinal preparations could be observed. Whereas in previous decades African vendors had competed with pharmacists in South Africa,94 the 1980s were indicative of the pharmaceutical industry's exploitation of local concepts of health and illness. In many township pharmacies, so-called muti wenyoni, an antiacid, was sold for the treatment of a widespread and very common illness known as inyoni. An African healer

93 Sekgalakane, Emelda. 'The last will and testament of a convicted murderer: the Killer Inyanga of Mgobothi.' Drum (February 1980), p.46. 94 See chapter 3. 158 had told a pharmacist about the remedy, whereupon pharmacists were copying the remedy and reaped high profits.95 The pharmaceutical industry experienced a period of growth because it drew on African knowledge. This development in the townships contradicted the parallel observation made, in tandem, elsewhere in rural areas – namely that scientific medicine challenged the role of diviners and herbalists. According to this observation, the extraordinary results achieved on the strength of treatment in hospitals obliged the diviners to specialise in "traditional medicine". Due to the fact that healers were basically incapable of keeping up with scientific medicine, and because healers had to avoid any confrontation with scientific medicine, it was "this complementary role which keeps the traditional doctor in business."96 Both observations took note of the tendency for African health practices to be subjected to pressure as a result of the encroachment of hospital based and pharmaceutically orientated medicine upon African territories and domains of expertise. No observations were made, though, that African health practitioners had started to successfully appropriate aspects or constituting elements of Western or European medical practices, or that the people who themselves utilised African remedies were debating their moral and manipulative value. Concerning themselves with medicines, texts in the popular print media also drew attention to styles of witchcraft that induced and coerced people into action. Spiritual insecurity, modern witchcraft and life-threatening witchcraft were not only a feature of post- apartheid society.97 They occurred at the height of apartheid as well, even though they went unnoticed and unstudied, as witchcraft then, in most cases, did not result so readily in witch hunts and the killing of people. This "ordinary", less spectacular type of witchcraft formed a resilient and popularly discussed backbone of the witchcraft which occurred at a later stage and which, in studies about post-apartheid witchcraft, or "occult economies",98 has often not been considered as the prologue of those processes and events which then would attract worldwide and academic attention. The articles in the popular magazines suggest that witchcraft, which constituted part of popular conceptions about health, formed an integral element of a larger culture aiming at explaining chaos and asserting control over it. It is well worth noting that in the magazines, as in popular discourse, witchcraft often was assigned the function of a catch-all category into which many experiences of the unbelievable, unintelli-

95 De Wet, Thea. 'Muti Wenyoni: Commodification of an African Folk Medicine.' South African Journal of Ethnology 21: 4 (1998), pp. 165-172. 96 Ulin, 'Traditional Healer of Botswana', p. 129. 97 Ashforth, Adam. 'Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in the New South Africa.' Cahiers d'Etudes africaines 38 (1998), pp. 505-532; Ashforth, Adam. 'Reflections on Spiritual Insecurity in a Modern African City (Soweto).' African Studies Review 4: 3 (1998), pp. 39-67. 98 Comaroff, John/ Comaroff, Jean. 'Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony.' American Ethnologist 26: 2 (1999), pp. 279-309. 159 gible, the feared and the thrilling could be bundled together. And as such witchcraft was a descriptive though reflected category in the popular print media rather than an analytical category. Hence, from an academic perspective, it is certainly true that Drum did not tackle the aforementioned aspect in a sophisticated manner but did, indeed allude to this connection, which maybe takes away a certain portion of the drama attendant to the presentation of witchcraft in post-apartheid academic notions. Witchcraft was quite frequently, although not always, associated with famous healers who, in the course of the 1980s, came to represent their profession through their position as icons of success and, at the same time, as controversial role models. Sarah Mashele, Credo Mutwa, Mighty Sosobala, Neverdie Mushwana and Khotso Sethuntsa were some of the most prominent exponents of their craft.99 Each one of them had his or her own special image. They closely conformed to the notion of the charismatic healer but, in contrast to their historical predecessors, they had no fixed association with or attachment to power, and they did not operate in a clearly defined community which could keep a check on them. Neither did they command a clearly defined and delineated group of adherents on whose behalf they could have claimed to act.100 All of them were deemed to be incredibly rich. Credo Mutwa was a successful author of widely published books, Mighty Sosobala owned and piloted his private aeroplane. Khotso Sethuntsa was rumoured to have, upon his demise, left millions of Rands, which nobody could find. The media came to interview these famous exponents of their craft, often more than once, so that these persons were in a position to convey to the journalists more than just some brief stories of the day. Another prominent group, although not large in number, consisted of the white izangoma and izinyanga. In South Africa any connections or interactions between black and white people were always imbued with notions of racial relations. While, in the time-span under review and as mentioned in the previous chapter, white people were known to consult African doctors in the period during which the mass media started to expand, gain popularity and attract a wide readership it became clearly apparent that there existed white people who, themselves, became healers. In the wake of this development Mashudu, David Myburgh and James Hall featured as personally named known whites in the African press.101 In a climate of

99 Scott, Leslie. 'Sarah Mashele – where did she come from?' Bona (January 1977), pp. 76-77; Mngoma, Amos. ' 'Where are the missing muti millions?' Bona (February 1984), pp. 26-27, 29, 31; Mngoma, Amos. 'Khotso's widow breaks her silence.' Bona (November 1986), pp. 57-58; Brümmer, Stefaans. 'Top sangoma in "Suicide plot".' Mail & Guardian (24.05.-30.05.1996), p. 2; 'Sangoma receives hundreds of appeals.' Natal Witness (05.08.1989); Shuenyane, Morakile. 'The Groovy Inyanga of Daan Village.' Drum (June 1984). 100 See for instance Murray, 'Father, Son'. 101 'Rosenthal, Vicky. 'The Witchdoctor of Houghton.' Bona (August 1977), pp. 90-91; 'The White Sangoma who wishes she were black.' Drum (October 1979); Ntuli, Nozizwe. 'Mashudu – the Venda's White Daughter.' 160 cultural racism, they were exceptional as, in general, esteem for African material culture was low. These personalities commanded respect because the involvement of culturally-proud whites in an intimate part of African culture enhanced the reputation of this very African profession. Readers and journalists assumed that if white people engaged in an intimate part of African culture, African culture could not be completely dismissed.102 Ilanga, before its sale to Inkatha in 1987, amalgamated stories that related to healers around yet other nexuses: In stressing that many family and community rituals did not of necessity require the involvement of a healer they reminded their readers that many ceremonies could be conducted perfectly well by informed elders instead and as it had been done in previous times. They warned that healers, especially if they were not part of the family or the community, were difficult to control, and that on leaving they often took away wealth from the community without a fair deal for those who were seeking health and protection.103 In a way this observation, which Ilanga took as a starting point to urge their readers to be cautious as regards the use of and payment for healers' services, provided an alternative perspective to the conviction that powerful medicines always came from "the outside" and that the most potent experts in health and prosperity should be admitted rather than be sought from within.104 Ilanga not only took the stance that reciprocity was at stake but, in addition, utilised the emerging debate about healers to put forward their views about the problematic balancing of rituals and knowledge which Africans had taken in from several different traditions and times.105 In addition, Ilanga tackled the urban reality that families did not live in a traditional structure, in the context of which informed healers from within a community could be consulted, and this often for fees which were rather less than those demanded by external experts. Thus, via debating the role of experts from within and without, Ilanga also addressed issues regarding social change and healers' legitimacy. From Ilanga's perspective the crucial

Bona (October 1982), pp. 28-33; 'The White Sangomas of Natal.' Drum (December 1989/ January 1990); Nkosi, Themba. 'The White Sangoma of Swaziland.' Bona (January 1991), pp. 20-21; Gcabashe, Golden. 'I became a sangoma the traditional way, says David Myburgh…' Bona (May 1992), pp. 28-29; 'Fire walk with me: As more white practice traditional healing.' Drum (Dec/January 1992/1993), pp. 18-19. 'Black and White Magic: Phineas and Rae, Egoli's amazing inyanga team.' Drum (June 1994), pp. 22-25, 34, 46, 82, 94, 99. 102 Interview with Willie Bokala. 103 This was an allegation that also came up in interviews with other editors as, for instance, Bhabha Mdlala, editor of UmAfrika, Mariannhill, 22.02.2000; or Chris Mokolatsie, editor of Echo, Pietermaritzburg office, 24.02.2000. 104 For the grip an admitted healers may in fact exercise see, for instance Smith, James H. 'Buying a Better Witch Doctor: Witch-Finding, Neoliberalism, and the Development Imagination in the Taita Hills, Kenya.' American Ethnologist 32: 1 (2005), pp. 141-158. 105 'The burying of dead people has lost its dignity.' Ilanga (28.-30.04.1988); 'He said that he wants to help those families who are attacked by tikoloshe.' Ilanga (January 1987); 'We should not forget about the ancestors', Ilanga (23.-25.05.1985). 161 point of legitimacy crystallised around the question of their control. Communities wished to be involved in the healing process, but in recent years, especially in urban settings, it had become more and more evident that healers cured individual health-seekers. Kin and community were no longer permanently involved in the management of healing. This gave healers scope to act against the common weal of the community, or the family. For urban health-seekers as much as for people from rural areas it was possible to work with "diagnosis by addition", meaning that people consulted a range of experts to ask them for the assessment of their disease.106 And yet, likewise, this strategy confronted healers, health-seekers and advisers with problems, especially if an individual's or his spirit's descent were unclear and if information about this proved rather difficult to retrieve. Unravelling social bonds implied unravelling social obligations of those parties involved in healing activities. Urbanised social ties implied urbanised social relations in the healing process. These had to be worked out in the townships. Living in urban surroundings had entailed a turning towards special experts, who naturally differed from how treatment was being sought in rural areas. People remembered, or knew from rural kin, that in one's own village it was possible to consult healers familiar with the patient's household, and who often only charged small fees. Only in cases where one went without improvement for a long period would one resort to healers from the outside, who then charged higher fees.107 In urban environments community healers were rare. More frequently one had to rely on healers from outside the family, often even from outside the country. They promised to be powerful, and they were expensive. They could, in fact, ruin a patient, their family and their friends who supported them during their illness. Ilanga touched upon the issue of the management of disease in contexts where kinship therapy groups, important as they may have remained in rural environments, would hardly come together.108 People had to cope not only with disease and affliction they were prepared for, they also encountered uncertainty about expert knowledge, uncertainty about how the body worked.109 The representations in Ilanga indicated how, through the process of South Africa’s urbanisation, much of the wisdoms acquired about healing did no longer function, and how difficult it was to negotiate new ones, especially as healers had to be cautious if they appeared in public. To a certain extent, as a response to such a diversity of calamities, efforts of healers to unite in professional associations were mentioned in the newspapers and magazines. In such

106 Feierman, 'Explanation and Uncertainty', p. 327. 107 Feierman, Steven. 'Popular Control over the Institutions of Health: A Historical Study', in: Last, Murray/ Chavunduka, G. L. (ed). The Professionalisation of Medicine. Manchester 1986, pp. 205-220, here p. 211. 108 For this concept see Janzen, 'Pluralistic Legitimation', pp. 105-122. 109 Feierman, 'Explanation and Uncertainty', p. 321. 162 reports, African healers' skills were usually compared to the paradigms of the medical profession. Medicines were compared. So were styles of treatment. Often an image emerged according to which healers were just an alternative version of what western-style medicine had on offer. Such representations oriented explanations about African healers along the paradigms of western medicine, and must have surely corresponded with the ambitions of many healers who wanted recognition in the face of a dominant orthodox (Western) medicine. Some reports, however, showed critical awareness. Readers, in particular, suspected that to speak about organised healers one had to consider more than merely comparable versions of medical treatments. South African readers were in their views divided and occasionally launched harsh critiques, especially about organised healers. Their general criticism highlights the fact that many did not trust African healers who were grouped together in formal organisations. These readers associated healers with the misuse of political power, and with the enticement of violence among people. In 1985, a reader of Ilanga referred to several reports about izangoma which had appeared in one day's issue of "this very newspaper of the nation". The reader declared that he dismissed all izangoma as frauds and opportunists, and he launched a special attack on the chairperson of one particular association around Durban.

The chairman of this organisation, Mr [...] said there is a money of about R500. He asked all izangoma to tell him how many R20, R10 and R2 would make this R500. Not even a single one of them responded or attempted to give him the answer! They just kept silent and looked at him, even though Mr [...] promised them that any brave isangoma who would know the answer would take the R500 with him/her. So, now: a million dollar question: are the izangoma and izinyanga doing guess-work or a great job when throwing stones? Why don't they take R500 while they do the job for so many families who pay them some R200?110

The angry writer criticised the chairman who was known to be an important figure in the Inkatha setting and who was known "to get away with things", whatever they were. This isangoma acting as chairman was known, for instance, to command the power to keep people at bay who came to destroy his house simply by producing a lake around his property as soon as parties of those wanting who wanted to take revenge arrived. The writer of the letter to the editor found it especially unrewarding to read what he considered an offence in an otherwise respectable newspaper. Other readers assessed the matter of healers' professionalisation more positively. One reader of Echo commented, in 1986, that "one notes with some guarded enthusiasm the step recently taken by the KwaZulu Dept. of Health and Welfare in organising

110 'Are the izangoma doing guess-work when they throw the bone?' Ilanga (29.-31.07.1985). 163 the Inyangas into an association."111 Professional organisation would have conferred an enhanced public standing upon healers. It is obvious that, depending on which kind of healers people had in mind, they had different opinions about the value of such organisations. This was not unusual since the professionalisation of African medicine had advanced in different ways in various countries. Swaziland had been the first country to adopt a positive approach towards the professionalisation of African medicine. After independence healers became officially recognised, and the king even employed his own team of tinyanga tenkhosi, royal healers.112 By 1972, healers in Botswana had formed the first officially recognised Dingaka (Traditional Healers) Society. In Zimbabwe, as well, healing was deemed an important national asset after the country's independence, evidenced by the fact that the establishment of the Zimbabwe National Traditional Healers Association was effected instantly in 1980. The professionalisation process swiftly resulted in an over-representation of herbalists in the Association – at the expense of traditional birth attendants and faith healers who were marginalized.113 Mozambique embarked upon a different route after independence in 1974/75 as the government did not recognise healers whom it deemed to be the natural allies of chiefly and feudal regimes, and who were considered "unproductive".114 In Dar es Salaam healers were part and parcel of the public scene, but they did not seem to have any associational structure.115 In Uganda, recruitment into the associations followed strict ethnic criteria.116 In South Africa, associations were popularly debated, but not positively considered by the state. However, diviners in rural areas entertained their own networks of teachers, students, ex-students, neighbours and neophytes which, so the author held, owed virtually nothing to outside influences. Rather than gathering in formal associations, diviners maintained a social organisation of their own which served to control and discipline individual members.117 The variety of approaches employed as regards the professionalisation of healers demonstrated a potential lack of awareness that transcended national boundaries, and which made it obvious that each state handled the issue according to its own logic. In

111 'Traditional medicine can be invaluable.' Echo (29.05.1986). 112 Maseko, 'Current Traditional Healer Policy'. 113 Chavunduka, G. L. 'Development of African Traditional Medicine: The Case of Zimbabwe', in: Fyfe, Christopher (ed). African Medicine in the Modern World: Seminar Proceedings No. 27. Edinburgh 1986, pp. 59-72. 114 Jurg, A. M./ Marrato, J. 'The Mozambican Experience – Policy and Developments since Independence,' in: Freeman, M. (comp.) Recognition and Registration of Traditional Healers – Possibilities and Problems (Conference Proceedings). Johannesburg 1992, pp. 14-17. 115 Swantz, Medicine Man. 116 Whyte, Questioning Misfortune, p. 210. 117 Ngubane, Harriet. 'Clinical Practice and Organization of Indigenous Healers in South Africa', in: Feierman, Steven/ Janzen, John M. (ed). The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa. Berkeley et al., 1992, pp. 366-375 [orig. 'Aspects of Clinical Practice and Traditional Organisation of Indigenous Healers in South Africa.' Social Science and Medicine 15 B (1981), pp. 361-365], here p. 363. 164

South Africa the nexus between healers and the state would have been a link between healers and the homeland authorities, or a link between healers and the apartheid state. For the South African of magazine readerships that would have been aware of the professionalisation process in other African countries, these developments could not even have served as a model. Their situation would have been difficult to compare to that existing in other countries. At a time when voicing any dissent with national politics would be heavily sanctioned, the popular magazines established, however, a site or sphere for the discussion of cultural values. Everyday experiences relating to the world of the spirits were narrated in entertaining, informative or, sometimes, scary episodes which challenged readers' opinions. All of this was rather more than merely an ongoing joke. Quite often, readers responded rather seriously. Popular media produced messages which emerged against the backdrop of politics, but which were rooted in people's everyday lives. The popular press proved to be an appropriate media for launching journalistic articles and readers' responses which operated within the "oppositional narrative frame where [there was] a great deal of room for manoeuvre and experiment".118 Of course, this discourse never resulted in a consolidated form of social activism that would have brought about a change in official notions about healing or about the health of African people. This should, though, not be regarded as a fault or defect as was, rather, a concession to the oppressive framework in which this discourse unfolded. Comparable to other popular media of the country, newspapers and magazines used captivating, gripping and well turned out episodes to engage the community in an ongoing conversation about certain issues of everyday life, such as health and well-being, which were clearly rooted in politics, but did not achieve, nor necessarily require a discussion in this context. What was accom- plished, however, was that roughly between the late 1970s and early 1990s healers gained a new visibility in the popular press. The press engaged in the "management of meaning by which culture [was] generated and maintained, transmitted and received, applied, exhibited, remembered, scrutinized and experimented with."119 At the same time, healers benefited from the emergence of a vibrant platform which reached out to a broad African readership. It has been observed that urban healing commanded only part of the cultic market as people often opted for a return to their village and to seek treatment there.120 The popular discourse analysed above suggests additional strategies were employed by those who decided to stay in town or to seek health remedies from famous representatives of the profession.

118 Gunner, 'Wrestling', p. 231. 119 Hannerz, Ulf. 'The World in Creolization', in: Barber, Karin (ed). Readings in Popular Culture. Bloomington 1997, pp. 12-18, here p. 14. 120 van Binsbergen, Religious Change, p. 241. 165

The Popular Healer The image of healers was popularised through the mass media after the mid-1970s. The popular press constructed discourses about diviners and herbalists, genuine healers and quacks, white izangoma and incredibly rich herbalists. In connection with these various types of different healers they almost invariably reported on people's daily afflictions and their controversial attitudes towards African healers. Moreover, they involved their readers in debates about the African experts of health and order. These debates, again, revolved around practical information as much as around opinions about culture. They abstained from addressing political issues, and, more importantly, they were tolerated and sometimes probably promoted within the setting of apartheid politics. In some respects the popular debates established foci that differed from the issues considered crucial to academic debates. Even though healers themselves did not determine the discourse in the media, they gained unprecedented visibility being debated as protagonists of health, but also more generally in a role of prisms through which ideas and notions about African culture were reflected, and through which the social aspirations of African people were termed in their own ways. On the strength of the fact that the newspapers and magazines were widely read and that publicised topics were talked about throughout the country as much as, across the border, it came about that via these stories South African healers, though unrecognised, actually gained a wide audience. Compared to the healers who had vied with the state for their recognition in previous decades, healers of the time-span reported managed to push through their immediate interests albeit in a more indirect fashion. Instead, their activities became a focus for the constant concern of others, an issue of human concern so-to-speak, resulting in the fact that the more pragmatic aspects of their activities were debated in considerable detail from the perspective of potential clients. Seen from this point of view it was often less important as to whether a healer was a diviner, an herbalist, or a combination of both – of more relevance was the fact that the person concerned was successful in treating those ailments they were presented with. Anthropological studies of this period have argued that, through the activities of healers in the towns, people were brought closer to their ancestors than they used to be previously.121 The media did not immediately mirror this observation, but spiritual concerns and issues of cosmology did anyway command a minor focus of attention. Comparable to the discourse that emanated from the documents left behind by healers themselves some decades before, healers and those who were interviewed as patients by the media did not debate world views. The role

121 Hellmann, 'Rooiyard', p. 8; du Toit, 'The Isangoma', p. 64. 166 of ancestors, though, did indeed matter. But the focus of concern was gradually more stringently placed on daily survival and on strategies for prosperity. If considered as a group, popular healers consisted in equal number of diviners and herbalists. Their professionalisation was less immediate a concern than was their popularisation. Through popularisation healers did, in fact, regain access to some of South Africa's racially divided publics. In forming part of an ongoing discourse, they were actually seen in an immense number as much as variety of photographs. In a climate where it was largely impossible to debate their original aim and ambition for professionalisation, this was an impressive advance. Of course, it can be assumed that healers were not always happy about the ways they were represented. As a group, they had no influence on the processes that decided which individuals would be chosen as symbols, or who would speak on behalf of the profession. Neither the "beautiful sangoma" nor the "cannibal witchdoctor", neither the "professors from the University of Witchcraft" nor "Mother Sangoma" were elected representatives of the profession, and none of these figures acted intentionally in the interest of the healing profession as a whole. Popularity did, though, take away some of the pressures that arose from the ongoing concern about legitimacy and for a number of years it appeared as if popularity would even make up for the as of yet unsettled question of healers' legitimacy. In the long run, the popularisation of the healers' image impacted on the path of their professionalism, an issue which would again be taken up after the ending of apartheid and, when, in the face of the spread of HIV/AIDS infections the public health sector and the organisation of care had to be considered anew. While in the first half of the century the competition between African healers and white medical practitioners had impacted on the professionalisation of African healers, and whereas the urbanisation of healing had spawned commercial trade in muti between town and countryside, the period under review in this chapter indicated the popular controversies among African people. It became even more evident than before that, if healers were to be considered part of African culture, the very question was which African culture was being referred to. African culture had amalgamated features of the rural and the urban, it incorporated the ambitions of the socially aspiring and ambitious as much as of those holding rather a traditionalist outlook. And, in addition, African culture was interfered with heavily by the apartheid state. A penultimate point can be made. Whereas, in previous decades, African therapeutics had threatened the commercial and ideological basis of white biomedicine to such an extent that African medicines had competed successfully with the medicines prescribed by the white community, by now the white community started to compete anew, in the cultural a much as in the economic domain, with 167

African medicine. Last but not least, it remains to be noted that, while in previous decades izinyanga had managed to increase their status through legislation, diviners now regained publicity through the popularisation of healers' image. In this process it also became evident that the differences existing between herbalists and diviners mattered for herbalists and diviners, but this distinction was of less importance for health-seekers who sought remedies, cures and healing rather than representatives of a particular type of healers. Against the backdrop of the globally developing discourse about "traditional healers" it is interesting to note that while, in global terms, in the aftermath of gaining independence by many African countries, an internationally optimistic attitude started to dominate official health politics of the state and the World Health Organisation, while, conversely, more pessimistic outlooks prevailed among the South African population. The WHO, in particular, promoted a conviction that "Africa could be cured", and that there was "health for all".122 In 1977/ 78 the WHO recommended to count "a traditional healer as someone who could cooperate in a modern health team."123 Taking seriously what readers of popular newspapers and magazines were debating, it seems as if, at the grass-root level, many people at least in South Africa did not share that conviction. They experienced, rather, the loss of control, both their own as much as the state's power to control. As a result, in their attitudes they questioned the optimism about "traditional healing". Even though they never actively participated in the global debate, people in South Africa wondered how exactly it would be possible to bring about "health for all" if each and everyone of them had to struggle for the maintenance of health on a private, individual or, at best, family level. This more pessimistic attitude only began to change in the late 1980s when isolated reports about HIV/AIDS first appeared in the media. From the outset, and this issue will be further developed and clarified in chapter 7, there was a basic and vague truly intuitive or "gut-felt" conviction that African medicine could provide a solution to this disease, the societal impact of which could by no means have been appropriately estimated in the late 1980s. Consequently, when the world's opinion regarding the health of the African continent began to become more pessimistic in outlook, South Africans began, in what could be termed another counter-dynamics, to take a more optimistic approach towards "their traditional healers".

122 Maclean, Una. 'The WHO Programme for the Integration of Traditional Medicine', in: Fyfe, Christopher (ed). African Medicine in the Modern World: Seminar Proceedings No. 27. Edinburgh 1986, pp. 5-39; Velimirovic, Helga. 'WHO und traditionelle Medizin', in: Barthel, Günther (ed). Heilen und Pflegen. Internationale Forschungsansätze zur Volksmedizin. Marburg 1986, pp. 83-88. 123 Ingstad, 'Healer, Witch, Prophet', p. 247. 5 Colourful Fixations Over-Determination and Neglect

Wordless Worlds When contrasted with the efforts, arguments and images brought forth by healers and participants in the popular debate and analysed in the two previous chapters, the material under review in this chapter is striking in its reductiveness. While it reduces meaning by over- determining certain aspects of healers and by neglecting others, the material, which is known to probably anyone who lives detached from African healing cultures, distorts and interprets without any regard to context, but it does leave behind pervasive messages. Healing did not constitute a marker specific or peculiar to African culture. In various ways it pertained to the view of the world as held by white people from outside the homelands and African townships in South Africa and it stood in relationship to the worldview of those from beyond Africa who wished to visit, or know about, the continent. For this specific audience healers' activities and ambitions did not become manifest, neither in written petitions nor in African newspapers and magazines. Should they be interested in gaining knowledge of specific features of African culture they were likely to turn to coffee table books. Browsing through the glossy pages of such tomes they would, in all probability, come across images, and as such mostly photographic representations of African healing. Photographs of healers portrayed them involved in traditional marriage ceremonies, showed them conducting rites of passage, or healers were depicted so that their ceremonial dress and regalia could be admired. Only rarely would portrayals of healers form a separate section of this type of book but, instead, they appeared as an integral part of various sections of African people's cultural life. These lavishly illustrated books, printed not only on glossy paper but in oversized format as much as in an artistic style, portrayed healing and its actors as part of an "image-Africa". Compared to the images, illustrations and visual devices which formed part of the arguments and styles discussed in the two previous chapters, the coffee table books virtually lived by and on the strength of their pictorial representations. In them images became the core medium around and through which many readers and viewers or, as one could term them, viewing 169 readers, tried to gain an understanding of African healing which they usually regarded as something that had to be brought into a comparative relation with their own cultural narratives. Distinct from the perspectives developed in petitions and popular print media, many white South Africans as well as international tourists wanting to travel the "ethnic Africa", took much interest in African healing as part of a wider set of African "tribal" traditions. This interest was targeted, first and foremost, at the artistic expression of said traditions, and secondly, at African spirituality. It is, for this reason, not surprising that in the luxuriously presented and lavishly illustrated books – again in contrast to the materials produced by earlier generations of healers themselves, or by journalists – diviners were more frequently represented on photographs than were herbalists. It seems as if they, who were known to communicate with the ancestors and the spirits, commanded a greater aura, at least according to the viewers' taste. Images proved themselves, in general, to be an almost perfect device for translating, reducing, transferring and endowing with meaning, for implying meaning about something which the vast majority of the targeted consumer groups of these tomes would never have seen in reality. Difference constituted a crucial key to these suggestions of meaning, as coffee table books derived their particular popularity from othering African people, their material culture, and their ways of doing things. Of more import is, however, that the producers of richly illustrated books arranged their material with a focus on specific and more or less consciously selected cultural aspects of African people's lives while, at the same time, neglecting others. In this way African healing was admixed to African "culture" as a whole whereby, simultaneously, essential features of it were neglected, and almost rendered indiscernible. Artificial, constructed, and distorted as the pictorial messages may be considered to be, they reached out into a worldwide consumer orbit, linking up with long established tropes in depicting Africans, once more confronting African healers with images of themselves to which they had to respond in one way or the other. As a source for historical investigation, picture books inform us, with regard to South Africa, about views in a racially structured society which, on the one hand, were often peculiarly interrelated but which, on the other, also manifested themselves as mutually exclusive. This was possible because, especially with a camera, the very private and particular could be viewed while, simultaneously, any need to mix with Africans was obviated. Heavily illustrated books were indicative of processes of identity formation and identity assertion within the non-African community, and this much more poignantly so than being informative about African culture. Those books which will be used as sources in this chapter have been 170 selected from several decades of South African history, whereby the emphasis is placed on publications from the mid-1970s onwards as from about this time onwards notions of difference assumed particular complexity and systematisation, not least because internal tourism received rather a boost due to the opening of hotels and casinos inside some of the South African homelands.1 In the context of a worldwide readership, the books, frequently translated into various European languages, tell us about the distance if not even secrecy which Europeans placed between themselves and the objects of their viewing in order to ensure that what they engaged with was admirable, different and controllable. Compared to the material under review in the previous chapter, the material central to this section dates from the same period, and originated from the same society, but it shows a different if not separate world that did not have much in common with the ways people looked at healers and their activities in the popular print media. One of the reasons accountable for this is, of course, that the coffee table books were intended as combinations of text and illustrations, semi-academic in their stance, aimed at imparting knowledge and providing orientation, often involving professional anthropologists and highly skilled photographers. A further reason is furnished by the fact that that the books were directed at a completely different audience and consumer group. Techniques of photographic reproduction available at the time under review facilitated a broad publicising of the topics reoccurring in the coffee table books. The books contributed, consequently, to a popularisation of information about African culture among people who had not been in contact with it, but who possessed a general knowledge about the subject matter. Healers belonged to the cultures thus portrayed as just one detail and they were introduced in typological portraits and in recordings of dress, or they were being visualised in photographs of games and festivities, as well as in scenes of rural work. The books created images of a remote African culture, and they generated, in fact, remote audiences – in South Africa and all over the world. They fixated the notion that to keep Africans separate was to actually protect them as, in this way, they would be saved from culturally corrupting influences. Such notions corresponded to the ones held by apartheid and, at the same time, with romantic conceptions if not ideations of an ethnic Africa that deserved admiration and needed to be conserved. Navigating along a blurred line betwixt documentation, visual anthropology and popular imagery, the visual material of the picture books provided strong illustrations to a narrative that did not, of necessity, need to be told. In this manner, they confirmed expectations pre- existing in many minds of readers and observers with a certain amount of vague knowledge.

1 Schutte, Gerhard. 'Tourists and Tribes in the "New" South Africa.' Ethnohistory 50:3 (2003), pp. 473-487, p. 475. 171

This group of scantly informed readers and observers represented, yet again, rather a stark contrast to the "knowledgeable community" referred to in the previous chapter. The community of "vaguely knowing" readers and observers enjoyed, though, the privilege of being presented with images and information which came from the writing pens and cameras of "knowing" academics and photographers. The majority of drawings and photographs published were intended to objectify something that to some experts seemed worth documenting and conserving. They focused on things that were known and commented upon in public opinion even though it was not the function of these images to capture something new. Once these photographs and drawings were published and archived, the objectifications themselves became sources and could be appropriated for interpretation.2 What was being read into the pictures may have been abstruse, or a distortion of reality, it did though and nevertheless help to fix in an authoritative manner a discourse which produced and reproduced knowledge, and that is still ongoing and prevailing, so that Africans and the represented "cultures" which were rendered in an abstruse and distorted fashion, have yet to engage with it. Even though the pictures were artificial and posed they did, nonetheless, create a sense of reality for those looking at them. The power of these images was based on the fact that they responded to and addressed gaps in the culture of those who would, at a later stage, look at them. African people seemed to have what the consumers of the books lacked, or had lost in the process of their own modernisation. Africans and healers had been silenced, whereas the wish of the consumers to turn them into objects of difference and to compensate for the loss of their own culture achieved a prominent position. The gap between readers and the people portrayed was widened because readers engaged with images of culture, and not with people and their material living conditions. In many cases African women and men were reduced to models of culture and artefacts, or into bit players on a stage. They did not bear real names, and instead, merely received ethnic labels or a functional description. The photographs of coffee table books stood diametrically opposed to the category of "struggle photography" in South Africa. They were concerned with and aimed at folkloristic depictions of Africans and ethnic groups rather than social critique. The photography utilised for the "picture books" did, as well, differ from illustrated books on wildlife for which other parts of the African continent became prominent. In South Africa, early coffee table books included ethnographic depictions of the 1930s which had been recorded, for instance, by a former mine official, who took photographs of the people whom he encountered in the mines and to whose remotely situated homes he undertook

2 Hägele, Ulrich. 'Visuelle Tradierung des Popularen: Zur frühen Rezeption volkskundlicher Fotografie.' Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 93: 2 (1997), pp. 159-187. 172 photographic expeditions.3 The documentation and collection of evidence of the ways people lived, or used to live, were the main concern and interest of this volume. Books published at a later stage were more eager to concern themselves with the conservation of what people feared would soon be irretrievable, or had been lost already. In the 1960s a new wave of publications reached the South African and, to a lesser extent, the international reading markets. The design of these books suggests that they were geared towards appreciators of African culture, and towards such people who wished to become its connoisseurs.4 A virtual wave of publications emerged after the mid-1970s, more often than previously dedicated to portraits of particular ethnic cultures, and evidently geared towards mass readerships within and without South Africa.5 In the 1990s a move back towards portraying "Africans", rather than disparate ethnic groups, began to emerge. At least that was what first appraisals of the cover pages suggested. The structuring of the material contained inside the books did, however, not necessarily follow any different logic than in previous decades.6 And yet the publications of the post-apartheid era naturally spoke a different language in a changing political context. In their visual presentations coffee table books pursued the photographic canon which evolved out of a discipline that could be called "anthropology at home". Typological portraits of rural people were important and recurring motives, often taken in anthropometrical style: head or the whole person, either in strict enface-position, or captured in profile. Dress and material culture were other motifs, and recorded from the frontal as well as from the rearwards aspects. Artful details were often presented as enlargements and afforded an additional depiction of their own. Some books portrayed scenes of cultural festivities such as weddings, initiations and burials, others included scenes of rural work as, for instance, the thatching of a roof or the grinding of corn. The urge to collect generally held precedence over the desire to interpret. Anthropological explanations linked the images to text. The academic or quasi-academic voice endowed the books with a narrative imbued with authority. As these

3 Duggan-Cronin, A. M. The Bantu Tribes of South Africa: Reproductions of Photographic Studies. Cambridge 1938. 4 Tedder, Vivian. The People of a Thousand Hills. Cape Town 1968; Tyrrell, Barbara. Tribal Peoples of Southern Africa. Cape Town 1968; Tyrrell, Barbara. Suspicion is my Name. Cape Town 1971. 5 Elliott, Aubrey. The Magic of the Xhosa. London 1970; Mertens, Alice/ Broster, Joan. African Elegance. Cape Town 1973; Mertens, Alice/ Schoeman, Hilgard. The Zulu. Cape Town 1975; West, Martin/ Morris, Jean. Abantu: An Introduction to the Black People of South Africa. Cape Town and Johannesburg 1976; Tyrrell, Barbara/ Jurgens, Peter. African Heritage. Johannesburg 1983; Morris, Jean/ Levitas, Ben. South African Tribal Life Today. Cape Town 1984; Elliott, Aubrey. The Zulu: Traditions and Culture. Cape Town 1986; Elliott, Aubrey. The Xhosa and Their Traditional Way of Life. Cape Town 1987; Elliott, Aubrey. Tribal Dress: Beadwork and Other Decorative Arts. Cape Town 21993 [repr. 1986 6 Elliott, Aubrey. Zulu: Heritage of a Nation. Cape Town 21993 [repr. 1991]; Hammond-Tooke, David. The Roots of Black South Africa. Johannesburg 1993; Magubane, Peter. Vanishing Cultures of South Africa: Changing Customs in a Changing World. Cape Town 1998. 173 explanations hardly ever dominated the texts, textuality was allocated a secondary and subordinate relationship to visuality. It remains, to this day, difficult to assess how readers actually approached these combinations of text and image offered in coffee table books. And yet it could be assumed that people's primary and foremost interest was focused on the pictorial material. As the photographs were not presented in isolation but were, rather, embedded in text, no one who started to wonder about the visual representations would be left to wondering for long. If their creativity, however, took readers into exotic worlds which spoke for themselves, the academic explanations did not really constitute an interruption. In the majority of cases these picture books were authored by teams consisting of an anthropologist and a photographer, a productive combination for books intended to popularise knowledge of African culture, and in particular because they endowed this popularised view with academic legitimacy. Many of the authors published several books or, over time, individual authors would combine with differently structured, alternative teams. Alice Mertens, for instance, worked as a photographer and as a lecturer in photography at the Arts Department of Stellenbosch University. Joan Broster, an ethnographer, counted among the leading experts of Xhosa beadwork and textiles. So as to continue the list, Jean Morris was an acknowledged photographer specialising in beadwork and African art while Ben Levitas was an ethnographer who had worked for the Chamber of Mines and who had held responsibilities for maintaining sufficient production levels and structuring the working conditions of migrants. Martin West was appointed professor of Social Anthropology some years after the publication of the coffee table books under review in this chapter. Last but not least, Peter Magubane was an internationally renowned photo-journalist who had worked for Drum in the 1950s and, in addition, counted as one of the prominent struggle photographers. All of them shared a professional interest and a well founded as much as sustained expertise in African culture. Their professional background accounted for the fact that the wordless images stood side by side with rather distinguished descriptions which referred, often in quite a sophisticated manner, to many details captured in the photographs.

Entertainment in Colonial Pietermaritzburg, and When "Times Immemorial" Pass By: A Random Sample of Images Many non-Africans have long been fascinated by certain aspects of African culture, have observed it with intense scrutiny, explained it to others and incorporated it into their own cultural narratives as something that was different a and yet resonated strongly with their own 174 difference and distinction. This occurred on a variety of levels. Each time the message, which photographers and producers of pictorial material broadly defined and wished to push through, changed slightly, a shift that was largely due to changes in perceptions of their own culture and social situation. The photographs referring to situations of healing encapsulated a particular drama or, in some instances, conveyed visions of holistic harmony. Their central message was the excitement and thrill, the entertainment as much as the earnestness onlookers missed in their own religion and health culture. An eye-catching portrait of African healers appeared in Lady Barker's published memoirs in which, in the late nineteenth century, she recorded her years in Natal as the wife of a colonial officer. In her book she mentioned an incident when she entertained her guests with a special attraction, taking place when once she invited her friends to "a famous tea- party... [which] beat all your London teas hollow... because in the corner of my cards were the words, 'Tea and Witches'."7 While her guests were arriving for a garden party, teeming with curiosity, an "immense mob of shouting, singing Kafirs clamouring outside my garden fence" entered through the back door of her house to stage a witch-finding performance.8 Lady Barker and the actors turned into "a play and pretence" what was "against the law to do so really."9 In books which conveyed images of South African culture to overseas readerships and travellers of the African continent, healers provided a particular attraction. They were the starkest embodiment of difference, and they had come under control through colonial legislation. Lady Barker cannot really have feared these people, and yet it was a play with and upon fears and excitement that she put on stage.

Illustration 20: Tea and witches, illustration in Lady Barker's memoirs of her years in Pietermaritzburg

7 Lady Barker. A Year's Housekeeping in South Africa. London 1883, p. 169. 8 ibid., p. 171. 9 ibid., p. 174. 175

On her invitation card the hostess already promised her guests the thrill of providing them with an extraordinary experience. Instead of being entertained by a performing dog which one Madame Häger was known to hire out during the party season, Lady Barker decided to present a more dramatic and exciting encounter – a ngoma. The appearance of the hired izangoma at the party was more than a performance by a skilfully trained dog; it was less than a session of real divination. The lithograph shows a well ordered scene: on the drawing the participants in the event are clearly arranged in three rows with the "actors" depicted in the front, "assistants" in the middle and, finally, "spectators" arranged at the back. If the guests of the garden party guests had been included as part of this picture, it would have spoiled the peculiar African flair of the scene. The guests were left to the viewers' imagination. To set ngoma into a context of entertainment did not necessarily mean alienating the performance. As has been presented in chapter 2, in East Africa beni ngoma dance societies emerged around 1890 in old Swahili towns, the new ports and industrial cities, and presented a melange characterised by the sound of brass bands, by military drill and a hierarchy of officers with European titles and, as such they formed an integral part of popular culture.10 The amalgamation of ngoma, healing and entertainment was, subsequently, observed in a number of other locations as well.11 Lady Barker's diary shows that a similar cultural trend may have existed in parallel in Pietermaritzburg. If this was indeed the case, her African guests probably played an active part in shaping the party, quite probably designing their presentation in the knowledge that they would be performing in front of a colonial audience. The book remains silent as regards their motivation and falsely portrays them merely as thrill- engendering puppets. This rendered colonial authority more powerful than it was in actual fact, and conveyed a distorted notion of the pervasiveness of colonial control as extending even over cultural matters. In a different context, and several decades later, A. M. Duggan-Cronin, the ethnographer who had worked for the Chamber of Mines, set out in the first decades of the twentieth century to describe what diviners and herbalists looked like and which activities they engaged in. His pictorial production did not aim at entertaining but at arriving at a record. Pursuant to this concept, he decided to single out aspects of more complex scenes. While the drawing in Lady Barker's memoirs had folklorised a colonialistically determined scene of "African merry-making" – which was definitely more than that – Duggan-Cronin opted for a typological portrait derived from a particular ethnic setting. An individual healer was presented as a specimen, even exponent, of a particular culture, after he had been singled

10 Ranger, Dance and Society. 11 See chapter 2. 176 was presented as a specimen, even exponent, of a particular culture, after he had been singled out from an encompassing and overarching cultural activity, namely dancing ngoma. In the sequence of the published reproductions of his photographic studies, the first image presented the Zulu diviner in isolation. Subsequently, his reintegration into the scene becomes apparent when on one photograph he acts as an illustration of the former picture. It is possible to argue that, as compared to Lady Barker, Duggan-Cronin's motivation was more sophisticated, but that he dissected what Lady Barker had left as a whole. And neither Barker's nor Duggan- Cronin's portrayals left space for the accommodation of African and, more specifically, of healers' voices.

Illustration 21: A Zulu diviner singled out Illustration 22: A Zulu diviner with a party of pupils, for study posing as if involved in dancing

At first, and this emphasises the ethnographic approach, head-dress and goat-skin were explained as symbols of culture. The typological explanation went that "his dead-dress signifies power, and the goat-skin breast plates (izinqwamba) show that he is professionally qualified and are a token of his former success."12 No explanation was provided with regard to what the isangoma actually did, and what his powers were. The descriptions centred on the equation of materials with symbolic meaning. The second photograph was explained as a

12 Duggan-Cronin, Bantu Tribes, plate cix. 177 scene of people who had different functions in the diviner's entourage.13 Again, the izangoma and the ngoma party are taken out of their social context. Ngoma was presented as an isolated, autonomous cultural style and not as part of a cultural process within which ngoma belonged to a range of activities such as divination, entertainment and health management. The photograph also obscured and concealed that ngoma was performed in a community rather than on the depopulated veld, and with the community asking questions and waiting for messages to be delivered. A snapshot of a more embedded scene can be found in Vivian Tedder's collection of photographs of the people of the Thousand Hills. Her photograph, published in 1968 but taken already before 1906, captured a complex scene of various people engaged in an exercise of negotiating health.14

Illustration 23: A divination session in Natal, originally published in 1906, reprinted in 1968

The scene, slightly darkish in outlook, was arranged as a circle, with the diviner and the patient's health manager in focus, the patient discernible only by his or her outstretched legs. At the margin of the centre two assistants of the diviner can be identified, behind them a goat probably intended either for sacrifice or as part of the payment. Other people watch the scene

13 ibid., plate cx. 14 Tedder, People of a Thousand Hills. The original photograph, taken by the Mariannhill Trappist Mission, appeared in Müller, 'Wahrsagerei'. 178 from positions arranged on various concentric rings around the centre. As compared to Duggan-Cronin's photographs, Tedder creates a more intense scene which some contemplators may also have experienced as more frightening. In her photograph the viewer is less in control of the scene as there is a lot of communication going on between the people depicted within the scene. The viewer is close to this communication, but he remains excluded from it. Such an arrangement of actors was unusual and was never repeated in any of the later, more commercially orientated books. A passion for observed detail, a desire for grounded expertise, an appreciation and the enactment of elegance form a mixture of the constituting elements which can all be detected in the drawings of Barbara Tyrrell. Her elaborate drawings were published at approximately the same time as Vivian Tedder's photographs, recording with admiration and insight the elaborate details of many izangoma's outfits. Movement was translated into pose; the recording of multifaceted details was enacted like an aesthetic remedy against the general acceleration of urban life and the ever more hectic rhythm of the time. Tyrrell's drawings were the reminiscing reflection of a tribal world immersed in rural traditions, depicted in pencil colour and transposed in the language of an adoring artist.

Illustration 24: Drawing from Barbara Tyrrell Illustration 25: Drawing from Barbara Tyrrell entitled "Shangane witch-doctors", entitled "Bhaca diviner" with much adoration of detail

179

Barbara Tyrrell took an inventory of costume whereby she was less concerned with symbolic meaning than with material, colour and style of wearing. People constituted another area of her interest, and she dwelled on the characters of the men and women with whom she worked. This provided, rather frequently, a second level to her texts: "My male sangoma was a leading witch in the Cathedral Park area, a most eloquent and outgoing personality."15 A third level of her text included descriptions of what seers, diviners and sorcerers – whom she indiscriminately called witches, wizards and witch-doctors as well – actually did. An enormous amount of appreciation becomes apparent in the way she described what she saw.

Ancestral spirits govern tribal life from cradle to grave and hlonipa or 'respect' customs are owed to them as well as to the living. If a young bride fails to hlonipa in proper manner she insults, not only her in-laws, but also her ancestral spirits. She may err in this manner unwittingly and if trouble comes the witch-doctor will discover her mistake and ascertain which of the ancestors is offended.16

The majority of her texts were composed with due consideration for giving the portrayed people a face and personality, even though not a name.17 Involvement was Tyrrell's key to abandoning reservation. The photographer Alice Mertens also advanced involvement, albeit in a more dramatic form. In her collection of photographs, which reached the market in the 1970s, a female diviner can be seen running towards the viewer. She emerged out of the wilderness, it appeared, and the caption to the photograph explained that she was "a Zulu witchdoctor reported to have great power. She comes from the Vryheid district."18 The scene, enacted on the photograph as if it formed part of a film, belongs to a chapter on Shenge, a hereditary herbalist and diviner. The photographer, the anthropologist and a "local man", with whom the two cooperated on their research trips, had paid him a visit.

15 Tyrrell, Tribal Peoples, p. 132. 16 ibid., p. 132. 17 One of her other publications was Tyrrell, Barbara. Suspicion is my Name. Cape Town 1971. 18 Mertens/ Schoeman, The Zulu, pl. 166. 180

Illustration 26: A Zulu diviner, creating the impression as if running towards the viewer

Involvement that, to a limited degree, even amounted to interaction was also suggested by the manner in which the story was told. Mertens' was the text of a personal encounter between the photographer and an authentic diviner-herbalist, Shenge. The photographs did not indicate whether any of the images in the collection actually portrayed him. With the suggestion of personal involvement and mutual interaction a notion of mystery and adventure entered the publication: Mertens, the observer, had actually seen. But Shenge did not act as a voice of the divining profession, he was introduced as a token of an actual experience, who endowed the encounter with authenticity, and the author's narrative with legitimacy. The viewer happened to be even closer when looking at the "two novice diviners with white clay on their bodies", a photograph that was part of a collection published in 1984 by Jean Morris and Ben Levitas. The twasa were seated decorously in the foreground of a photograph – just like two people exhibited behind the glass of a shop window. This way one could gaze at them as one would at a commodity on display. "Their dress is a mixture of traditional and western, as the large collection of inflated goat bladders on their heads and the

181 decorative slippers testify."19 This description differed from the captions accompanying the photographs chosen so far as it indicated an admixture of styles that seemed to contradict each other. The description insinuated ambivalence and mockery, whereby the slippers were dismissed as decoration and, hence, categorised as less important, less authentic, and not to be taken too seriously, while the impressively inflated goat bladders deserved genuine and more thorough wonder. The combination of styles imparted a notion of "weirdness" upon their attire as much as on the wearers, and turned the scene on the photograph almost into a "masquerade", thus calling into question what the women represented. The description was derived from the notion that tradition and modernity were contrasting categories, each belonging to different realities and which, if mingled with each other, evoked and resulted in confusion. That, in this instance, it was the confusion of those who read into the picture a contradiction of styles rather than interpreting this as the self-confidence of those who amalgamated said styles, was not taken into consideration.

Illustration 27: Amatwasa, as if on display in a shop window

19 Morris/ Levitas, South African Tribal Life, pl. 253. 182

Tradition and modernity, science and experience, were categories set in opposition to one another in the book's corresponding chapter on "religion, magic and belief" where the author argued that African people pursued numerous approaches to achieve health which were sometimes, but not always, at variance with western ones. It could be argued that in some of the later publications readers or, rather, viewers were being encouraged to take a closer look. This does, though, prove as being deceptive as more often than not the viewer was removed from the actual scene more stringently than in the scenes taken from a more revering distance. The closer the lens of the camera was focused on diviners, the more detail and sophistication of an embedded cultural practice was actually being neglected. The nearer the lens peered, the less the voices of the protagonists became discernible. The camera, even though itself invisible, put a distance between the photographers and their subject, and exactly this distance was passed on and conveyed to the viewer. The cameras did, in fact, turn the photographers into the heroes of the situation, into pioneers who reported back to their own community images of unheard novelty as much as hitherto unseen scenes. It might well be that photographing people always entails violation, entails seeing them as they do not see themselves, and gaining a knowledge of the subject of the photograph that they themselves can actually not have.20 With these photographs it was certainly the case that the captured images turned people into objects that could , in their symbolical representation, be possessed. Once apartheid had ended, Peter Magubane launched a collection of photographs intended to describe and record African cultural ways of life. Healers were modelled once more on older, more familiar images as wearing "long white, beaded headdresses in acknowledgement of their association with the shades of the underworld." Displaying the country's new gender awareness, the description added that "most diviners are female but men also enter the profession if called by the ancestors to do so. Many of these make diviners cross-dress and may also learn to fashion the beaded items commonly worn by diviners".21

Illustration 28: Face to face with two diviners in a post-apartheid publication (overleaf)

20 Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York 1977, p. 14. 21 Magubane, Vanishing Cultures, pp. 52-53. 184

On an enlarged photograph, two friendly-looking diviners seem, by their broad smiles, intent on welcoming their viewers into the new, by now African South Africa. They indicate that in post-apartheid South Africa divination, in word and image, has become largely synonymous with Zulu culture.

Silence, Difference and Fixation Against the backdrop of a segregated society and, later, against the backdrop of a society that termed its ideas about difference through the policy of apartheid, silence, difference and fixation were three of the key structures for understanding healing. The determination to render different and to segregate was, of course, never fully devoid of an inclination to conserve, protect and raise. The desire to silence and to fix was, clearly, a reflection of power. Photography was, in many ways, as if a mirror was being held in front of African people, including healers, so that they appeared as objects available for consumption. In the coffee table books the mirror was invariably held by non-African people while the consumers were always non-African people as well. Taken as a metaphor, consumption could perhaps be interpreted as a process in the course of which the mirror devoured the people, swallowed their lives and sucked dry their blood so that little more than a silent, lifeless shell remained.22 It went hand in hand with this quality of consumption that one of the main undercurrents of commercially marketed coffee table books was to propagate and assert the notion that it was still possible to subject people without necessarily destroying or inhibiting their cultural autonomy.23 Photography enjoyed a very close relation to reality, even though the motifs it sought out were artificial and were peered at through a lens. It has been argued that photographic narratives work with connotations and that they are frequently understood, at least implicitly, as an eye-witnessing rather than as the conscious construction of a story. Photographs may mimic and copy scenes, or they may misrepresent objects, but people looking at them will experience them as real. Images may distort, they do, though, possess enormously evocative power and thus convey a firm sense of realism. Words have to be added to the photographic narrative in order to alleviate some of the multiplicity and ambiguity of meanings that arise from the pictures alone. The combination of photographs and texts, in turn, takes away much

22 Root, Deborah. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder 1996, p. 2. 23 Wirz, Albert. 'Beobachtete Beobachter: Zur Lektüre völkerkundlicher Fotografien', in: Brauen, Martin (ed), Fremden-Bilder. Eine Publikation zu den Ausstellungen "Frühe ethnographische Fotografie" und "Die exotische Bilderflut". Zürich 1982, pp. 44-60, here p. 55. 185 of the vagueness inherent in images and renders the impression of reality as a reliable experience for the viewer rather than as an ambiguous one.24 The dynamics between text and images can be multi-faceted, at times co-existing with each other and influencing the reader-viewer to about the same degree. At other times, texts may provide the material within which photographs are positioned so that the photographs would be embedded in the textual message. The relation could be inverted, in which case texts may appear to be framed within the messages that arise from dominant visual material. Another variant, a critical relationship between photographs and texts, may emerge once verbal and visual devices comment upon one another. In many instances, however, a relationship of dependence marks the tension between text and image and in these instances, texts might be unable to exist without images, or vice versa.25 Any of these potential relations may be fruitful. Silence and fixation, however, are likely to occur due to specifically imbalanced or mismatched dynamics between text and image and should be considered with caution in the subsequent analysis of coffee table books. Inasmuch as the conveyance of meaning through photographs is concerned, the effect of images is inescapably ambiguous or vague. It is, therefore, difficult to assume that a particular univocal message emanates from or is conveyed by pictures or, to put it differently, that it is, due to the vagueness or ambiguity of images not at all clear what considerations the viewer is expected to have, or what line of argumentation the contemplator is supposed to follow. If the appeal or impact of the photographs is not completely clear, it can just as much not be obvious what concessions the viewer will make. The vagueness and ambiguity of photographs makes it, consequently, in many respects, impossible to discern from the pictorial publications a clear-cut and unequivocal message, or argument, which would emanate from them.26 At the same time it must be taken into account that images published in illustrated books about South Africa were anything but vague. They were published in specific years against the background of particular events, and within the general setting or context of apartheid. All through the period during which coffee table books became articles for mass consumption, the photographic representations conveyed their message against the backdrop of a confidently construed philosophy, in fact against the backdrop of at least two confidently held philosophies: the first of them being racism and apartheid, while the second consisted of projections of culture and traditions in terms of alterity.

24 Berger, John/ Mohr, Jean. Eine andere Art zu erzählen. München 1984, p. 279. 25 Helmers, Marguerite/ Hill, Charles A. 'Introduction', in: Hill, Charles A./ Helmers, Marguerite (ed). Defining Visual Rhetorics. Mahwah 2004, pp. 1-23, here p. 14. 26 Blair, J. Anthony. 'The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments', in: Hill, Charles A./ Helmers, Marguerite (ed). Defining Visual Rhetorics. Mahwah 2004, pp. 41-61, here p. 46. 186

Historically, photography was an innovative technique brought forth by the industrial age, which did not form part of a heritage or a tradition.27 And yet it was used in coffee table books to depict just that. More than a century and a half ago colonial photography began to insert colonisers into the colonial scene and started, thereby, to create visual arguments of colonial realities. Visual representations were often a "play and make-believe", but less so of actors staging a performance to be photographed, and rather more so of photographers who transformed the seen into a scene. Activities such as taking photographs and disseminating them to overseas consumers were integral aspects of spreading universal knowledge about African societies and of marking as distinct the allegedly characteristic features of other people's culture. Frequently, photographs were arranged in a type of "then-and-now" style, depicting people who had "developed" from a "previous" stage of civilisation to an "advanced" stage by the time the photographs were prepared for publication. Missionaries in particular who, at the beginning of their mission activities, were often convinced of the cultured status of the people as whose benefactors they wished to act, used photography in mission journals to help create a perception of the environment in which they worked and of the spirit in which they worked.28 Their photographs and engravings were not only meticulous in detail and carefully arranged for viewers. Texts and photos, especially still lives, created a surprisingly positive outlook on traditional culture as a counter-weight to encroaching colonialism.29 This critique ran in parallel with the notion that it was necessary to record and to preserve by fixing that which was on the verge of extinction. This dually directed ambition did, in its own turn, prioritise a particular style of recording and presenting, namely that of concentrating on symbolic meanings. Symbols resisted, to a large extent, individualistic interpretation. They were over-determined by customary usage, and they determined themselves what customs were supposed to be. It was all too evident that the representation of African life in symbols rarely took on a reflective, individual meaning. Only interpretation could bring the symbolic signs back to life, and thereby took away the voice of Africans in such publications as the coffee table books. In colonial photography the capturing of photographic images was additionally an activity through which photographers pried into areas where African rulers exercised power independent of colonial control. Thus photographs became a means of imagining the exertion

27 Barthes, Roland. The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980. Berkeley 1985, p. 353. 28 Kirkaldy, Alan/ Wirz, Albert. Picturing the Soul: Missionary Encounters in Late-Nineteenth-Century Vendaland and Beyond. (Working Papers on African Societies 44). Berlin 2000. 29 Jenkins, Paul. 'The Earliest Generations of Missionary Photographers in West Africa and the Portrayal of Indigenous People and Culture.' History in Africa 20 (1993), pp. 89-118. 187 of power over spheres of which colonial regimes had not yet achieved actual control.30 In the Foucaultian tradition, the surveillance of the gaze counts among the chief instruments of domination, whether over the criminal, the insane, or the subject peoples of the Empire. "It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection."31 While colonial pictures classified "tribes" and confirmed notions of a particularly ordered society, they also acted as a protective shield behind which the eye of the observer remained veiled.32 It is due to this veil that it is difficult to assume an instrumental link between the photographs in illustrated books and healers' subdued existence in South Africa. Just as photographs of empty landscapes did not necessarily attract hundreds of white settlers,33 pictures of artfully posing Africans did not freeze the culture of which African healing formed a part. And yet they reflected, and influenced, perceptions to which healers themselves also became sensitive, especially as they tried to capture the dominating perceptions and to appropriate them in their favour. At first sight it might well cause some astonishment that in order to provide a conceptual framework for the analysis of photographs published in commercially marketed coffee table books, the analysis of colonial photography should be taken into account. Potentially the question will be raised as to why the photo-journalism of the 1970s and 1980s would not furnish the appropriate perspectives required for comparison. In South African photo-journalism the 1970s did, in fact, leave their mark as the volatile years, while the 1980s became to be regarded as the belligerent years. More recently the 1990s photographically imprinted themselves as the contrasting years, with more blood, more optimism, more euphoria and a greater portion of disillusionment showing up.34 For reasons that will have to be explored in more detail further below, however, colonial photography provided much more of a backdrop against which the photography utilised in coffee table books developed. Photography in lavishly illustrated publications was so extremely immersed in enduring tropes as much as in the permanence of colonial conceptions about culture that it was immensely and almost unbelievably removed from the traditions of contemporary photo- journalism. Indeed the immersion of the pictorial ethics of coffee table books in colonial

30 Prins, Gwyn. 'The Battle For Control of the Camera in Late Nineteenth Century Western Zambia.' African Affairs 89 (1990), pp. 97-105. 31 Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York 1977, p. 187. 32 Pinney, Christopher. 'Classification and Fantasy in the Photographic Construction of Case and Tribe.' Visual Anthropology 3 (1990), pp. 259-288. 33 Hayes, Patricia/ Silvester, Jeremy/ Hartmann, Wolfram. 'Photography, History and Memory', in: Hartmann, Wolfram/ Silvester, Jeremy/ Hayes, Patricia (ed). The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History. Cape Town 1998, pp. 2-9. 34 Raditlhalo, Sam. 'Vanishing Cultures? Authority, Authorising and Representation in South African Photography: A Review Article.' Kronos 27 (2001), pp. 249-260, here p. 253. 188 styles almost always prevented viewers from comparing the different traditions as rival photographic modes. Photography set in motion the rhetorics of agents who, each in their own way, lived in worlds cut off from "the other". In this process voices, the subjectivity of the agents and the power to shape and approve visual styles were distributed on an uneven scale. Keywords such as encapsulation, translation and fixation are, perhaps, best suited to capture the communicative style induced by the pictorial arrangements. For viewers and consumers of photographs, on the one hand, it was possible to approach what was seen by assertion, and concomitantly, to retreat from argumentation. All that was necessary in illustrated books was to create the vision of something and to re-enact it through realistic representations.35 In this way, the viewers were accorded the powerful position to distance themselves, and of being able to grasp a scene that was presented in a domesticating photographic frame.36 Ethnographers, on the other hand, can be trusted for their openness to the experiences of those they portrayed and described. They are known for their professional curiosity for understanding the ways of life of people who live according to their own traditions. Generally speaking, one may assume that ethnographic photographers conceived of themselves as academic interpreters, and brokers of cultural messages. Communicating to people in a didactic way and as minutely and as truthfully as possible that what they had in actuality encountered ranked highly among their priorities. They certainly hoped to render translation possible by means of documentation. Dedicated ethnographers and photographers documented, consequently, what was considered to be on the verge of extinction in order to conserve this knowledge for subsequent generations. Photography was, thereby, turned into a complex form and mode of communication. It enacted the unique in relation to the general, the "other" in relation to the familiar. The viewer could, and had to, decide what was the general, or the familiar and the photographer, or those agents who arranged the photographs, tried to insert into this notion of generality and familiarity images which showed the particular. With regard to coffee table books this setting of communication unfolded in the context of the commodification of culture, as much as within the context of the commodification of difference. In South Africa, the first attempt to present a systematically romanticised image of the Khoisan people, for instance, had taken place with an expedition of 1925/ 26. From this

35 Wirz, 'Beobachtete Beobachter, p. 46. 36 Bann, Stephen. '"Views of the Past" – Reflections on the Treatment of Historical Objects and Museums of History (1750-1850)', in: Fyfe, Gordon/ Law, John (ed). Picturing Power: Visual Depiction and Social Relations. London 1988, pp. 39-65. 189 expedition an illustrated book had emerged the texts of which imbued, even loaded, pictures with a culture, a morality and an imagination.37 Frequently, the commodification can be compared to consumption, a "hunger for flesh", a virtue that is seen as a source of pleasure and excitement.38 The strong aesthetics that drive the composition of African culture in an illustrated volume, often provide a means to abstract from scenes and people portrayed, from a particular social and cultural matrix and it becomes, therefore, possible to imagine them as something separate and transcendent that makes all violence and repression of history unthinkable.39 The essence that remains is a fascination with other cultures that exist outside the disasters of South African racial policies. Coffee table books gather what needs to be restored, become a means of healing themselves. And, as has been shown in previous chapters, the connections between healing and entertainment were, at times, extremely tight. It is a connection, however, in which the African voice remains silent. Silence attains, therefore, the role of a central aspect of the failed communication that arises from illustrated books which is, in parts, due to the fact that the photographed "object" does not participate in the message that is being put across in the coffee table books. It is, of course, possible to argue that in many instances, even in the days of technically sophisticated photography, the photographed person must always agree to "keep still" as, otherwise, the photographer would not be able to take the photographs which may, perhaps, be assessed in terms of collaboration.40 And, yet, the more important point to be considered rests in the fact that the persons portrayed were not informed about the contexts in which their photographs would be published. Silence surrounds, as well, the fact which is of particular relevance as regards the portrayal of healing cultures, that many aspects of healing were edited out of the pictures. Innovative photographs of healing were obviously considered not to match the taste of potential consumers and were, consequently, neglected. Last but not least, the books produced silence because their editors, authors and photographers did not reflect on the selection of criteria for publication. In an age of mass photography many more photographs are always being taken than will actually ever be published. A reflection on the criteria according to which the photographs were finally chosen would help the readers to contextualise and position the images at which the books invite them to look.

37 Gordon, Robert J. Picturing Bushmen: The Denver African Expedition of 1925. Athens 1997. 38 Root, Cannibal Culture, p. 9. 39 ibid., p. 18. 40 Wirz, 'Beobachtete Beobachter', p.47. 190

Denied Transformation: Alienations and Estrangements Even though the coffee table books, especially those published in the 1970s and 1980s, may have had little in common with any of the real life scenarios in the country where their images were shot, they must have appealed to the eye of the contemplator. The books' photography framed experiences and realities that lay beyond the everyday world of the observer, they fractured and re-composed the view on African culture.41 Photographs functioned as one-way interfaces for non-African people making up their minds, and asserting them, about Africans and African culture.42 The images reproduced as photographs responded, on the whole, to almost all the tropes mentioned in chapter 2. They confirmed an Africa of rural traditions, an Africa of people and customs which rendered natural landscapes truly colourful, and they created the illusion that this imagined Africa was under control. The pictorial representations suggested that to keep Africans separate was to enhance, and to actually protect, the autonomy of their culture. Notions of "race" permanently resonated in these tomes. As "race" was an imaginary category, the coffee table books provided discourse and a discursive lens through which Africans as a "race", and healers as part of this "race", were to be assessed. Discourse found its frame in actual political events or, in other words, what was being said and shown about "African tribes" has best to be "pictured" against the backdrop of actual race politics and conflicts over race in the country. Healers and their activities mostly appeared as a picturesque topic in the nexus of the cultural and the spiritual, rather than as a concern related to health and its maintenance. Diviners were more frequently portrayed than herbalists on the strength of the fact that they appeared to be more mystical. Moreover, as regards their spiritual dimension, healers were mostly relegated to the sphere of an adjunct to culture, rather than regarded as an independent focus of cultural interpretation. This portrayal of healing was emptied of its social dynamics and reduced to a set of cultural basics. Instead of an imparting of knowledge, a reduction of knowledge was arranged which offered to the consumers a vast space for projection. It is interesting to note that the majority of the photographs provided a positive outlook on African healing. Even though the texts often operated with the term of the "witchdoctor", witchcraft itself or its destructive social components was rarely ever alluded to. In deciding how the pictures should look, in preferring one take over another, photographers were imposing their own standards on their subjects and on features of healing.

41 Edwards, Elizabeth. 'Photography and the Performance of History.' Kronos 27 (2001), pp. 15-29. 42 Landau, Paul S. 'Empires of the Visual: Photography and Colonial Administration in Africa', in: Landau, Paul S./ Kaspin, Deborah D. (ed). Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley 2002, pp. 141-171. 191

Framing texts such as forewords, blurbs on the inside flaps and introductory paragraphs to the books highlighted the sentiment and vein in which African culture was edited for these publications. These short paragraphs provided a notion or concept of the general spirit in which African culture was to be processed and against which, more specifically, readings of healers and their activities were expected to occur. Rather condensed, forewords, texts on the inside flaps and introductory paragraphs channelled the tensions which later ran through the amalgamated narratives of word and image. At first sight they appeared to be composed on a deceptively simple level while, conversely, they did point to deeply contested cultural values. Those tensions that existed between the visual and the verbal representations were inseparable from struggles in cultural politics and political culture.43 They did not become immediately apparent from a first glance at the illustrated books. Readers probably read, conceptualised and grasped in a different way if they were aware of the gaps that existed in the discourse and if they recognised the arrangement of the scenes. The pictorial scenarios did not help readers to grasp the overall tensions in the country, but it was possible that readers had these in mind when leafing through the publications and when marvelling at the pictures. The photographers, artists and ethnographers were most definitely aware of them, and the question has to be posed how they translated this awareness into their work. Barbara Tyrrell, having travelled through rural South Africa between 1944 and 1962, produced towards the late 1960s and assisted by Killie Campbell, a "standard work on the subject: an authority for scholars, a delight for collectors, and a revelation to all those who will find the text a fascinating account of ways of life completely different from anything to be seen anywhere else on earth."44 In a parallel universe, the National Party was voted into power, and the milestones of apartheid legislation were instituted. The 1960 massacre of peaceful protestors demonstrating against Pass Laws in the African township of Sharpeville, made visible and obvious the scale of official brutality – sixty-nine men and women were shot dead. Through the 1960s large numbers of Africans were removed to the Bantustans from farms under white ownership, from towns and so-called "black spots", black-owned land in areas designated as "white" by the state. Some 39% of Africans were living in the Bantustans in 1960, while by 1980 the figure was to reach 53%.45 Barbara Tyrrell's specific interest focused on tribal dress, but she also showed concern about the dignity of the people who modelled the attire for her to draw. She chose to publish the "portraits of real persons drawn

43 Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago 1994, pp. 1-8. 44 Tyrrell, Tribal Peoples, front flap. 45 Marks, Shula/ Trapido, Stanley. 'South Africa since 1976: An Historical Perspective', in: Johnson, Shaun (ed). South Africa: No Turning Back. London 1988, pp. 1-51, here p. 13. 192 in their homes and in traditional posture" and explained that she and her models preferred a "solemn appearance" rather in distinction from engravings in which people "showed their teeth like dogs".46 Tyrrell's diligent and carefully executed drawings became popular because the book conserved a beauty, appreciation and dignity that was otherwise alien in South Africa. Working with text and illustrations, and aimed at a mass readership, the majority of the books presented "convenient parcels of photography and text", through which coffee table book producers intended to "leave an impression less superficial than to be obtained on a quick, conducted tour of Zululand, and [which] yet avoid[ed] leading the reader along the devious paths of social research".47 It becomes evident from this foreword that for people who wished to be more than tourists, African culture was turned into a picturesque programme, easy to digest, with artefacts of the living museum on display. Academic research was included as a legitimising underpinning of these publications, endowing the books with interpretive solidity, a promise of seriousness and never dominating the messages emanating from the pictures. Frequently, photographs took time out of the projections. They froze whole traditions into a colourful moment, disconnected these moments from present, past and future, and imposed nostalgic glimpses onto something peculiarly lively, yet doomed to die, as authors continued to emphasise. Consumers of coffee table books were invited to stroll through the "beauty of tribal life in the Transkei [because] it was a matter of urgency that we capture this life before it vanished."48 The coffee table book readers became the adventurous pioneers of bygone days. Paying tribute to their own sentimental feelings and completely omitting any recording of the voices of Africans, writers and photographers at other times "enjoyed surprising interludes of gay tribal life."49 As if he were removed from the political events of the time, a publisher of a coffee table book, who must have been completely alienated from South African realities, mused in 1976 that

strictly speaking, the tribal people of Southern Africa have ceased to exist. So much has changed, so much is changing, so much has already been lost. Dr Martin West and Jean Morris have collaborated to create an image in words and pictures of what remains of the traditional African way of life in South Africa. All the major groups are described; their customs, rituals and dress are shown and the meanings discussed. This is a record of a way of life centuries old but now, inexorably, drawing to an end. It may well be that at some point in the future, all that will remain of this proud heritage will be its oblique reflection in the new emerging black society.50

46 ibid., non-paginated introduction. 47 ibid., Mertens/ Schoeman, Zulu, foreword. 48 Mertens/ Broster, African Elegance, prologue. 49 ibid. 50 West/ Morris, Abantu, front flap. 193

While in the country people were shot, arrested and prohibited from any rightful participation in society, publishers set out to document in images an ancient Africa in a style that implied the creation of a garden of remembrance rather than that of a documentation appropriate for the times. While the Bantustan policy led to the emergence of several "independent homelands", starting with the "independence" of the Transkei in 1976, over and over again, a feeling of gratitude was expressed by the authors when they realised "how many people there are, black and white, who are just as anxious as I am to conserve the knowledge of culture and the way of life of the Zulu traditionalists."51 Read against the violence of the day it is difficult to discern and ascertain whether these were remarks of ignorance, desperation, or escapism. It is, at least with hindsight, possible to read into some of the forewords a tone of ambivalence. An immensely popular publication of 1984, South African Tribal Life Today, drew attention to the inadequacy of traditions and old ways of life for people who had to cope with the challenges of contemporary life in South Africa. Yet again, as a reminder of the political agenda of those days, a new constitution introduced in 1984 the tri-cameral parliament with separate chambers for "Whites", "Indians" and "Coloureds", excluding systematically Africans from participation in the central decision-making and representative institutions of the state. Election boycotts led to a poor turnout at the polling stations, and resistance reached a new quality with the United Democratic Front coordinating the resistance activities of a broad spectrum of churches, trade unions and political groupings. The government responded with the policy of "total strategy", a bundle of military and civilian policies aimed at guaranteeing "national security". The lavishly illustrated book published at this time prepared the reader for a portrayal of African culture which would show that in these days indigenous and traditional customs underwent multifaceted, often vibrant adaptations to contemporary life.

Tribal life today is in a state of flux and of transition. Traditional established ways, based on tribal experience, are no longer adequate or capable of providing satisfactory solutions to problems now being encountered by detribalised people, particularly those who have moved away from their tribal lands. A breakdown of tribal bonds is affecting all the Bantu-speaking people, whether they live in the homelands or in the urban areas. This process of change and of urbanization has dislocated the lifestyle of the ex-tribal person, and left him in a transitory state with two value systems, one tribal, the other western. Such a state of dislocation is not a comfortable one to be in, and widespread social problems manifest themselves and remain endemic until a new balance is reached. Although this state of balance may be eluding many, there are countless others that are adapting well to the virtues and vices of so called "westerni- zation". It is not however, the intention of this book to highlight some of the unsavoury or

51 Elliott, Aubrey. Sons of Zulu. London and Johannesburg 1978, acknowledgements. 194

unfortunate effects of these changes, although the authors are well aware of their existence. It is our intention merely to record the last remnants of a way of life that is rapidly passing away.52

The perceived tensions between tradition and modernity were treated and dealt with as a self- contained cultural topic, unrelated to the broader contexts in which the lamented vanishing culture underwent change and transformation. The coffee table books took their consumers on a trip in search of culturally self-sufficient entities. Culture was a residual category, interaction a taboo. "Whites", "Coloureds" and "Indians" had seemingly steadfast and immutable identities which could not be contested. African communities were seen and categorised in terms of linguistic belonging as San, Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, Venda, Swazi, or North and Western Sotho, all of whom were deemed in need of identity.53 Notions of tradition and modernity, which at least healers themselves had never coined as the poles between which they positioned themselves, appeared to be irreconcilable with one another and functioned as a frame within which the original "naturalness" of ethnic cultures expired. It must probably be borne in mind that photographs are not capable of creating a moral position, it has been argued, though, that they can reinforce one and help build a nascent one.54 It is, in the end, still ideology in its broadest sense that determines what constitutes a reality. Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel, and they appease insofar as they bypass certain realistic scenarios. Within this broader concept of the photographical portrayal of African culture, concerns regarding healers and their activities rested with the spiritual rather than the physical or material realm. It rested with the so-called "traditional" rather than with the "progressive", a category once brought into play by healers themselves. One publication began

with a scene-setting chapter on the various ethnic groups of Southern Africa, followed by an illuminating and perhaps controversial account of their origins and history, the role of the chiefs or kings, and the importance of beliefs relating to the customs of the ancestors in a social context. A comprehensive description of the priest-diviners highlights the central role of these colourful individuals: as representatives of the ancestral spirits.55

This introduction made it quite clear that healers and the culture represented by them functioned as an illustration of an ancient, supposedly fixed spiritual realm that entertained no links to any of the so-called world religions in South Africa, and which, in contrast, reflected colourfully the monolithic disconnectedness of believers in African Religion from adherents

52 Morris/ Levitas, Tribal Life Today, preface. A similar argument is to be found in West/ Morris, Abantu. 53 Raditlhlalo, 'Vanishing Cultures?', p. 249. 54 Sontag, On Photography, p. 19. 55 Tyrrell/ Jurgens, African Heritage, front flap. 195 of world religions. While within South African realities such as adherents of African Religion were stigmatised, it seems that there was a readership, probably on the detached international market, that perceived and regarded the world of such ancient religiosity as stimulating and exotic. The approach towards the exoticism of African people's religion was not unique to this particular publication. Other books organised their explanations according to a similar philosophy and maintained, as well, that the spiritual part of African culture formed the crucial backbone of African lore and identity. As one book explicitly put it,

the significant point is that in Zulu traditional society, religion itself is based on a social philosophy which permeated all its culture; and that Zulu beliefs in magic and the things it can do revolve around social ambitions the Zulu feel are out to reach or difficult to realize. With the Zulu the fringes of the supernatural start at the limits of their social technology.56

This attitude stigmatised people as metaphysical and basically out of touch with modernity, and, even though usually stated less explicitly, served as a guideline in other publications as well. In The Zulus texts introduced extra headlines to describe on some eighty to hundred pages specific spiritual phenomena such as the "supreme being, living with the ancestors" or "the diviner".57 Others composed small passages of text in the form of a dialogical conversation between the author himself and one Madala, whom he called "my old friend – about "the Sangoma". The dialogue revolved around manipulative medicines, a common preoccupation of visitors to African herbalism. "My old friend told me. He patted the waistband of his fur apron. 'Under here I have got it,' he said. 'Strong medicine, very strong. It cost me an ox, but if I don't have it my family will die. They will be kicked in the night because the people across the other side are still very angry.' I was puzzled."58 The Magic of the Xhosa contained three chapters on the world of "ancestor worship", "the witch-doctor" and "characters in magic".59 These chapters included photographs of plants and birds which were explained to symbolise the interconnectedness between African Religion, spirits and nature. In general, for many photographers, to portray a non-Christian, non-Muslim, non-Hindu, and non-Jewish religion meant to portray picturesque diviners because it was difficult to find symbols, holy places, material culture, edifices or documents that would have represented African Religion straight-forwardly.60 As a result, the bulk of the photographs turned diviners into rather undisputed focal points of a religion which, in the common knowledge about

56 Mertens/ Schoeman, Zulu, last non-paginated page in chapter 7. 57 Mack, John. Zulus. London 1980. 58 Elliott, Sons of Zulu, pp. 133-134. 59 Elliott, Magic of the Xhosa, pp. 104-136. 60 This was undertaken later, after the ending of apartheid, and will be taken up in chapter 7. 196 religions, did not possess a clearly defined repository of images. Diviners were photogenic and could be interpreted in terms of their function as holder of priestly office and as spiritual authorities, an interpretation that especially in the South African context could be fundamentally challenged.61 In South Africa, religion was structured around the household, and within the household it was the male head of the family, or the elders, who performed important rituals. The diviner was not as central as the photographs suggested him or her to be. Even though Zulu religion was generally conceived of as "the ancestor cult of the traditional Zulu [which] is, therefore, more an extension of their social knowledge to the darker field of human experience,"62 many captions implied a relaxation that could be experienced in the cosiness of one's armchair rather than excitement: "In the shade of a tree in their mentor's homestead, novice diviners pound roots for medicines. Novices often spend months learning from their instructor and training can be an expensive business."63 Other descriptions ran along similar lines. "The old witch-doctor and her retinue pause at the foot of historic Chief Ndlambe's throne before commencing a rainmaking demonstration."64 The image depicted a decorous group before starting off their ceremony, completely at rest. The photograph of "an isangoma (witchdoctor) at work"65 created an impression of happiness and ease, whereas a photograph which was captioned "holding a séance"66 allowed at least a glimpse at the group dynamics that were about to take place. The group photographs created an effect of obedience, pictures at which it was possible to look with delighted curiosity. "An interesting gathering of men and women I met at a kraal at the Tugella Ferry area" was probably the most badly staged composition of people who did not relate to each other as a group at all.67 And, yet, it suggested the thrill of travelling in a remote African world, in which it was possible to just encounter strange things one unexpectedly happened to come along a planned itinerary. As far as religion is concerned, the 1970s and 1980s, the time span during which most of the coffee table books were published, were a period in which African Theology and Black Theology, in interconnected ways, started to concentrate on liberation and on the conscious

61 Mndende, Nokuzola. 'From Racial Oppression to Religious Oppression: African Religion in the New South Africa', in: Walsh, Thomas G./ Kaufmann, Frank (ed). Religion and Social Transformation in Southern Africa. St. Paul Minnesota 1999, pp. 143-155; Mndende, Nokuzola. 'From Underground Praxis to Recognized Religion: Challenges Facing African Religions.' Journal for Study of Religion 11: 2 (1998), pp. 115-124. 62 Mertens/ Schoeman, Zulu. 63 West/ Morris, Abantu, pl. 113. 64 Elliott, Magic of the Xhosa, p. 123. 65 Mertens/ Schoeman, Zulu, pl. 164 66 Elliott, Magic of the Xhosa, p. 131. 67 Elliott, Sons of Zulu, pp. 24-25. 197 incorporation of African cultural elements into Christianity which especially the majority of the formerly mission-derived mainstream churches had lost. Independent Christianity was more positively regarded and assessed. African Theology and Black Theology cultivated an interest in African traditions, which they often understood, from a pan-Africanist christological perspective, as a preparing ground for their own Christianity. Elements of African culture were identified, and emphasised as essential in the religious practice of African Christians, being taken as a starting point for cultural self-assertion and, therefore, forming part of a growing consciousness against oppression and racism.68 The theological debate focused on churches, mainstream as much as African Independent, and not on the merely faintly institutionalised African Religion, in spite of the reality that many Africans were practitioners of both African Religion and Christianity. This constituted another striking feature of the heavily illustrated books. The majority of Africans professed Christianity, either in churches which had grown out of former mission churches or in one of the many African Independent Churches, many of which included diviners who healed the needy. Coffee table books did neither portray Christianity as a major religion of the African majority, nor did they depict and describe diviners as part of encompassing church structures. Healers and diviners were, instead, dissociated from this context and modelled, to use once more a common designation of the coffee table books, as "colourful individuals". To the majority of the consumers of these books the controversy between theologies would probably not have been of interest as it did not touch upon their own immediate spiritual concerns. It would, however, have provided a genuine "African concern" as regards religious heritages on the continent. Books created pictorial narratives by repetition rather than argument. Firstly, they arranged their material either according to ethnic groups or, secondly, they endorsed stages of the life cycle. Within this frame healers often appeared as being themselves the bearers of artefacts or artistically constructed fossils. Many of them were turned into objects in bust portraits. Photographs also showed the thus objectified person from top to toe. Indeed, portraiture was one of the key photographic techniques through which the cultural significance of healers was communicated.

68 Schoffeleers, 'Christ as the Medicine-Man, pp. 11 - 28; representing African Theology: Setiloane, Gabriel M. Der Gott meiner Väter und mein Gott: Afrikanische Theologie im Kontext der Apartheid. Wuppertal 1988 198

Illustration 29: An igqira captioned "Young Woman Witch-Doctor"

Illustration 30: Photograph of a diviner, caption reads "A bold look from a youthful Zulu diviner 199

Illustration 31: A photograph entitled "A herbalist at work – a variety of medicines are kept in the containers"

200

Illustration 32: A Zulu diviner, taken from a chapter of a coffee table book on the significance of the ancestors in Zulu culture

201

Pictorial narratives worked in connection with their accompanying captions and comments whereby many of them referred to the inventory of material culture which the objectified human bodies put on display. "A young woman witch-doctor with the fur of a wild animal as her headdress and the dried gall-bladder of a sacrificed white goat as part of the neck-wear" read the caption explainingthe igqira's outfit in one of the pictures above.69 Furthermore, captions and comments served to create and evoke a mood, an atmosphere of mystery and thrill that stood in a relationship of tension with the "objective" description of what was on display. One caption, for instance, when describing the facial expression of the isangoma in the photograph, conveyed a feeling of mystery, while it exuded the charm of a cataloguing entry when it referred to the regalia the woman put on display.

A bold look from a youthful Zulu diviner. Strips of goatskin crossed over her chest and a switch of cow-hair or, traditionally, the tail of a wildebeest, are sure signs of her profession. The masses of metal bracelets worked from wire bought at the trading store are highly-prized ornaments for arms and legs.70

A "bold look" was perhaps to be read as an unambiguous invitation, in particular as the description went on, with some sexual connotations, to refer to "strips", "her chest", "arms and legs". A similarly mixed or ambiguous atmosphere which, on the one hand, reminded the observers of the secrets allegedly surrounding any diviner and which, on the other hand, provided a kind of geographical information, was evoked by the caption of a photograph which read "A Zulu witchdoctor reported to have great powers. She comes from the Vryheid district".71 The allusion to "great powers" coupled with some brief information which contained the holder of the great powers in a precise locality, suggested a glimpse into both unexplored African worlds and cartographically determinable space. In rare instances only, diviners were reduced to "a colourful character" without further comment.72 One photograph was embellished with the narrative of a diviner's initiation path.

Amongst the Zulu both men and women can become diviners. The Zulu believe that the spirits decide on suitable candidates and possess them. The chosen person then starts to have numerous and extraordinary dreams and becomes ill. The illness is treated by an experienced diviner, who, in the course of treatment, teaches the person the secrets of the profession.73

69 Elliott, Magic of the Xhosa, p. 114. 70 West/ Morris, Abantu, illustration no. 52. 71 Mertens/ Schoeman, pl. 66. 72 Elliott, Zulu, p. 24. 73 Mack, Zulus, p. 28. 202

This caption was almost technical-didactic in its nature. It did not convey any of the spectacular allusions that many other captions triggered off. A considerable number of photographs held this kind of information. "A herbalist at work – a variety of medicines are kept in the containers" was one of the concise captions which encapsulated neither sensation nor horror.74 "A Pedi diviner reads the 'bones'" was a comment fashioned in a similar mode.75 In another of these scenes, the healers' activities received more elaborate description, and may be seen as an equivalent to the description of the diviner's initiation procedures mentioned above.

Throwing the bones. This method is used by certain diviners, notably among the Sotho. The 'bones' consist of a variety of objects including small animal bones, shells, stones and more modern oddments. They are usually in pairs, one to represent the male and the other the female and, with the exception of one or two 'indicators', most are identified with specific totems. Thrown upon a mat, each item represents some part of the solution to a problem and the diviner studies the pattern carefully before pronouncing her finding.76

The majority of the descriptions, however, were brief, doing little to nothing towards providing a potential frame within which readers could have placed their interest to learn more about diviners and divination as parts of African culture. Through intersections of photographs and text, a particular popular knowledge about healers and their activities was provided. The combination of photographs and texts implied that the photographers and writers knew about what they photographed and described, and the readers were in a position to accept things as the camera recorded them. This represented the exact opposite of understanding, which would have started from not accepting the world as it looked. The photographs of diviners and divination neglected major aspects of this part of African culture, clearly designed as a strategy to avoid causing irritation "within" their consumers. Blood sacrifices were not shown. Nor were actual scenes of divination, trance or possession presented. Even though the coffee table books were keen on presenting the exotic, they obviously drew a line between what they considered as being marketable as exotic and what they suspected of being too embarrassing or too bewildering to the taste of the consumers targeted. The coffee table books only marginally played on notions of disgust and mild irritation. They showed, for instance, a pot containing a "concocted medicine" which was elaborated on as including "bats wings, crushed beetles, [and] the fat of a puff-adder," or, in another case, "toes of rats, ground and dried locusts and the burnt feathers of a black

74 Mertens/ Schoeman, Zulu, pl. 165. 75 Morris/ Levitas, South African Tribal Life, pl. 245. 76 West/ Morris, Abantu, pl. 112. 203 bird."77 These were descriptions which possibly sent shivers down the spines of some readers, and which yet differed from more ecstatic horror scenarios which would have involved blood and trance, and which would possibly have provoked a sensation of fear. When read in comparison with the photographs forming part and parcel of the messages promoted by the popular newspapers and magazines, a few general remarks may be in order. Whereas the newspapers and magazines were largely using illustrations as a form of participation, and utilised pictures as a device for encouraging what was going on to keep on happening, coffee table book photography repeated the familiar tropes. The tropes were often beautiful, more beautiful than many of the colonial tropes once had pictured, but nevertheless lifeless and not inviting the readers' debate. Images in the popular press were not shocking – images of the known were presented as well, but those were images which argued against the stereotypical, which possessed so much prevalence in the coffee table books. In the popular press images either pleased or provoked, and one never knew in advance while, in contrast, t photography of the coffee table books was generally predictable. The messages emanating from these different pictorial styles were different in their nature as well. To a large degree, coffee table book photography explored symbols, whereby symbols require interpretation are they not to remain devoid of life and meaning.78 The interpretation of symbols involved an interpretive community of scholars of African culture and picture book producers, but no African voices, neither the voices of scholars, only rarely the voices of research assistants, and never ever the voices of the photographed. The messages which transpired from the photography of the popular press had, as well, to be derived from portraits of scenes and symbols. But the symbols were more varied, the amalgamation of symbols and scenes more unpredictable. Through letters to the editor readers had the possibility to concur with the images or to criticise them. And even though the images published in the popular press visualised scenes that some readers would personally not like to know too well, readers found themselves, their friends, neighbours and kin in the photographs of the press. This was not the case with the illustrated books. Last but not least, by their very nature, the coffee table books maintained an all-encompassing eye, whereas the press represented a serial production in which fractures occurred all along. The encompassing eye of the illustrated books pretended to survey a culture as a whole and in its entirety. To arrive at a survey or an overview, however, the coffee table books had to simplify complex lifestyles and reduce the complexity of culture to folklore and tribal attribute. It is possible to

77 Elliott, Magic of the Xhosa, pp. 106-107. 78 Helmers/ Hill, 'Introduction', pp. 15-16. 204 argue, though probably not truly fair, that they also turned notions of racism into an issue of culture and folklore. In comparison with the visual style utilised by healers themselves between the 1930s and the 1950s there existed, as well, some marked differences. Healers had imitated and competed with the visual programme of mission publications as, for instance, in the case of the certificate of the Cape Province Herbalists Association. Using a variety of stamps, they had ambitiously competed with the symbols employed by the state bureaucracy. And they had, in addition, made use of business stationery, or had reproduced passport photographs of their leaders. Neither healers' ambitions to set the standards for their own visual representation, nor their inclination to mimic and compete were included into any of the photographic collections of the coffee table books. In these books pictures were too serious and solemn, so that the experimental nature of healers' approaches to visuality was lost.

The Tribal Healer Through photographs, the coffee table books conveyed and arranged an image of the tribal healer which resonated most strikingly and rather stringently with the colonial tropes mentioned in chapter 2. As representatives of African culture, tribal healers pointed towards a concrete and delineated or bounded world of beliefs and practices. Healing as but one aspect of an encompassing "tribal culture" nestled embedded within a more general "African tribal culture". It was almost dissolved in this all-encompassing culture, in which neither work, nor social status, nor gender, nor movement between places mattered, and provided it with some colourful markers. The tribal healer represented, most certainly, an antagonistic element. Not only was the reality of segregation veiled but, even more so, the image of the tribal healer suggested cultural autonomy, and it insinuated that culture could be dissociated from social, political and economic life. Tribal healers were more often diviners than herbalists for the simple reason that diviners were surrounded by more secrecy and myth than were herbalists. They were, all in all, rather pleasing figures, a bit mind-thrilling, and happily rooted in timeless tradition. Compared to the healers who arose out of the discursive strands under review in previous chapters, tribal healers emerged as a de-contextualised anti-reality. But they read as such only if they are being read in conjunction with the other narratives. When the readerships targeted are taken into account, it can be assumed that this hardly ever occurred. Compared to what became visible about healers in other discourses, the coffee table book narratives neither revealed how healers conceived of themselves, nor did they show how the community 205 observed healers with Argus eyes. In terms of visuality as well, healers' representation appeared scant and meagre. The photographs were colourful, but did not vary in what they portrayed. The image emanating from the illustrated books appeared strange, and yet it was, in some ways, more real than other discourses on the strength of the fact that it clung so stringently to the tropes that resulted from colonial encounters and the authoritative descriptions rife in previous decades. The tropes were held by a powerful discursive community, far-reaching and with a long tradition. In the context of coffee table books the professionalisation of African healers had shifted completely out of focus. And yet, encapsulated in discourse and cut off from realities, they translated as popular figures into a particular strand of South African reality. As discursive figures African healers were turned rather into folklore than into figures at the cdentre of a popular debate. They were colourfully fixed in otherness for those who wished to affirm their own identity by looking at the other, and hardly ever were they cast within the contradictions of socio-cultural change and continuity. The observation that "otherness is the point of equivalence or identity in a circle in which what needs to be proved… is assumed"79 applies to the message provided by the photographs. As mass media, however, the coffee table books popularised healers to that extent that they were dissociated from witchcraft, witches and evildoers. Both diviners and herbalists were turned into important cultural figures in their own right, less disputed than they actually were in real African communities, more authoritative than was their true position in African discourse. They were popularly spiritualised and shaped as almost altruistic figures according to the tastes and needs of an audience outside Africa, that was seeking religious certainties and spiritual truths. In South African environments, between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, diviners and herbalists translated into tourist attractions to be viewed in so-called cultural villages, and as such they earned a particular legitimacy that, in the face of their ongoing denigration, simply cannot be overlooked. Carefully sanitised and removed from the way of life of the vast majority of the population, these villages represented the fictional and idealised recreations of "tribal" lifestyles and activities.80 Tribal diviners became a resource in this scenario, and could easily be marketed to tourists who paid eagerly for realistically enacted images of difference. In the end, however, the coffee table books endowed healers with merely a fictional legitimacy.

79 Bhaba, Homi K. 'DissemiNation: Zeit, Narrative und die Ränder der modernen Nation', in: Bronfen, Elisabeth/ Marius, Benjamin/ Steffen, Therese (ed). Hybride Kulturen: Beiträge zur anglo-amerikanischen Multi- kulturalismusdebatte. Tübingen 1997, pp. 149-194, quote p. 90. 80 Schutte, 'Tourists and Tribes', p. 473. 6

The Fantastic World of Documentaries Notions of a Not Yet Reconciled Society

Delayed Narratives In addition to what has been said so far about herbalists, diviners and their activities in South Africa, and about perceptions of these, there is yet another body of sources which also touches upon related issues. Documented life stories yield yet another perspective on South African healers and issues that related to them. They appear in a textual format in which fiction, personal reflection and historical encounter lie intertwined. In South Africa, this genre was authored by real writers who interacted with real protagonists, so that at a later point in their lives, experiences and personal relationships could be converted into manuscripts for a book. Actual historical circumstances contributed to the recording of the original material, its transcription into a manuscript, the publication of the manuscript, and finally, to its reception by readers. The texts under review in this chapter capture the narrated lives of healers and persons who were intimately familiar with processes of healing and divining, and who either wrote the biographical texts themselves or, as in most cases, had them recorded by persons with whom they entertained a relationship based on trust. While this type of recording occurred throughout the century, publications often followed much later, and coincided with the demise of apartheid, a time when South Africans were looking for the possibility of reformulating identities. The narratives attempted to elucidate the past at a time when people, other than professional historians, suddenly felt that South Africa's past needed to be clarified. In 1991, Bert Schroeder presented the biography of an African convert and designated isangoma, Joseph Zulu, which was set in the second half of the nineteenth century. The author presented Joseph Zulu as a role model, and as a typical example of conversion to Christianity. The narrative he provided was rather more than merely the story of an individual convert as, instead, he showed the work of grace on somebody who had to arrive at a decision between becoming a diviner or becoming a child of God and, consequently, whether he wanted to be included or excluded from the society of the righteous. Through his conversion to Christianity 207

Joseph Zulu was, at a time when he was a young man, virtually snatched from the hands of the sinister Dingaka, a powerful diviner, and funnelled into the protection of God.1 A grandson of a pioneering missionary who had acted as Joseph Zulu's mentor and employer, the descendant of the Schroeder family approached Shuter and Shooter in Pietermaritzburg more than a century later with the request to publish the account, which was probably geared towards a South African mission readership. The encounter, even though set in the nineteenth century, possibly assumed a particular meaning for the descendents of a mission dynasty and some targeted readerships, when they were coming to terms with the approaching and imminent end of apartheid. The publication stood in the tradition of previous mission manuscripts of life accounts and conversion stories which, in the 1980s, were sometimes aimed at specifically African audiences to relate to them the history of their Christian forebears, but which were also popular with mission readerships, who wanted to remember the days of African conversions and the lives of pioneering African Christians.2 Two years later, in 1993, the biography of quite a prominent healer from Soweto was published.3 Lilian Simon, a writer and journalist from Johannesburg, had encountered Sarah Mashele, a reputed healer in Dube Township at some stage in the mid-1970s. The author describes Sarah Mashele as a professional healer, not as a private person. She sees in her a woman of respect, not a friend, and yet, compared to the story of Joseph Zulu, the story of Sarah Mashele is the account of an individual, not of an ideal type. The text itself does not give any indications as to when exactly Lilian Simon wrote up the life and consultation experiences of the woman who impressed her so thoroughly. The reasons for the significant delay in publication also remain unexplained. As regard the targeted consumer group, it can be assumed with some certainty, however, that the publishing house probably sought to address and attract a South African readership. This differed from Taffy Gould McCallum's account of Rae Graham, a white woman who worked as a professional herbalist and diviner, and who had immigrated to South Africa as a nurse and as the wife of a South African soldier after World War II. At a later stage she trained as an inyanga in the Venda tradition, and who, moreover, became a member of the City Council in Johannesburg.4 Taffy Gould McCallum, an American journalist, seems to have been successful with her account which was published almost immediately once she had

1 Schroeder, Bert. Joseph Zulu. Pietermaritzburg 1991. 2 Filter, Heinrich (comp.) Paulina Dlamini: Servant of Two Kings. ed. and transl. S. Bourquin. Durban, 1986. [German: Ich diente zwei Herren: Paulina Dlamini erzählt ihr Leben. Hermannsburg 2002]. 3 Simon, Lilian. Inyanga: Sarah Mashele's Story. Johannesburg 1993. 4 Graham, Rae. White Woman Witchdoctor: Tales from the African Life of Rae Graham. comp. Taffy Gould McCallum. Miami 1993. [German: Mashudu. Die weiße Zauberheilerin. Berlin 1993.] 208 terminated the interviewing during one of her visits to South Africa. She probably had a North American and European readership in mind when writing the manuscript. The previous chapter on newspapers and magazines has shown that Africans were also familiar with the story of Rae Graham, alias Mashudu, who represented a healer of the "white sangoma" type and while, in the 1990s, her story was a novelty for international readerships, her biography had been known to many South Africans for some time. In 1994, James Hall, a Californian screen writer and the biographer of the South Africa-born, internationally acclaimed singer Miriam Makeba, wrote his autobiography after he had been initiated as an African healer in Swaziland in 1991.5 The "lore" recounts that it was Miriam Makeba who had discovered his gift with the ancestors, and that she motivated him to embark on his search for the spirits. James Hall's account was, as well, published rather immediately after the inception of the manuscript. Both Rae Graham's and James Hall's texts soon became available in German translation, and being incorporated into the programmes of publishing houses catering for popular reading tastes. Back in South Africa, 1995 was the year in which the delayed publication of Margaret McCord's account of Katie Makanya took place. Katie Makanya, sister of Charlotte Manye and the daughter of an elite Christian family in South Africa, was by no means a healer herself. She had, though, worked for many years as a nurse at the McCord Zulu Hospital in Durban and, amongst many other things, interpreted conversations on health matters between patients and doctor.6 A member of the Christian as much as the professional elites, Katie recounted her life and intended to set an example for others. The recording of the tapes commenced in 1954 and was completed a year later. Subsequently it took the author some forty years until in 1995 the book finally appeared on the South African market. An abridged version of the text became also available in Zulu. The story of Katie Makanya was received as a text among the academic community as well. Even more stringently designed for academic readers, but as an account of personal reflection, in 2000 Australian-born, US-based social scientist Adam Ashforth provided a narrative of his Sowetan friend, Madumo, who was not a healer himself, but who undertook an extended search for healing while Ashforth entertained a friendship with him.7 It was this friendship in particular from which the author drew his legitimate claim of being familiar with African ways of living. The popularity of Ashforth's publication owes much to the intense interest many South Africans were taking in issues of

5 Hall, James. Sangoma: My Odyssey Into The Spirit World of Africa. New York 1994. [German: Sangoma: Eine Reise zu den Geistern Afrikas. München 1996.] 6 McCord, Margaret. The Calling of Katie Makanya. London 1995. 7 Ashforth, Adam. Madumo: A Man Bewitched. Cape Town 2000. 209 healing and witchcraft immediately after the inception of the post-apartheid era in South Africa. Both accounts, that of Katie Makanya and that of Madumo, were popular texts appealing to academic readerships, probably because the genre of life stores of less well- known Africans was a topic that many academics were tackling as well.8 This type of biography-writing served the primary purpose of recording the lives of remarkable men and women whose names were not yet familiar to contemporary readers, but whose skills or cultural achievements were. Last but not least, and more stringently inclined towards the esoterically inspired scene, at about the time when Rae Graham's and James Hall's stories hit the international market, and when Katie Makanya's story became available in the South African bookshops, the American market saw the publication of Nicky Arden's autobiography. Having travelled to South Africa she found her spirits with whom she now lived peacefully in the United States.9 The account was produced for a specific, spiritually-inclined Western readership, and in the context of this study it is indicative of how South African healing was used as a cultural resource that was promoted and turned into a financially profitable commodity overseas. Nicky Arden's account was an autobiography, or narrative employing the first-person singular and it belongs to the confessional forms of writing, whereby the primary purpose of these forms is to mark the workings of a calling, a divine selection, or grace on the life of the individual. Documentaries constitute ambiguous sources of historical and personal fiction, and can certainly be read in multiple ways. At first sight, documentaries speak authoritatively as they suggest or imply an experience-based narrative. Authors have actually encountered the healer, lived with him or her. In the narratives that will be explored in this chapter, two writers were initiated into the realm of esoteric, or holy, knowledge, while the other two authors wrote about persons who were initiated into this kind of "secret" knowledge, and were willing to "reveal" some of the parts that can be disclosed more easily. The rest of the writers gave accounts of people who were familiar with health-seeking strategies, and who were to a stronger or lesser degree witnesses to other people's struggle for health. Practically, each author claimed a different way of having come to the phenomenon of healing as close as possible, and as close as it was still safe and wholesome to get. The authors as much as the narrators appropriated the voices of the persons whose lives they recorded and, at the same

8 Onselen, Charles van. The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kaas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985. Cape Town 1996; Hodgson, Janet. Princess Emma. Johannesburg 1987; Delius, Peter. The Conversion. Johannesburg 1984. 9 Arden, Nicky. African Spirits Speak: A White Woman's Journey into the Healing Tradition of the Sangoma Rochester 1996, 1999. 210 time, they attempted to give a voice to African individuals who would otherwise not be heard in the wider community. The crucial feature of these texts is, however, that the experience they deal with is not necessarily the portrayed people's experience, but the experience and perception of the writer. At best, the texts document the experience of an encounter, which possesses its own profound value. One way of reading these texts is as imaginations of community and of socially indicative interpersonal relationships in a not yet reconciled society. Life narratives of healers and of persons drawn near to processes of healing do not only invite reflections on the self of somebody else. They differ from the large body of popular testimonies of personal religious experience in Africa, which numerous religious bodies put on sale in pamphlet format.10 The documents under review in this chapter appear, rather, to fill a gap of public confessions and of private accounts of healing, as well as a gap between public healing and private confession. It can be generally observed that the actors involved in the production of the manuscripts did not muse over their lives in a relaxed or laid-back fashion. Quite the opposite – they struggled for mutual understanding. At the same time, writers and protagonists seemed to be, on the whole, quite settled rather than restless and, with the exception of Madumo, they were not caught in a torment or exposed to any immediate insecurities of life while telling the stories.11 Potentially with the exception of Joseph Zulu, all of the protagonists wanted their stories to be told, often with the help of a person skilled in biographical or academic writing. The biographers were keen to write down the story others wanted to be told. Emerging beyond the line of official life narratives, the life documentaries taken into consideration for this chapter form an alternative, and certainly non-academic, kind of "history from below" which officially rested in the hands of academic historians or reconciliatory institutions such as, in the years after apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.12 The texts play and concern themselves with notions of a society which, in different stages of its history, has been in dire need of reconciliation. These different moments merge in the post-apartheid setting for reconciliation, and take on a new meaning and sense in the more current situation of transformation. Against this folio, involvement with somebody who did not come from the same cultural or social background, and with whom one had to engage in one of many possible cross-cultural relationships, promised to bridge cultural and racial

10 Ellis, Stephen/ Haar, Gerrie ter. 'Religion and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa.' Journal of Modern African Studies 36: 2 (1998), pp. 175-201. 11 For an autobiography of completely different style, see for instance Modisane, Bloke. Blame Me On History. Jeppestown 1963 12 Minkley, Gary/ Rassool, Ciraj. 'Orality, Memory, and Social History in South Africa', in: Nuttall, Sarah/ Coetzee, Carli (ed). Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Oxford 1998, pp. 89-99, here p. 90. 211 divides if not even chasms. Within South Africa the publications touched upon the dissolution of conceptions about race, which always played a role in the actual processes of marketing and publication. Outside Africa, the books were launched at a time when issues of spirituality, especially spiritualities that lay beyond Judaeo-Christian-Muslim religious traditions, had gained new attractiveness, particularly in places that had often denied, or searched anew for their own religiosity. In this same context healing is often reduced to a form of religious spirituality and a body of hidden truths, and hardly touches upon issues of health and material prosperity. This way African healing traditions become a global popular resource through which people unfamiliar with the African setting can redefine themselves. The many narratives published with such conspicuous a delay reflect more than just one moment of South African history. They reflect the instant when the encounters did occur, the moment when actual encounters were turned into narrative, the moment of the inception of a manuscript and the moment of publication. An historical and partly diachronic perspective is, thereby, being inserted into the accounts, especially when a series of such accounts can be read in perspective. The historical perspective and the focus on personal and cross-cultural relationships transform the texts into more than mere fiction, and definitely turn them into documents deserving and worth of historical investigation.

Soweto and Johannesburg at the Height of Apartheid, and 1993: A Healer in Suburbia At some stage during the years of apartheid Lilian Simon, a writer and journalist living in Houghton, one of Johannesburg's suburbs, encountered Sarah Mashele, because she required her house to be doctored. Quite soon she developed an interest in the life story of Sarah Mashele which she listened to and turned into a typed manuscript. Sarah Mashele's story is about a nine-year-old girl from Eersterus, "on the other side of Pretoria", who started to feel sick and estranged.13 Sarah began to hear voices and saw people appear in her dreams. She foretold people that they would die, cried out in church because she saw the devil. Her behaviour and unpredictable visions were embarrassing for people in her environment, so that family members and friends decided to do something about the little girl. Sarah's grandmother from Louis Trichardt, an inyanga, having agreed to take care of the child, soon realised that she could offer only limited help. Local prophets were also restricted as regards the scope of what they could do, so they suggested to the parents that their daughter probably was

13 Simon, Inyanga, p. 11. 212 possessed by the spirits. Sarah was, consequently, taken to an inyanga in what was then Rhodesia where she was trained as an inyanga herself. After her training and initiation she stayed with her parents, until after her marriage she moved to Soweto and set herself up as an independently operating inyanga. Over the course of many years she was approached by numerous clients who suffered from a range of wide differing problems, and among her clients white South Africans such as Lilian Simon. She also came to the bedside of another writer's and journalist's husband, a surgeon who had incurred irrevocable brain damage in a motor accident and lived with suffering for more than seven years.14 Although the title of Lilian Simon's book suggests that the story deals with the life and activities of Sarah Mashele, it concerns itself more specifically with the encounter of two women. Inyanga: Sarah Mashele's Story is the story of an encounter that occurred in a peculiar phase of South Africa's history. The climate dominating the mid-1970s virtually paralysed the relationships between people who, due to the apartheid system, were segregated into different racial categories even though they worked for one another, employed one another, or depended upon one another's professional skills. As will be shown further below, Lilian Simon would not have been able to banish the evil spirits without the assistance of inyanga Sarah Mashele; while Sarah Mashele would not have succeeded in achieving a written account of her life without the help of the writer and journalist Lilian Simon. The account is, consequently, the narrative of a skewed or unbalanced encounter, the encounter of unequal women resulting in a text that maintains this basic un-equilibrium and that constructs the tale around it. Furthermore, the text encapsulates twenty years of South African history which lay between the original meeting of the women and its final publication as a book. Even though these twenty years remain essentially untold, they are embodied in the text and, by means of this time span, the text is being rendered immediate and, at the same time, appears to be remote as here a device is being employed by which the encounter is removed from the actual time of its occurrence. Lilian Simon's story, which intersects with that of Sarah Mashele, is that she has run into trouble with her domestic workers and gardeners. She believes that there is a rumour going round which makes her African employees think that a spell has been cast on her garden as much as the backyard where her workers' dwellings are. After a number of workers had started their employment with her – just to leave soon afterwards – she decides to

14 Holland, Heidi. African Magic: Traditional Ideas that Heal a Continent. Sandton 2001, foreword; Sarah Mashele also featured in the popular account of Holland, Heidi. Born in Soweto: Inside the Heart of South Africa. Harmondsworth 1994, pp. 140-146. In Holland's book she features as isangoma, once more an indication of how devious the official categories can be when used as labels. Sarah Mashele also foretold the future and read the stars in Bona between 1975 and 1978. 213 approach the editor of the World, who puts her into touch with one of his journalists. One day a reporter, a photographer and a staunch lady, who happens to be Sarah Mashele, appear in Lilian Simon's place of residence. That same afternoon, she is hosting a book club meeting in her lounge. When the party rings the door bell, Lilian Simon asks her visitors into her bedroom to wait.15 Immediately the story becomes a combination of a healer's actual activities and a media event, of which many white South Africans, a reporter and a photographer of an African newspapers and the healer herself become a part, while no domestic worker, gardener or any other ordinary African person participates. Overwhelmed by a mixture of unease and curiosity, Lilian Simon witnesses Sarah Mashele enter her white suburban world. She had been convinced that the woman from Soweto would be immediately interested in the backyard sleeping quarters of the domestic workers, but Sarah Mashele, always good for a surprise and very much used to doing things in her own way, starts her work in Lilian Simon's bedroom. In later sessions, no longer recorded by the media, Mashele expands her field of operation into the family lounge. Instead of treating the gardener and the domestic worker, something Lilian Simon had expected, Mashele commands the owner of the house to dip her hands in a basin of water into which she then sprinkled a black powder. As a result, the luck of the Simon family changes abruptly. Treated with lucky sticks and applying the prescribed vaseline mix, Lilian's husband wins the jackpot four times in succession. The family is suddenly able to find domestic servants who stay in their employ, and Lilian's small and sickly child grows strong and healthy. Lilian herself wins a car in a slogan competition, and soon afterwards gets the first prize in a raffle at work.16 Rather dramatically, efficiently and successfully, Sarah Mashele works herself into Lilian Simon's life, who sometimes feels "as though she is taking over my mind."17 More than that, in Simon's own house Mashele takes her client "out of a brightly lit, modern room into an occult-dark world."18 Finally inviting her client to Dube Township in Soweto, Mashele takes Simon physically into an environment to which not many white people entertained close relationships. Simon speaks of a friendship that unfolds between Mashele and her family.19 It is, however, an uneasy relationship. Friendship and fright, darkness and light become key notions which determine Simon's understanding of the encounter and which, in turn, the

15 This part of the story is a bit similar to Lady Barker's invitation of the ngoma party, with the difference that Barker's party acted visibly whereas Simon asked them to wait, invisibly, in the bedroom. 16 Simon, Inyanga, pp. 6-8. 17 ibid., p. 106. 18 ibid., p. 106. 19 ibid., p. 8. 214 author uses as tropes to communicate her encounter to a broader audience. Lilian Simon's attitude towards Sarah Mashele is prefigured through a set of "experiences" she used to have with her domestic workers before Mashele, eventually, entered her life, and through which she had gained a basic understanding of witchcraft, tokoloshe, evil forces and similar phenomena at a point in time before she asked Sarah Mashele to come to her house. There will forever remain something that frightens her, and Simon instigates this feeling in her readers repeatedly.20 Simon uses the dichotomy of darkness and light whenever she tries to grasp and explain the activities of her "friend" Sarah Mashele and she cannot conceive of their mutual relation in terms which are independent of this dual metaphor. Simon thus describes a peculiar friendship dominated by circumstances which determined many relationships between black and white people in South Africa during the height of apartheid. Deeply entrenched in mistrust, she becomes overwhelmed by the desire to actually meet a black South African, maybe to learn sincerely, to gain first-hand insights, and maybe to open her mind to other ways of knowing.21 The South African setting of the early and mid-1970s was not necessarily favourable to encounters between a diviner and a white woman. The white woman had not only "learnt" about "witchcraft" through "experiences" with people whom she employed. As regards her attitudes, she had developed a deep-rooted mistrust against Africans which could only be described as having become ingrained. Not only had one of her domestic workers left after she woke up one morning with part of her hair cut off in her sleep, and which she now suspected her neighbour of using it for muti; not only did she discover that workers avoided her house because they saw a horseshoe in her garden – a sign they were said to take for a spell that hovered over the property. Simon's basic dilemma consisted of failed communication. The way this break-down of communication transpires from the manuscript, she hardly ever received first-hand information, but relied on explanations provided by her gardener and on rumours. Somebody told her that "blacks leave horseshoes in front of a house. That means there are evil spirits inside."22 Her gardener reported to her that the neighbours thought that her domestic worker was possessed by the tokoloshe.23 She suspected her domestic worker of taking dish swabs "to strain the brew" which this woman used to fortify herself against the gardener's love.24 Lilian Simon's world was bursting with superstitions which she ascribed to

20 ibid., pp. 1, 2, 3,5,7,8, 106, 108. 21 These motivations were explicitly brought up in Holland, African Magic, p. xiv, and cannot totally be dismissed for other writers as well. 22 ibid., p. 2. 23 ibid., p. 2. 24 ibid., p. 2. 215 her workers; and she cultivated an attitude of general mistrust against her domestic workers, whom she suspected of having an inclination for stealing, for pretending to be sick and, last but not least, for drinking. This relation between a white employer and her domestic workers, between a woman who considered herself enlightened and educated while she deemed others superstitious was, yet again, fractured when she received the opportunity to travel to Soweto. Lilian Simon applied for a pass. When receiving the document she was also given the advice not to go there on weekends, and not to leave later than at four p.m.. At home with Sarah Mashele and her family, Lilian Simon felt safe, but fear returned when her hosts took her out of Soweto. Children kicked a football and aimed it at the car in which Sarah's sons accompanied their guest back to Johannesburg. They caught the ball and threw it back, and Lilian Simon could not banish the thought from her mind that "it could have been a stone... if one of them picks up a stone..."25 Violence was a South African reality Simon and Mashele were unable to escape. As a figure of the text, the healer Sarah Mashele remains culturally tied to the African world of Soweto. Sarah Mashele is aware of this conception that is tantamount and all- pervasive in many non-African people's minds and presents a counter-argument to it. Just like many herbalists and diviners mentioned in their interviews with journalists of the popular press that their clients came from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds, Sarah Mashele as well stressed that in her dreams already, and when she was a mere apprentice, "people come from very far, from many different countries... They are white, black, Chinese, Indian, all nations."26 The claim that among her patients racial boundaries dissolve is repeated later in the text.27 The author, Lilian Simon, records these statements, but does not develop them into a focus. Later, Mashele argues that

the different tribes have different ways. Maybe the Zulu inyanga will not give you the same medicine as the one from Vendaland, and the sangomas from different places will not always do the same things. My father was a Tswana and my mother is a Venda so I am already not just from one tribe, and I grew up in Eersterus where the tribes are all mixed up so the ways are changing. Now I am married to a Swazi and we speak Zulu at home.28

25 ibid., p. 108. 26 ibid., p. 27. 27 ibid., p. 53. 28 ibid., p. 35. 216

In her statement Sarah Mashele repudiated any notion of cultural essentialism. The essence of the cultures that formed the basis of Mashele's healing practices mattered to the woman who observed her activities. It did, though, possess no importance to the healer herself. As referred to in previous chapters, healers deployed various strategies not only to cross any ethnically defined boundaries of their activities, but also to transcend their peculiarly "African" sphere of operation. Mashele was, for instance, approached by the police to help solve a case but she was told not to mention this in public or to the newspapers.29 Lilian Simon's decision to write about Sarah Mashele was, quite certainly, a step towards breaking a taboo, yet it took her twenty years to finalise the intended project. For diviners and herbalists it was probably more productive if they were approached by news journalists. Mashele recalls how "a lady newspaper reporter came to me and said, 'There are a lot of troubled people in Roodepoort, they want to see you'."30 Mashele went, helped, and received coverage in the newspaper. Moreover, a team of health workers approached Mashele because they were considering using a likeness of her as a figure in a publication rendered in comic-book style. of putting her as a figure on a comic. Organising a campaign against tuberculosis, they asked Mashele whether she would like to be one of the main protagonists and join a television show.31 Sarah Mashele was successful in obtaining a public image that went beyond the immediately African sphere, and she managed to become associated with health campaigns. And, yet, her story remained the story of an individual diviner and herbalists, and no generalisation of her case was attempted so that conclusions drawn from it could have spilled over to the profession's more general concerns. Simon encountered Mashele before 1976 as otherwise she could not have approached the editor of the World, which was banned in 1977. The interviews conducted by Lilian Simon with Sarah Mashele included consultations from the time "when the riots were going on in Soweto".32 Despite the fear and the darkness that pervaded the encounter, Simon had an inkling that the encounter furnished the material for a good story. Being a writer herself, Simon was especially fascinated with Mashele's "delight in her role as storyteller".33 The recording was done in the author's home in Johannesburg, and occasionally in Mashele's office in Soweto. If visits were difficult to arrange, Simon and Mashele talked over the phone. In the end, interviews had been conducted over a period of about three years.34 It is not

29 ibid., p. 68. 30 ibid., p. 98. 31 ibid., p. 109. 32 ibid., p. 86. 33 ibid., p. 10. 34 ibid., p. 9. 217 evident when exactly Simon turned her transcribed material into a narrative, yet it seems as if prologue and introduction were added when the manuscript was finally prepared for publication in 1993. Justified Press, a division of William Waterman Publications, Rivonia, Johannesburg, accepted the manuscript. The author explained that

I did not meet Sarah or write her story in a new or old South Africa. I became involved with her on her terms almost despite the times. And she allowed us to become friends despite our country's sad history. But this book is published in a new age.35

The encounter recounted in the book stands as a reminiscence of the "country's sad history", it focuses less on separation and more on what was possible despite segregation. It thus translates an encounter that took place during apartheid into "a new age" when histories of cross-cultural interaction were desperately sought for. The 1990s became a prolific period for similar publications, in which "the African world" received renewed attention from readers who had problems in gaining access to it, and in which writing about healers was seen as a way of writing about culture, race and social order without having to position oneself too openly in political terms.

Encountering Difference and Post-Apartheid Transformation in South Africa "Just as the international struggle against apartheid was built on an idealised vision, so the kind of society that emerged after its collapse is often described in veiled categories of disappointment and hope."36 Biographical narrative, the hope for as much as the disappointment about, change in post-apartheid society lie intertwined. It was mostly politicians and activists who authored their autobiographies, or whose activities during the struggle and in the course of the post-apartheid years have been written down. In these texts the tendency has been to turn personal testimony into observation and reflection of a more general character, or vice versa, to break down, in the name of the "unknown individual worker" as well, the impersonal forces of change, transition and transformation, as well as the obstacles towards achieving them, into human fates which make it easier for many to identify with.37 It makes

35 ibid., p. 10. 36 Mitchell, Gordon. 'Laying Claim to the South African Miracle: a Study of the Place of Religion amongst Competing Theories of Change', in: Mitchell, Gordon/ Mullen, Eve (ed). Religion and the Political Imagination in a Changing South Africa. Münster 2002, pp. 9-34, quote p. 9. 37 Gready, Paul. 'Political Autobiography in Search of Liberation: Working Class Theatre, Collaboration and the Construction of Identity', in: Gunner, Liz (ed). Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry and Song in Southern Africa. Johannesburg 1994, pp. 163-198. 218 sense that the "ordinary" and "non-activist person", who lived through these years just like the more prominent and politically active ones did, has started to command interest too, and it is within this group that this chapter's documentaries, published after 1990, can each be assigned their place. As regards the processes of political transformation, it is possible to understand biographical narratives, particular in their reference to religious metaphor, as the theorising of the ordinary person.38 Even more so, biographical documentaries, in those cases in which involve two agents, can be taken as an indication of how people of different cultural backgrounds engage with one another and, in consequence, as a theorising about yet unorthodox, courageous and uneasy alliances which are, for the time being, still of a provisional and temporary nature in South Africa. In them there lies embedded the narration of the new nation, not according to the pattern that "things fall apart" (to quote the book title of Chinua Achebe's famous novel of social disintegration), but with the intention of drawing or bridging together, albeit quite frequently in a manner that emphasises the vulnerability of people as much as their still ongoing puzzlement. As a historical source, biographical documentaries, and documentary biographies, pose a cluster of challenges as they do not only operate along a line where fact-based narrative and fictional account blur, but also because, in addition, they constitute a hybrid between the literary genre and the historical narrative. In the view of the fact that they are constructed as biographical narrations they do, moreover, convey the impression of possessing a specific authenticity. As personal narrations they are strongly reminiscent of the spoken word which, even though this constitutes a fault line, is often associated with authenticity and originality.39 From the perspective of historical interpretation it is a difficult task to arrive, on the basis of a personal narration, at generally valid statements about attitudes that exist within a society as regards change and reconciliation. It is an equally precarious undertaking to derive from such accounts attitudes that exist within a society towards cultures of social health, order and belief. If the texts are to be considered as sources for historical investigation, the nature of these texts has to be assessed with care. The texts attempt to narrate diversity and, even more importantly, difference. They do not pretend to represent any unity or equity of society. And, yet, they are an attempt to write against racism and mutual illegibility. Authors and protagonists encounter difference and do not of necessity have the inclination to erase it. They undertake, however, the best that is possible to make it a difference one can personally live with. These narrations became attractive for publishers at a time when South Africa went

38 Mitchell, 'Laying Claim', p. 9. 39 Hofmeyer, 'Wailing for Purity'. 219 through a period of change and when neither the political nor the economic or social stability of the new order can yet be determined with any certainty. Conceptually, it is crucial to understand the different attitudes towards difference in the concrete, but diachronic experiences of transformation that protagonists and readers live through, each in their own time. Yet again, discourse unfolds its significance in concrete and different historical constellations. Many of the texts convert into books what had started out as an oral narration. The act of recounting one's life to somebody else, and maybe with the desire to have it published, has been identified in the practice of oral history as a major device of "legitimising and concretising [the experience of ordinary people] to the people themselves."40 Through its translation into another medium the personally narrated makes public an experience which may have been perceived, until then, as private and individual. In its new form the once oral, private and individual produces responses by its audiences, triggering amazement and rendering objective something that used to be subjective. In this regard it is important to ask which audiences the narrative, and later the published texts, intends to target. It may be possible, for instance, that the recording of a life was originally intended as a narrative directed at the individual's family, children, and friends. It may also be possible that it was targeted at a particular audience in either South Africa or abroad. The original narrators have perhaps given their voice to a different audience than the one to which their voice reached out after the publication of the text. Last but not least, any experience and any telling of an experience contains attitude and, thus, ideology. By and large, it seems as if the texts under review here were relatively free from any explicitly made reflections in terms of politics, economic concerns or social visions. Religion and moral principles commanded their share, but in hardly any case did they dominate the text. And yet, the philosophising of an interviewed person may lead any interviewer to new questions. Hence it is important to bear in mind the constellations under which each of the texts was actually produced. In their engagement with difference, the texts showed a variety of approaches, whereby these may be understood in terms of "classifying and conquering", a model of comparison that developed particular currency in the South African context.41 More generally, the ability to represent both oneself to others and these others to themselves has been identified as a source of tremendous power that formed part of the imperial conquest.42 Of course, in documentaries

40 Bozzoli, 'History', p. 11. 41 Chidester, David. Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville and London 1996. 42 Chrisman, Laura. 'The Imperial Unconscious? Representations of Imperial Discourse.' Critical Quarterly 32: 3 (1990), pp. 36-58. 220 such as the ones under review in this chapter, some selves presented themselves to others, but they did not always present these others to themselves. And yet, the power of representation and of casting interlocutors as the cultural other did not rest in the hands and mouths of those who were represented. In contrast, bricolage has been identified as a process that relates more particularly to processes of religious and cultural interaction.43 It is a concept that emphasises the art of a craftsperson according to which the bricoleur commands a set of tools which he uses to translate meanings and messages into familiar idioms, beliefs and customs. Through the activities of a bricoleur, difference can be "repaired", and the cultural universe that used to be one's home and which was shattered into pieces can be mended so that it looks like new. Marvelling can also be an approach to cope with difference. It is a very particular form of amazement when the observer does not understand and decides not to come up with a direct opinion or interpretation. Historically, this form of encountering difference was indicative of early encounters. Opinion and interpretation, as results of an increasing sovereignty of the view, followed in the process of colonisation, when the marvels were taken into possession.44 As has been mentioned, the various approaches towards difference were more than merely models of discourse and they have to bee seen as situated in particular historical contexts of change. Here again, a variety of models cover different understandings and the different nature of processes of change. In post-apartheid South Africa the model of change, which was popular in descriptions of projected change in the 1980s, was differentiated. Transition and transformation became the key notions according to which post-apartheid reconfigurations of society were understood. Transition referred, most frequently, to South Africa's democratisation process, while the concept of transformation envisaged the encompassing social and economic revolution of the country. In the pronunciation of this concept the metaphor of the struggle was revived and projected into such programmes as Black Economic Empowerment, Affirmative Action or the African Renaissance.45 Biographical documentaries lay, of course, beyond the immediately official sphere. They were also detached from the officially dominant versions of determined commitment to transformation. More often than not, biographical documentaries expressed unease and doubt, and were less self-assertive in their assumptions about social and cultural reconciliation.

43 Comaroff, Jean. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago 1985. 44 Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford 1991; for later marvels see Behrend, Heike. 'Ham Mukasa wundert sich: Bemerkungen zur Englandreise eines Afrikaners (1902)', in: Behrend, Heike/ Geider, Thomas (ed). Afrikaner schreiben zurück: Texte und Bilder afrikanischer Ethnographen. Köln 1998, pp. 323-338. 45 Mitchell, 'Laying Claim', pp. 10-11. 221

In conclusion, depending on the conditions under which the texts were narrated, recorded and published, they represent different constructions, not of selfhood, but of relations within a community and, more particularly, South African society, culture and traditions. People's place of belonging was often far from determined or settled and healers played a visible role in this nexus. They served as actually encountered, but also tropically imagined literary figures around which crucial experiences and visions of society materialised. These experiences and visions which, from a textual point of view, were clearly located within South African society itself, were in some instances also over-arched by a more globally unfolding quest for individual spirituality and social harmony, more particularly so at a time when many groups outside Africa have taken a revived interest in the religious. In this global context, the focus on healers and healing, which is followed up in localisable biographical documentaries, facilitates a reading into multiple directions. These include, once again, different understandings of the religious and of the antiquity of knowledge, but readings are also possible with regard to physical and material concerns about well-being and prosperity.

Coping with Change: Unsettled Paths into the Future After 1990, South Africa entered a phase of transformation that has not yet ended. Within the country many groups active in the political, religious and social sphere set out to design a path into a brighter and more rights-based future, but many in the country took also a more pessimistic concern in the legacy which either the former South Africa or more generally, the history of the country was imparting on the present. While, in general, a grand enthusiasm and euphoria prevailed, many people realised for themselves how difficult it actually was to grow together, in particular across the formerly dividing racial boundaries. The apartheid visions of racial domination did not work any longer and, basically, according to what could be heard in public, the majority did not want these visions any more. A new order, however, had not yet arisen. It had been projected, but it still required implementation. This was an arduous task, indeed, in a society that had to tackle and overcome a history of racial discrimination, segregation, apartheid and authoritarianism. Transformation meant that ways were opening up towards a better South Africa, but these ways had to be found, and they needed to be pursued. Naturally, the concern of many South Africans was not just with society in broader terms, but more particularly with themselves as individuals and as bearers of responsibility in their own core families. Each individual had personally made encounters with people of "the other race" so that forms of previous interaction were often being re-interpreted in the light of 222 the newly emerging order in South Africa. A number of such personal encounters, including some which had been handed down as lived experience from previous generations, were finally published as books. A fair few of these, again, dealt with experiences some people had made with healers and their activities, or they were tales of people's search for health, social stability and healing. Exploring the often metaphorical, individual and popular literary expression, the texts documented people at the moment before models of societal transition were converted into reality. This frequently happened at a time when a diversity of models of societal reconstruction was thought through in public debate. And, a the same time, encounters between people held messages or, in a stricter sense, lessons for the future. The stories of the encounters were popularly-thought and personally-expressed counter-weights to some of the official debates that were unfolding on another discursive terrain. In comparison to these, they could be read as an alternative repertoire of images, arguments and critical stances, against or in favour of the transformation that was underway.

In order to arrive at a written account of a life story, frequently one person approached another with the intent to have his or her life recorded. Enthused by the idea, the approached person usually arranged a couple of sessions in which he or she taped, recorded and listened to what the other person had to say. Mutual trust and the legitimation of the person who intended to write the life story from the person whose life's account was written were crucial. The young protagonist from Soweto for instance, Madumo, thus suggested to Adam Ashforth to make a "case study" out of his plight.46 "You are very much educated … That's why you must write my story", were the words with which Katie Makanya commissioned her chosen biographer, Margaret McCord in Durban, to set about her work.47 The authors used these mandates as legitimating bases for the jointly pursued life documentary projects stressing that they did not simply decide to write unauthorised life stories. Even though many of the people whose lives were recorded and published may not have read the final product, it was emphasised right from the start that they were the ones who provided the incentive and who gave their consent. There were, of course, other authors who considered the writing of the recounting of somebody else's life more of their own affair. Lilian Simon, for instance, chose another legitimating basis for her account explaining in the prologue to her book that "I have been afraid to write about Sarah Mashele and I don't really know why. Is it because in her there is something that I don't want to accept, something that frightens even as it draws?"48 With this anxious reflection she made explicit that the decision to write the life story of a

46 Ashforth, Madumo, p. vii. 47 McCord, Katie Makanya, p. 3. 48 Simon, Inyanga, p. 1 223

Sowetan diviner after all was hers – rather than a project pushed forward by Sarah Mashele. Taffy Gould McCallum freed herself completely from any concern regarding legitimation. She mentioned that she had met Rae Graham in what was then Venda while she had been collecting material for a book about "the twenty-one different tribal societies of South Africa".49 Her account was imbued with legitimacy by her conviction that anybody was free to write accounts about encounters with others and to use the information the interviewer had received during these get-togethers. The journalist did not, apparently, feel any special obligation towards the protagonist of her account. The account of Joseph Zulu's life did also not require particular authorisation in the eyes of the author. At the time when the missionary was writing the story of the convert, in the nineteenth century, it was not an issue of debate whether Africans consented to the publication of their lives, or not. Last but not least, in the cases of the two autobiographies, that of James Hall and that of Nicky Arden, the issue of legitimation rested with the authors themselves who were free to market their life stories as they liked. If read in series, the legitimations remind the readers of the fact that not every person commanded the means to make his or her life stories publicly known. Nor did everybody command the means to decide what would happen with the account of a life once it was recorded. This was especially indicated through the circumstance that, with the exception of the autobiographies, it was always a white person who wrote the life story of a black person. And yet, the notion of a simple black-and-white, or African-European encounter does not illuminate the relations between those who engaged in the recording of the life story. In each of these encounters, whether authorised by the protagonist or not, and with the exception of the two autobiographies, two people engaged in discussions which focused on the biographical story of the protagonist. Bert Schroeder, a Lutheran missionary, grew up on a remote mission station in the valley of the Black Mfolozi river. He was the grandson of the missionary who had witnessed the conversion of Joseph Zulu. Joseph Zulu, on the instigation of personified evil, had almost become a diviner as an adolescent, but converted to Christianity, whereupon he was later trained in Uppsala, Sweden, and eventually became an evangelist to his people. Margaret McCord listened to the story of Katie Makanya, who used to work as a nurse in the author's father's hospital in Durban, and who had much to relate about how as a travelled interpreter she translated health issues back and forth between the doctor and his patients. Taffy Gould McCallum, an American journalist, happened to encounter Rae Graham, alias Mashudu, who had become a herbalist in the north of South Africa and who later lived in Houghton, Johannesburg, and Lilian Simon, as has been detailed

49 Graham, White Woman Witchdoctor, p. 7. 224 in the previous section of this chapter, documented the story of a Sowetan diviner who solved a number of her domestic problems. Adam Ashforth shared and published his Sowetan friend's ongoing search for solutions to the deeply rooted and recurring dilemmas of his life from a variety of differently skilled healers. At the stage of narrating the narrators brought in their own philosophies and ideologies, but it was never possible to fully to discern these from the texts that later evolved. The biographers ordered the material, chose whether to insert themselves into the narrative or whether to remain largely absent from it, and promised to approach a publisher in due time. In virtually no case did the author completely retreat from the text. Authors interspersed the protagonists' narratives with their own reflections and comments, or added forewords, notes to the reader, introductory remarks to chapters, epilogues or illustrations. This was their major pattern of interpreting and of ascribing significance in a meaningful way. The journalist Taffy Gould McCallum, for instance, the journalist, constructed a first-person narration which conveyed the impression that Rae Graham, the woman who had become a healer, was relating her life to the readers herself. On the first pages of the book, however, the author dedicated the book to her parents, despite the claim that she let her protagonist speak, and in contradiction already to her conviction that, as the author, she was able to see through the eyes of the woman who had told her so much. In an equally stark manner and from a narrative-related point of view, the life story of Joseph Zulu was kept completely dependent on the narrator, the missionary Bert Schroeder. For the publication of the text in 1991 the original was endowed with a particular message which purposefully set the account in the context of the newly emerging South Africa:

We have in South Africa a legacy of social prejudice and hostility but the scene has been set for a new group concept which this story intends to nourish. The embroidery and polish that Jay Heale has brought to the original manuscript will do much to strengthen and support this challenging trend. Also, the sensitive and imaginative sketches supplied by Penny Miller have added immeasurably to the warmth of authenticity of this historical novel.50

This "historical novel" did not intend to reconstruct, but to teach. The didactic message, the "group concept" which will be explored further below, was shaped by a missionary, his descendents, an editor and an illustrator. The protagonist served as a model. Even though the text was intended to stand for "a new group concept", African hands and voices were excluded from the preparation of the text for its publication.

50 Schroeder, Joseph Zulu, acknowledgements. 225

The narrative of Katie Makanya was finely interwoven with the voice of Margaret McCord. In between the chapters the author situated the recorded text by inserting little conversations she used to have with Katie Makanya when they were capturing her autobio- graphical tale. These inserted paragraphs referred to the time when Katie Makanya was telling the story of her life in 1954 and 1955, while the thrust of the narrative told Katie Makanya's story as it unfolded since 1877, and without the author being involved in the protagonist's life. Adam Ashforth, employing yet another narrative strategy, set himself as part of the picture by ascribing himself the role of a pertinent figure. He positioned himself as a friend of the protagonist, Madumo, who out of the intimacy of a friendship between men, and out of his ability to observe, witnessed the drama of health-seeking and health-losing that overwhelmed his friend. "We have long been like brothers, Madumo and me. In the face of danger and death, which is never far away for young men in Soweto, there is no question that we stand together. But like many brothers, our connection is rarely untroubled."51 Virtually all the authors decided to add themselves to the picture and actively shaped the lens through which prospective readers were guided towards some individual's personal experiences, and to the experiences of a country and its values. The people whose lives were told had given the incentive to turn their lives into a written account, but no writer mentioned that they actually discussed with the protagonists in which form the authors would insert themselves into the evolving picture. As a result, from the encounter between the authors and their interlocutors, it becomes clear how the authors related to their protagonists rather than, vice versa, how the people whose lives were recounted related to their scribes. The way in which the relations were described between the biographer and the person whose biography was taken constituted almost a microcosm of society from which broader cross-cultural relations were echoed. Both agents shared in voices, vantage points, activities and experiences to create a final text. Interactions and mutual understanding were possible to a certain degree, but the people who engaged in these also encountered cultural limits and barriers that proved themselves difficult to surmount. In the academic literature on the formation of community it has been argued that the roots of "imagined communities" lie embedded in a process that helped produce a feeling of belonging to the same community, and that this process starts from within society rather than as an imposition. If this kind of feeling is communicated successfully across the community it may well be possible that the imagination of a new community is underway.52 In the productive constellations of the

51 Ashforth, Madumo, p. 4. 52 Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London 1990. 226 biographical documentaries such cores can be identified as can the intent to communicate the relations into a broader surrounding. Against this backdrop it is particularly useful to read the communities that have been imagined around these nodal relationships, as well as the communicative process that emanated from them, with regard to the emergence of a variety of imaginable or conceptualisable possibilities in post-apartheid South Africa. These mental envisionings can sometimes even be read with regard to a globally imagined community. This would be a reading of imaginations of the community of those who share an interest in the physical and mental reconstructions of their own selves and of their surroundings and who, for this end, explore the specific resources of South African healing. In the academic literature coherent religious systems and their scriptures, monuments and other aspects of a material culture, dynasties, lineages and royal families have been identified as nodes around which notions of identity, unity and belonging have been constructed. The production of written narratives such as the documentaries that tackle issues of healing and careers of healers can be interpreted in this sense as well, even though they rarely lead up or result in the actual formation of communities. The biographical documentaries did not necessarily reach out to a vast proportion of South African readers but did, on a popular level, resonate with official debates, ambitions and ambiguities regarding the restructuring of society. In this context, healing, healers' personalities or health activities served as a virtual prism through which the newly evolving cultural constellations were evaluated and experimented with. The boundaries between people of different cultural backgrounds were, in fact, becoming a matter of unease and ambivalence, and each of the documentaries suggested rather different paths for a yet not reconciled society into an unsettled future. In Joseph Zulu, for instance, a text stemming from South Africa's imperial past, African culture and religion played a deeply ambivalent role. The text pointed towards a constellation between the author of the book and the figure portrayed which, as a whole, proposes a society in which mature Christian and well-meaning white masters would watch over, monitor and support the development of an African adolescent. The narrative suggested that such a relationship of benevolent dependence was, in particular, possible under the umbrella of mission Christianity, a form of Christianity not only characterised by loyalty of the younger and inexperienced to elders and masters, but that would have the authority to determine virtuous membership of society. In an inversion of said process, this community would also decide about exclusions from that society. "Modern" virtues such as "civilisation" and "Europeanness" would be the goals to strive for under the supervision of those who embodied these virtues already. 227

Diviners, as cast in the sinister figure of Dingaka, "the King's chief isangoma"53, embodied the opposite to these values. They were modelled as dark, if not demonic figures. "In secret caves the ancestors reveal to them the names of evil-doers"54, and hence, readers were instructed that it must be the ultimate aim of any African, worthy of membership in the social community, to overcome these forces of evil, threat and temptation. The power of the evil Dingaka was counteracted by uGogo, an elderly woman also knowledgeable in the ways of life and who gave advice to the young man and a spear with which he was to guard the sacred shrine of the homestead.55 Through uGogo's intervention the significance of home and elders was put forward. The text showed that conversions to Christianity and, herewith, to "progress", "civilisation" and "modernity" arose from this older, communally held African tradition rather than from what Dingaka was purported to stand for. The text implied that those who would not achieve conversion had to remain outside. The attractiveness of this essentially inward-looking model lay in its tendency to draw clear-cut boundaries, to exclude or include, and to reduce any interaction to a minimum. While the diviner's activities were interpreted as socially disruptive, mission Christianity was assigned an overarching and integrative power. The model expressed the vision that some sections, in fact the large majority of the population, would have to radically re-imagine their lives and attitudes if they wanted to be accepted into the community. The model shown and pertinent in The Calling of Katie Makanya drew attention to a much more complex reality. The world of Katie Makanya was not reduced to either a dichotomy of experience between – to apply the terms of racial categorisation – black and white or – to shift to terms of cultural grouping – African and European or – to finally plumb for categories of moral and social advance – Christian as opposed to non-Christian. Katie Makanya's world was, just as much, not explicable in terms of a duality of educated and uneducated or – to use another commonly employed normative classification – traditional and progressive. All these categories and labels played their part, but they did not stand in dual opposition against each other. They were, instead, finely interwoven by the narrator and the author of the text. Against the uneasy relationship between the protagonist and her biographer, who came from racially segregated worlds, and who met up with each other at a time when the apartheid state was consolidating its policy, as well as against the background of patently obvious racism Katie had encountered in Europe in the final decade of the nineteenth century, it becomes evident that Katie's version of African life was patterned by

53 Schroeder, Joseph Zulu, pp. 5, 7. 54 ibid., p. 8 55 ibid., pp. 19-21. 228 migration, movement and the transgressing of boundaries. Having lived in Port Elizabeth she moved to Kimberley, from there to London, northern England, Scotland and Ireland, returned to Kimberley and spent a number of years in Soekmekaar north of Pietersburg. Subsequently, she spent her adult life in Johannesburg, Durban, Amanzimtoti, once more in Durban, and once again in Johannesburg, and finally concluded her days in Durban. All these places were filled with life and interaction because she remembered personal relationships and recalled interpersonal experiences in each of the places. Typical of her age, Katie's world was more dually divided into the world of the aspiring who strove for education, and those who did not. For Katie, this line was usually determined by Christianity, and it was not a question for her that it was through Christian values, which she had appropriated and made her own, that she had become who she was and had achieved that what she had. At the same time, with regard to maintaining and rearranging health, she was much more pragmatic. The Calling of Katie Makanya is probably the book in which health achieving activities, both in the shape of health-giving and health-seeking, were explored most stringently from the perspectives of lay people, particularly from the vantage point of people who had to "manage" the health of another person. Attitudes towards health took the shape of a multi-faceted everyday experience rather than as a particular and temporary effort in people's lives. Katie herself, who worked as a nurse and an interpreter for a doctor, knew and accepted that everybody pursued their own strategies, or a mixture thereof, to achieve personal health or the health of a family member. In the narrative, charms and African medicine were often associated with frictions and jealousy. When, for instance, as a young woman Katie was in Great Britain, jealous fellow choir members suspected her of taking charms because she was considered the best singer.56 Years thereafter, in the Durban hospital, a patient spoke of so-called "heathen book tricks".57 By means of this metaphor, which was a contradiction because "heathens" were not considered experts of the book, while people of the book were associated with Christianity, he referred to spells which disturbed the order of things, but which nobody could explain in detail, and which yet happened and made his life miserable. "Heathen book tricks" had caused the death of his twins, and he did not want the doctor to carry out a post-mortem. In another situation, the ambiguity of vaccination was of relevance. It was never clarified whether the disease of Katie's sister in Soekmekaar stemmed from a Dr Dickson who had once vaccinated the people in the village, but Katie's family and their neighbours had had to learn painfully that, whatever the cause of the young woman's illness, African medicine could not restore health to Katie's sister. In the end it was Katie's

56 McCord, Katie Makanya, p. 40. 57 ibid., pp. 172-173. 229 personal relation to Dr McCord which brought relief for this suffering woman.58 The narrative of Katie's life is surfeited with situations in which afflictions could not be attributed a proper cause, and in which afflictions could not be healed by any medicine. Despite Katie's familiarity with European medicine, despite her knowledge of African healing, for instance, she was unable to prevent that four out of her ten children died. Katie's sister suffered from syphilis, and her promising son Livingstone suffered a mental disease. As an interpreter and assistant of Doctor McCord Katie interwove the health scenarios, which from the vantage point of scientific medicine looked like separate fields but which, in the perspective of popular perceptions, related to one another. In the mines, where she acted as the head of a temperance movement, she ordered the workers to show respect because she was the "mouth of the white inyanga who comes to warn you of the evil spirits waiting for you in all the drinks you buy from the old witches in this town".59 Katie also recorded how many years later she explained to one of the hospital patients that "the muti will cure your child because the magic in it is very strong".60 Katie would have agreed with the Bushveld doctor, C. Leipoldt, who was mentioned in chapters 2 and 3, and who in the late 1920s made the observation about his rural Afrikaner patients that "treatment means medicine. It is essentially a bottle- loving community, and directions on a label are regarded as being as powerful as the written charms of a real Turkish hakim."61 Katie observed similar convictions among the people who came to the hospital in Durban. As a cultural broker working at the interface of interpreting, nursing and knowing African health managements, she decided to endow the medicines with extra potency when she labelled the doctor's medicines with numbers and names, and added handwritten verses from the Bible.62 Seen as a text that reflects certain experiences of change in South Africa, it is possible to argue that African people have learned to adapt their ways of striving for health and order in their private surroundings. Cultural mediators such as Katie Makanya broker health knowledge for Africans receiving health care from hospitals. She brokers views of how health is achieved to non-African readers. Between the communities there is not much interaction, but people as Katie Makanya bridge and reconcile the different realities people in South Africa live in. Overcoming domination is not part of the picture – the picture is, rather, formed by the ability to accommodate oneself in one world or the other, and determined by the possibility to communicate the world of the subjected to the dominating. Whether Katie

58 ibid., p. 132. 59 ibid., p. 124. 60 ibid., p. 177. 61 Leipoldt, Bushveld Doctor, p. 192. 62 McCord, Katie Makanya, p. 171 230 saw herself as representing a role model for African people, whether she wanted to have her biography written due to an ambition that several of the Christian elite aspired to, or whether it was her wish that her brokerage was presented to non-African readers, is not discernible from the text. In the context of South Africa's post-apartheid transition, the text was certainly attractive as it was an eye-opener to African views of the world, but did not request or require immediate commitment to interaction. In Adam Ashforth's account of the drama of his friend's health-seeking activities, the protagonist and his scribe move closer. The author consciously decided to write from the vantage point of intimacy as it arose out of a close relationship between men. With the help of his friend Adam Ashforth encountered and observed a local urban landscape of healing, and became particularly involved as he put money and advice into his friend's search for solutions to his sore calamities. Ashforth tries hard to portray a peculiarly African world that in the aftermath of apartheid is not demarcated by definitions of race anymore, but that is yet set apart as distinct due to cultural difference and the need of African township dwellers to survive in a climate of spiritual insecurity, violence and lack of resources.63 While Ashforth concentrates on the ways in which his friend and his surrounding are bound up with their own world, he argues that these people entertain merely little interaction with the world outside the township and outside the scope of specifically African cultural practices. Conceiving of himself as an observer, he tends to neglect reflecting on the ways in which people interact with him. More often, in contrast, he explains their relationships the other way round, and speaks about the ways in which he related to them. Ashforth's physical presence in the family of Madumo, however, is a constant reminder that the African township world does not exist completely apart, and is not "hermetically African", but in trying to explain Madumo's search for healing he de-emphasises interaction and mutual influence. He concentrates on the lives of those who have only little opportunity to "get out" and enter the spheres which promise prosperity and easier avenues to upward social mobility.64 The township world has been identified as a scenario in which especially young people are often not left with much more guidance than to "steer by the stars".65 In the setting explored by Ashforth, the search for healing provides a kind of focus, in which the ambitions of underprivileged Africans, commonly known mechanisms of solving critical situations, hope and disappointment,

63 Ashforth, 'Witchcraft, Violence'; Ashforth, 'Spiritual Insecurity'. 64 Mitchell, Gordon/ Rüther, Kirsten. '"It was kind of strange to see everyone again": Jugendliche begegnen Verschiedenheit in Kapstadt', in: Lähnemann, Johannes (ed). Bewahrung – Entwicklung – Versöhnung: Religiöse Erziehung in globaler Verantwortung. Schenefeld 2005, pp. 369-377. 65 Ramphele, Mamphela. Steering by the Stars: Being young in South Africa. Cape Town 2002. 231 cultural difference and visions of material gain, and the actual investment of money into a precarious future all converge. All three of the very individual imaginations which have been under review so far have little in common with the more dominantly debated models of transformation in South Africa, be they encapsulated either in the idea of the African Rainbow Nation, or in the notion of the African Renaissance. They do also not conform to the much-debated concept of ubuntu, which has gained particularly widespread recognition on a more popular level of debate. It is especially the notion of ubuntu which in post-apartheid South Africa has become a widely debated label for collective identity within the nation state, but ubuntu also characterises a kind of relational individualism through which individuals of different backgrounds are provided with a common strand along which, in the fashion of the rainbow nation, to aggregate their interests. Intellectually rooted in the Pan-Africanism represented by a Leopold Senghor or a John Mbiti, ubuntu is claimed to form the basis of an all-African world-view. It refers to an ahistorical philosophical concept that received historicity only in particular historical circumstances, and when used by particular historical actors.66 Historically ubuntu has been used by the African bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie, the aspiring and the achieving, in the name of the struggling masses to legitimate their own hegemony. In post-apartheid South Africa, however, ubuntu became an assertion of dignity after the long denigrations people were subjected to during the years of apartheid.67 In the past decade and a half the language of reconciliation has become almost synonymous with the term.68 As a concept of humanity, mutuality, community and compassion, ubuntu has very positive connotations, meaning to participate in a universal brotherhood for Africans, and refers to treating and respecting other people as human beings. These notions have often been crystallised in the formula that ubuntu is "being through others". As a category of popular thought ubuntu emerged as a spirit of identity within the South African nation-state which, sometimes sentimentally, transcends ideas of the rainbow nation, the discourse par excellence about non-racialism, and the African Renaissance. Non-racialism, however, became the monologue of a white liberal or left constituency and was "Africanised" only in its rainbow expression.69 While racial empowerment attained the status of a more prominent concern, visibly in the debate of the African

66 Masina, Nomonde. 'Xhosa Practices of Ubuntu for South Africa', in: Zartmann, I. William (ed). Traditional Cures for Modern Conflicts: African Conflict "Medicine". Boulder 2000, pp. 169-181. 67 Liwane, Nombeko. 'The significance of ubuntu in the development of an ANC cadre' (www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pubs/umrabulo/umrabulo13v.html (12.04.2005)). 68 Wilson, Richard A. 'The Sizwe Will Not Go Away: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights and Nation-Building in South Africa.' African Studies 55: 2 (1996), pp. 1-20, here pp. 10-14. 69 Sitas, Ari. 'South Africa in the 1990s: The Logic of Fragmentation and Reconstruction.' Transformation 36 (1998), pp. 37-50, quote p. 40. 232

Renaissance, a move towards a more essentialist understanding of the African future of the country gained significance.70 Ubuntu represents awareness and belief in the African heritage of the African people, a heritage that can be transformed into "modernity", and promotes identification with African culture. It covers a sense of blackness and basic respect for each other founded on traditional values. Whites are supposed to learn ubuntu from Africans. In this dimension ubuntu places emphasis on dialogue between parties which have historically been involved in conflict, while it advocates concomitantly that the whole should win if individuals retrace harmony with others.71 It would be hard to detect in the documentary texts of mutual engagements a possible reading in terms of ubuntu. This is perhaps indicative of the fact that to many in South Africa even the most popular concept of transformation may yet be an alienation. In Mashudu, relations between the author and the protagonist suggested yet an alternative perspective on health, and thus yet another understanding of community in South Africa. In addition, as the text was intended for a world-wide readership, notions of globally projected unity emanate from the text. Whereas Rae Graham, who became an herbalist and a reader of bones in South Africa, provided information on divination techniques and diseases that she cured, the journalist provided the flair of the text, the perceptions of Africa and the vocabulary. Mashudu, whose life is considered "unconventional" in the sense that she involved herself in "adventures", "secrets" and "romantic endeavours" which, at times, are termed as "primitive" and "burdensome",72 is installed as a symbol of the idea that people of European background are able to understand and engage with the wisdom of African culture. A white herbalist, Rae Graham, in her African guise, is portrayed as somebody who learnt to bridge two allegedly separate cultural universes. Physical healing is taken as a field to which not only Africans committed themselves, but which was of interest to people of European background as well. It was a field to be explored and, if mastered, a terrain worth communicating to the wider world, so that in the end, those people who are not at all familiar with African herbalism, may open their eyes for it. In the account, activity rested with Mashudu, the white healer, rather than with her teachers as for instance Nellie, the diviner, or Phineas, the herbalist. Africans and their culture remained an overall residual category that needed ambassadors who spoke on their behalf. Even though Nellie, Phineas, Ralushai and many others taught Rae Graham, who then received the name Mashudu, it was Mashudu who made something extraordinary out of being a diviner-herbalist. In this sense, healing becomes a

70 Lodge, Tom. South African Politics since 1994. Cape Town 1999, pp. 96-109. 71 Wilson, 'Sizwe',p. 13. 72 Graham, White Woman Witchdoctor, p. 8. 233 metaphor of otherness in an amalgamated universe of health, religion, culture and race. With world-wide readerships, the narrative satisfied tastes towards complementary health. It resonated with people's quest for a type of spirituality deemed different from the mainline Christianity Europe is often associated with. The tale particularly suggested that this complementary health knowledge was inspired by a nature-bound and pragmatically oriented spirituality. In a similar vein James Hall modelled himself as a broker between cultures. His writing addressed a similar readership like Taffy Gould McCallum's account of Rae Graham, and hence his tale provided a similar vision of communion between African worlds and those beyond. While the story of Rae Graham was partly constructed around the trope of helping others, the story of James Hall's apprenticeship and of his initiation revolve more stringently around the issue of self-assertion and self-actualisation. Culturally he emerges as a go- between who conceives of himself as an "ambassador who carries the [Swazi] culture into the world."73 The motif of recognition, so prevalent a concern of African diviners and herbalists to achieve from the state, resonates here, albeit it is turned into a somewhat different direction. As the state denied healers formal recognition, cultural brokers are needed to enhance at least the medial image of the profession. In many ways, therefore, the life accounts of the white healers resonated with the stories the popular press told its African readers.74 During the 1990s, however, the topic of the white healers aroused a proper degree of controversy in the press.75 Insofar it must be noted that the story of the white healer as a cultural broker was a belated recognition of the white healer among a world-wide readership. It mirrored the concern of the white healers rather than of the African population who had become more critical of the cultural authority of non-African healers at the time when the biographies were published. The stories of the protagonists of African health activities were disseminated beyond South Africa. James Hall's account, for instance, was translated into German and Polish.76 Katie Makanya's life became available to Dutch readers.77 Rae Graham's story was translated into German.78 But the translations did turn neither the authors nor their protagonists into transnational actors, neither in the realm of religion or in the field of culture. As real actors they would have been part of a body whose main priority should have been the well-being and

73 www.schamanismus-und-heilen.de (17.08.2005) 74 See chapter 4. 75 See chapter 7. 76 Hall, James. Sangoma; przeł. [z ang.] Joanna Pierzchała. Publisher Warszawa: "Muza", 1996. 77 McCord Margaret, Zingen voor Koningin Victoria: Het leven van Katie Makanya. Van Gennep/Novib 1997. 78 Graham, Rae. Mashudu. Die weiße Zauberheilerin. Berlin 1993. 234 advance of their transnational religious and cultural community.79 The protagonists, however, needed actors to apply themselves on behalf of their concern. In the instances when people came from outside, they acted on their own behalf. Globalisation, which has facilitated the growth of transnational networks of religious actors,80 does not automatically empower all actors. Quite the other way round, it puts many at an even greater disadvantage if they fail to command the global networks. Rather than transnational acting, the encountering of an experience, and the conveying thereof, featured in these accounts. From this vantage point it makes sense to compare biographical documentaries to academic literature that does, as well, take its primary concern with personal reflection and experience. It is a striking feature of this literature that it shows only scant ambition for turning actors of the religious into either politically or economically or sociologically debatable agents of social change and social reconstruction. Instead, within the study of religion, the search for truth is an encompassing and important topic. As such, the literature develops a focus on issues of moral authority and responsibility, unfolding descriptions of divinatory techniques and initiation paths rather than academic analyses.81 It is, of course, possible to argue that it is these academics that could be considered transnational religious actors, rather than authors of popular books and protagonists who require the assistance of a biographer. And, yet, it remains open to question whether the academics who write about their own initiation, and about how they achieved the ability to see, conceive of themselves as transnational religious actors in the sense that they act on behalf of the guild or the profession or their clientele to which they belong through initiation. More often it is the case that narratives of experience form a category of the distinct, especially in such cases when the distinction between knowledge and being initiated matters. This is a recurring issue in writings about religious movements, where religious truths are essential but often prove themselves elusive to academic approaches. Many students of religion face the problem that they consider it as important to convey issues of truth as of social reality, or of a reality that is socially differentiable. Insofar, one should not overburden the accounts with the expectation and search in them for a meaning they do not aspire to. It is rather more obvious that the genre of "experience accounts" has been pursued on the level of academic writing as well as on the

79 Haynes, Jeff. 'Transnational Religious Actors and International Politics.' Third World Quarterly 22: 2 (2001), pp. 143-158, here p. 143. 80 ibid. 81 Willis, Roy. Some Spirits Heal, Others Only Dance: A Journey into Human Selfhood in an African Village. Oxford 1999; Rosny, Eric de. Die Augen meiner Ziege: Auf den Spuren afrikanischer Hexer und Heiler. Wuppertal 1999. 235 level of popular narrations. Again, the popular narrations differ in scope from what more academically oriented narratives revolve around. The ambiguity regarding such appropriations outside anthropological realms is that they do not necessarily lead to a more sophisticated understanding of African cultures of health and that, at the same time, they are quite easy to appropriate for other pursuits of identity. In recent years, the international book market has been virtually flooded with African experiences, travel literature and literature of encounters between African and European partners. More specifically, literature on spiritual encounters outside Christianity has gained ground on the book market, that obviously radiates its very particular fascination with readers beyond the African continent. Nicky Arden's autobiography is but one such example.82 An American woman retraces her spirits on South African ground and, like a "spiritual tourist", she searches for personal healing and uses the help of South African izangoma who offer to initiate her. Especially in the post-apartheid setting and since that point in time South Africa has become a major travel destination for tourists from Europe and North America. South Africa seems to provide a rich African terrain, an open ground that seems to offer any opportunity for outsiders to submerge and appropriate exotic experiences for the sake of one's own gain or fulfilment. Nicky Arden left South Africa once she had attained what she needed, and has since endowed herself with the exoticism South Africa has to offer. In her autobiography Africa is reduced to a stylistic device, to a spiritual playground rather than being presented as a topic of interest in itself. In her case healing was reduced to a consumerist product, one from which she derived much pleasure and an improved attitude towards herself, and from which readers of her autography did probably garner or glean the same, and for which she did not even compensate the country except for the fact that she travelled there. It is fashionable for many readers in the north-western hemisphere of the globe to search for popular religion, a religion offered on a global market through the media. Consumers of popular religion search for information about the products which are available before they decide where to actually go, and they are prepared to "pay for" what they consume.83 To some South African seems to offer that kind of "invisible religion"84 which is not bound to form such as embodied in a church and denomination. It is a self-arranged religion which responds to the individual needs of the consumer. A timely appropriate communication about religion is a basic requirement of the presenting of such a popular social

82 Arden, African Spirits. 83 Knoblauch, Hubert. 'Populäre Religion: Markt, Medien und die Popularisierung der Religion.' Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft 8 (2000), pp. 143-161. 84 Luhmann, Niklas. Die unsichtbare Religion. Frankfurt/ Main 1991. 236 form. The aspect of communication was intended in the biographical documentaries, in particular by the protagonists. Through the actual process of production, however, their agency was pushed into the background. The genre of biographical documentaries and its performers did, therefore, not generate identity through cultural encounters, and cultural interaction, to mobilise a constituency. This was already the case because communication was sought in the form of the book, through which other people were approached than those who could, for instance, be reached through the electronic church or by papal visits. They did, however, broaden the scale of religion that is on offer for appropriation for those who search for religion without community and religion without commitment, or responsibility. In this way, the accounts which had often arisen out of precise social constellations, and within the political framework of the racist state, were turned into commodities that answered traditional questions of those who were looking for popular religion. These questions centred perhaps on inquires for the other world, experience of the numinous, revolved around the issue of death and afterlife.85 They had but little to do with the South African community, even though they once had started out of this same community.

The Culturally Brokered Healer In a study on meandering paths, on the professionalisation and the medial popularisation of South African healers, the images of healers which appeared in documentary biographies became indicative of the ways in which cultures of health, well-being and community were translated to the cross-border reader. The biographical documentaries resembled an allegory on the South African nation, a narrative in the course of which people's individual stories and their individual experiences came to embody the arduous process of narrating the community. The narratives functioned as a narrative of liminality, a narrative of transition and not yet attained orientation, sometimes like a rite of passage through which people were thrown or propelled from one stage into another. The hope accompanying this transition was that in the stage at which the protagonists would arrive, they would have become more mature in their outlook on society. Narratives of social cohesion, healers, healing and the search for it took place, more generally, in the context of culture and religion which needed brokerage, while more tangible experiences such as race, social and economic ambitions, and gender did not provide the main focus in any of the narratives. As narratives of liminality, launched from an experience on the margins within South African society they did, nevertheless, provide a

85 Knoblauch, 'Populäre Religion', p. 146. 237 nexus in which encounters became possible that were generally unthinkable. Insofar the narratives were launched from a marginal perspective into which the centrally defined policies of the cultural purity and racial identity extended, but where they did not work as neatly as defined at the centre of power and politics. Due to South Africa's enormous complexity, brokerage has to work into a multiplicity of directions. As a result, the culturally brokered, or the culturally brokering healer is not always black African. African healing is an experience presented in African guise to those who want to understand, to those who do not have access to African print media and the African discussion, and who want more than just leaf through coffee table books. From the documentaries readers can draw answers to their own questions and, to a limited degree, they can also learn about others. As protagonists in books the culturally brokered healers speak to audiences beyond the immediately local or regional sphere. Insofar, they also form part of a universally unfolding discourse, less significant in more immediate and widely lived contexts, and more significant, instead, as an addition to the world of tropes. In this regard it is, again, significant that whereas in the 1930s healers had tried to endow their universality in terms of "science" and "civilisation", the 1990s became the period out of which sprang the "culturalising" mission. As a profession, African healers were able to derive little benefit from the brokerage. Once more the effect of this part of their mediation lay in their popularisation, more precisely, in constructing or building them up as a cultural metaphor. As such, they were peculiarly removed from material realities, and explored as a resource. Perhaps, however, the role of the brokered healer lay in the mediation of social transformation from discursive perspectives which did not fall within the realm of politically correct articulations of change and uneasiness in South Africa's transformation. Potentially they functioned as prisms through which the wish of a society to draw together and the obstacles encountered in the pursuit of this wish became visible in truly undistorted ways. This would ascribe to healers the function of mediums, and of legitimacy as mediators, rather than as independent heroes in their own right and as individuals. 7

Since Then… Paradigmatic Changes More Recently?

Some Current Visibilities of Healers Sure since then much must have changed – or could it be that this is not the case? Since the ending of apartheid healers have re-emerged in the South African debate having achieved a discursive and physical presence in South Africa that they did not enjoy before. And yet, many of the long-nurtured misconceptions about healers still have currency.1 The field of healing in post-apartheid South Africa has become extremely multifaceted if not competitive. The large South African healing churches can perhaps be considered important agents in "establishing a new vernacular of loyalty and identity in the fragile post-apartheid state."2 In southern African countries beyond South Africa the history of the cults has moved on. A fair number of highly modern spirit possession cults have been recorded all over Africa, in general, which have been, in their particular environments, related to modern warfare in Uganda, for instance. They have been, in another case, incorporated in the economic policy of post-colonial Madagascar, where some cults criticise the capitalist market economy and patterns of modern consumerism, while others express wholesale ambivalence towards modernity.3 These are organisational forms one would not come across in South Africa where, apart from some pilgrimages that have been described for the Lesotho border area, or the periodically recurring Nomkhubulwane Festival in Bulwer area, KwaZulu-Natal, diviners operate on an individual basis. This is a pattern that even their currently occurring organisation into nation-wide professional associations does not interrupt. Healers in South Africa take a concern in similar matters as cults do in other places. They are concerned about violence, economic deprivation, and many more issues that the majority of the South African population has to deal with day after day. Primarily yet, and speaking on a most general level,

1 Rüther, Kirsten. 'Claim On Africanisation: Healers' Exercises in Professionalisation.' Journal for the Study of Religion 15: 2 (2002), pp. 39-64. 2 Gunner, Elizabeth. The Man of Heaven and the Beautiful Ones of God: Umuntu Wasezulwini Nabantu Abahle Bakankulunkulu: Writings from Ibandla lamaNazaretha, a South African Church. Leiden 2002, p. 3. 3 Behrend, Heike/ Luig, Ute (ed). Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa. Oxford 1999, p. xiv. 239 healers in South Africa have been re-considered in debates which have set a renewed Africanist focus on South African society in transition, in particular because one of the healers' functions was conceived of as being an authentic embodiment of ancient African knowledge. In South Africa's streets and on her markets, healing has visibly come to the fore as well. With both an increased discursive prominence and a newly marked physical visibility they have re-achieved publicity as figures in a number of more specific debates. "Indigenous Knowledge", for instance, has become a slogan under which healers' contributions have come to be re-assessed and this at a time, when the country is seeking to re-establish its cultural archives, and is working hard to dispel negative stereotypes about Africa and Africans.4 Healers have also re-emerged as controversially debated agents in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. They are expected to disseminate information, and to provide care, not to heal.5 Moreover, diviners and herbalists have been re-evalued as experts of herbal knowledge and psychological treatment where Western medicine meets its limits. It has become possible to debate anew in the 1990s data which was recorded some twenty years previously, this time from the vantage point of the comparability of Nguni divination to Freudian psychoanalysis.6 The limits of Western psychology and Western psychiatric sciences are named more openly since they frequently fail to respond to what is often conceived of as "cultural disease". They fail if war trauma pervades whole societies, and also because African patients do not always trust Western psychology and psychiatric sciences. "Transcultural psychiatry" has, therefore, been renewed as an idiom under which the possible interacting of Western psychology and African therapeutics have been debated.7 It appears that in terms of economic development, African herbalism is of more interest. Herbalism has attracted particular interest from globally operating pharmaceutical giants to whom the South African field became open with the ending of apartheid. Issues of patents, compensation and

4 Leonard, Kenneth L. 'African Traditional Healers: The Economics of Healing.' IK Notes 32 (2001), 4 pp. 5 Naur, Maja. 'Indigenous Knowledge and HIV/AIDS: Ghana and Zambia.' IK Notes 30 (2001), 4 pp; Naur, Maja, 'HIV/AIDS: Traditional Healers, Community Self-assessment, and Empowerment.' IK Notes 37 (2001), 3 pp. 6 Hirst, Manton. 'The Healer's Art: Cape Nguni Diviners in the Townships of Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa.' Curare 16:2 (1993), pp. 97-114. 7 Yen, Jeffrey/ Wilbraham, Lindy. 'Discourses of Culture and Illness in South African Mental Health Care and Indigenous Healing, Part I: Western Psychiatric Power.' Transcultural Psychiatry 40: 4 (2003), pp. 542-561; Yen, Jeffrey/ Wilbraham, Lindy. 'Discourses of Culture and Illness in South African Mental Health Care and Indigenous Healing, Part II: African Mentality.' Transcultural Psychiatry 40: 4 (2003), pp. 561-584; Igreja, Victor. '"Why are there so many drums playing until dawn?" Exploring the Role of Gamba Spirits and Healers in the Post-War Recovery Period in Gorongosa, Central Mozambique.' Transcultural Psychiatry 40:4 (2003), pp. 459-487; Reynolds, Pamela. 'Children of Tribulation: The Need to Heal and the Means to Heal War Trauma.' Africa 60: 1 (1990), pp. 1-38; Hirst, Manton/ Cook, Jackie/ Kahn, Marc. 'Shades, Witches and Somatisation in the Narratives of Illness and Disorder among the Cape Nguni in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.' Curare 19: 2 (1996), pp. 255-282. 240 intellectual property rights have since assumed public awareness.8 More infamously, especially izangoma have become associated with the witch hunts, and the general increase in witchcraft violence. Specialists in dealing with a variety of evil, mischief and affliction, they have come under immediate pressure once more to prove their social worth and non- involvement in destructive agency. Healers of particular fame and material achievement have also come to embody the promise of fame as much as material prosperity and they have assumed particular prominence in popular discourse. Generally speaking, it is possible to argue that more recently healers have achieved a site in the public debate. More people than patients, institutions and politicians have started to inquire about healers, the knowledge they represent, and the services they provide. It is easy to imagine that with this new curiosity and the more open assessments, many confusions, allegations and uncertainties have come, yet again, to the fore. Concentrated publicity is new to South Africa and yet, it did not grow out of nowhere. As previous chapters have shown that current debates are, to a large extent, continuations, constitute unravelling debates and newly entwining discourses of historically quasi-public and half-hidden discourses, and they pick up concerns which have evolved over a long time. The current public debate is largely a practitioner-centred inquiry into the role, dignity, worth and danger of African providers of health. Insofar, the question must be asked in which way re-considerations of topics of previous decades, which have been outlined in the four preceding chapters, have come to intersect and have adopted a new course in more recent times. Last but not least, the question has to be raised, once more, what bearing this new public awareness has had on the role and official recognition of healers in South African society.

Documentaries and Picture Publications Re-Visited The biographical documentaries were, already, a discursive phenomenon of South Africa's most recent transformation period which extended far into the decade after the demise of the apartheid government. Several more experiences of encounters with life in Africa have been published as have been stated intentions of people, who became diviner, to write about this experience. The overall impressions of these publications is, however, at this point in time, that they hardly ever engage seriously with South Africa and that, consequently, they do not exert a significant impact on South African society. Even though these publications shape

8 For a historical development, and a discussion of the current problematic, of patent and intellectual property rights see Juma, Calestous. The Gene Hunters: Biotechnology and the Scramble for Seeds. Princeton 1989. On the more recent situation see Frommer, Chloe. 'Protecting Traditional Medicinal Knowledge in Zimbabwe Traditional Medicinal Knowledge.' Cultural Survival Quarterly 27: 4 (2003), 6 pp. 241 perceptions outside Africa, Africans themselves do not pay particular attention to this discourse. They focus, rather, on their own perspectives so that in this chapter on the re- amalgamation of discursive strands, the documentaries still stand for what they have been taken as in the preceding chapter. In contrast, coffee table books, analysed in chapter 5 mainly for the decades between the 1960s and the 1980s, have started to re-appear under new paradigms which is, at least, the claim made by the authors and photographers of such books. This claim, however, needs to be ascertained. Because, in South Africa, the illustrated books which were published in the context of an apartheid setting were so heavily imbued with messages of volk, and race, even though they may have wished to forcefully put across a message of cultural difference, it was only natural that new coffee table books hit the market since the second half of the 1990s. Three varieties of such type of publication will provide a lens here for the dynamics that have become paradigmatic for more recent illustrated publications. One was a photographic publication by a renowned and internationally acclaimed photojournalist, the struggle photographer Peter Magubane, while another was written by a South African anthropologist. Whereas Magubane's publication followed the old ethnic divide in order to introduce the diversity of "vanishing cultures" in South Africa, the other was a textbook working with a wealth of illustrations. Many of the photographic illustrations were taken from the publications under review in chapter 5. All in all, the illustrated textbook dedicated three out of eleven chapters to "the shadow of the ancestors", "witchcraft, sorcery and pollution" and "the search for health", all of which resonated with portrayals of healers. The form of these picture-rich publications had existed before, and has claimed to put a tradition into a new light. In addition, a sample of Religion Education textbooks will be examined. These were produced in the process of restructuring the school syllabus for South African schools, and are remarkable insofar as they aim to refocus religious traditions in South Africa in such a way that particularly African Religion, in which healers play their part, does not have to dwell in the marginal position it has historically been assigned in South Africa ever since the interaction with so-called world religions. Peter Magubane's photo collection was introduced from a deliberately post-apartheid Africanist viewpoint.9 Ideas such as the African Rainbow Nation, the African Renaissance and ubuntu all resonated with it. The publication was distinguished with an authoritative, ten- line foreword by Nelson Mandela, whose voice was authenticated by means of the reproduction of a huge seal of Office of the President.

9 Magubane, Vanishing Cultures. 242

South Africa is proud of its diverse cultural wealth and traditions. Although some cultural traditions have been forsaken, other still form an integral part of our daily life, often blending with each other and with modern elements to present a fascinating juxtaposition of old and new.10

Involving the President of the Republic of South Africa and a photo-journalist of high standing and significant repute, the publishers of the book were in a position to claim authoritatively that the photo collection reflected the spirit of the new nation in which African cultures would no longer be discriminated against. In its philosophy and layout, however, the book was less innovative which became all too obvious when the publishers explained the motivation behind the production of a book that reasserted the cultural assets of the nation. The issue of concern remained largely what had driven the producers of previous publications to turn coffee table books into selling commodities. The underlying philosophy still held true that cultures on the brink of vanishing needed recording.

With political, social and economic changes transforming South Africa, the age-old ways of life bound to ethnic cultures of the region are slowly fading. In the photographs... and a fascinating, sensitive text, Vanishing Cultures of South Africa reveals the ways of the indigenous groups, recording the roots of South African identity. [...] Vanishing cultures of South Africa is a cultural record of striking importance, capturing the beauty of the still-meaningful customs and the powerful ties of traditional life.11

Akin to publications that used to be popular during apartheid, the post-apartheid "cultural record of striking importance" displayed a kind of timeless merging of surviving cultural forms. "Modernity" was not particularly visible. The photographic styles have changed. The majority of the pictures is characterised by more liveliness and motion. There are, yet, numerous photographs, as well, where people's only function is that they required to "model" a headdress. The style, in turn, does not support directly novel notions of culture and cultural interaction in South Africa. This might, quite probably, be a result of the almost exclusive focus on rural areas.12 Certainly this is owed to the fact that the market demands certain images, in particular as far as the pictorial representation of African culture is concerned. The publication makes it all too evident that Africa has, in the minds of mass consumers, remained the most strange, mysterious and "different" realm or setting. As of yet, a revolution of photographic styles in coffee table books has not occurred. Instead, a harsh and stinging

10 ibid., Mandela's address. 11 ibid., inside flap. 12 Raditlhalo, 'Vanishing Cultures?, pp. 257-260. 243 critique of this publication made the point that, after reading of Magubane's Vanishing Cultures, the question arises whether "struggle photography is part of a 'vanishing culture'".13 The second publication was more consciously directed at searching for the roots of black African culture, whereby this search for the roots was intended as a deliberate effort to prepare for the future. The opening remarks state that "the time would seem right for a book that attempts to record for future generations the life-ways of the ancestors of the great majority of present-days South Africans", going on to explain that "the politically motivated emphasis on cultural differences, coupled with the refusal to admit blacks to the full benefits of western civilisation, lay at the very heart of the system.14 It is no wonder that ethnicity was rejected by most contemporary black political movements and with it an interest in traditional cultures."15 This statement of mission is continued in the subsequent paragraph which sets forth that "it is to be hoped that the ending of legalised apartheid and the full participation of all South Africa's people in the New South Africa will result, on the part of black South Africans, in a more relaxed and self-confident interest in and understanding of the black South African past."16 The book was intended to be a contribution to "healing the wounds". In this context it is interesting to note that, apart from numerous drawings and lithographed illustrations taken from the holdings of libraries and archives, the book includes a broad selection of photographs which had previously been published in the glossy coffee table books once designed to address semi-academically interested readerships. The introductory passages of the post-apartheid publication make it appear as if these images were now consciously directed towards African readerships interested in "their own" cultural heritages. This appears almost like the introduction of previously shaped semi-academic discourse scenarios in which the images had not previously commanded any authority. Divination, sacred ritual and the search for health were denoted as integral parts of African culture permeating large areas of human conduct, and as befitting for a search for the roots of African culture, cast in idioms of the local and the rural. Paradigmatically new were four Religion Education textbooks produced between 1994 and 1998, and which drew on and provided a repository of images on African Religion. These books include a range of pictures on healers and healing. The first book to appear, in 1996, was Festivals and Celebrations.17 The volume was authored by an inter-religious team of five

13 ibid., p. 250. 14 Hammond-Tooke, Roots of Black South Africa, p. 8. 15 ibid., p. 8. 16 ibid., p. 8. 17 Stonier, Janet E. T./ Omar, Rashied A./ Pillay, Saraswathi S./ Reisenberger, Azila. Festivals and Celebrations: A new approach to religion education for South African primary schools. Kenwyn 1996. 244 writers representing the different religions in South Africa and included visual material as, for instance, illustrations. A book dealing exclusively with African Religion was published next under the title of African Culture and Religion Alive!18 Being text-based, it encourages pupils to do research among members of the community and to listen to elders in the community. It does not include pictures. The same year saw the publication of a further textbook entitled Sacred Places.19 This book was authored by a team which consisted of an educationist and a photographer. The most recent publication appeared as Rainbow Religions and was, yet again, authored by a team of five religion educationists representing the five major religious traditions in South Africa.20 As textbooks the publications were intended as reference books, teaching guidelines and collections of material for a new subject to be implemented at schools and termed Life Orientation. The books embodied a vision of current religious landscapes in South Africa, and encouraged pupils and teachers alike to take notice of one another, advocating a scenario wherein people would respect cultural and religious diversity. In line with other publications these textbooks looked towards t he future with a gaze of positively oriented commitment. Their illustrations did not reproduce or raise concerns about the legacies of racism and segregation but, rather, conveyed the message that this age had been left behind, and that new options were available to finally surmount the era where self-worth had been denied and inferiority had been inflicted. Almost comparable to the tradition stemming from the Age of Enlightenment, enormous emphasis was placed on the equality of religions. Even though educationists considered the topic of Religion Education (a term conceptualised in the South African educationist debate) as a topic "of national public interest in the education about religion, religions and religious diversity in South Africa", it did not arouse much response from the wider South African community. It did, however, provoke immediate criticism among the more conservative institutions in the country.21 For this reason the illustrations of the Religion Education textbooks ought to be read as visualisation of an idealised vision of a future South Africa, rather than as glimpses into actually already achieved and realised cultural reconsiderations.

18 Kwenda, Chirevo V./ Mndende, Nokuzola/ Stonier, Janet E. T. African Religion and Culture Alive! Pretoria 1997. 19 Stonier, Janet/ Derrick, Tracy. Sacred Places: A New Approach to Religion Education for South African Primary Schools. Cape Town 1997. 20 Amin, M. S. et al. Rainbow Religions: Multi-Faith Religion Education: A Resource Book for Teachers and Learners, Grades 8-10. Cape Town 1998. 21 Chidester, Religion Education in South Africa: Teaching and Learning About Religion, Religions and Religious Diversity." (paper presented at Oslo Conference on Religion Education Syllabus 2003). 245

South African educationists derived their methodology from studies in interpretive approaches.22 This methodology took into consideration that religious forms were considered as being socio-culturally shaped and challenged through the ways in which particular religions interacted locally and under the influence of public representation. The interpretation of religions was, thus, moulded by the public experience of religions and, hence, by the way they publicly interacted, as well as through the manners and fashions according to which religions were represented in public media. In South Africa it was recognised that children had access to a virtually unlimited repository of rituals, symbols and concepts of African religiosity while, at the same time, in the official discourses of Christianity and politics, African Religion was considered as being inferior to such "proper" world religions as Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity. This was the motivating element for educationists to create images of all religions in ways that emphasised the connection of world religions to African Religion. Sacred Places was the third textbook in this series, using a particular dramaturgy of images and aiming to reconstruct living as, especially "lived religion", as people in various places of the country would experience it. Accompanied by the photographer, the author went to different places in Cape Town to meet official representatives of religions and congregations in order to take photographs of sacred places and religious symbols. Whereas South African Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism were portrayed in images of the urban, the author and the photographer toured the rural areas to achieve a representation of African Religion. The richly illustrated book was intended as a mirror to the verbal inputs given, through interviews, by various experts. Photographs were taken with the specific purpose of emphasising the interpretive approach and, thereby, to neutralise the impact of official explanations given by experts and authorities. "The Sacred Places was very decidedly, carefully planned in terms of the strategy we used. We very anxious not to have the kind of single expert input on any particular religion."23 When the book reached the market, however, it did not sell.24 With the benefit of hindsight Janet Stonier, who authored the book, considered that the photographs were, potentially, somewhat intimidating.

Janet Stonier (JS): I think the photographs are a little intimidating Gordon Mitchell (GM): In what sense are they intimidating? JS: Well, I think that they look a little bit sort of arty. GM: And you think…

22 Jackson, Robert. Religious Education: An Interpretive Approach. Abingdon 1997. 23 Stonier interview. 24 Stonier et al., Festivals and Celebrations was soon out of print. It was not possible, however, to obtain information about the number of copies sold. 246

JS: I'm guessing. I am guessing. […] GM: Do you think people can relate better to these ones [in Festivals and Celebrations]? JS: I don't know. The layout is different. Maybe it [Sacred Places] looks less like a children's book. Perhaps.25

In the photographs religious experts are, in fact, posing or performing – in one the authors posed as members of a congregation praying in a church, in another the author of previously published textbooks showed how to brew beer for ritual purpose.26 These inserted "bodies" into scenes depicting religious activity in order to create a realistic representation of "lived religion" and can, therefore, be considered as a form of re-enactment, as a setting of norms rather than as experimenting.27 The religious experiences of Hinduism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity were, on the whole, depicted in photographs devoid of movement, while African people's religious expression, as it was to be found in Independent Churches or African Religion, were often portrayed in dramatic photographs which showed movement, trance, dance.28 When asked why African Religion, in particular, was cast in terms of authenticity and emotion, the interviewee dodged the issue and began to argue logistically.

JS: …and then there is, to get a bit of a variety, … we didn’t want just Xhosa [examples of African Religion]. There is some… GM: …KwaNdebele JS: ja, KwaNdebele, and that [the taking of photographs of a healer in KwaNdebele] was also governed by what was possible. My son was working up KwaNdebele. So I asked him to do the interviewing and he took the pictures. GM: [You] didn't get any feedback on that specific place… of African Religion as something rural and not urban? JS: No, I think partly that might have been dealt with because although we didn't get much photographing, we actually did interview two university professors who practise religion I suppose in a very urban setting you know to start that off […] So in KwaNdebele we wanted to get a little bit of a spread if possible because our other book had focused on Xhosa very definitely, and one person's view on that, so we wanted to spread the African part as much as we could because we'd felt that we tried to get a range of the other religions as well, in the Sacred Places book, and so we tried to get that kind of range, and we felt that a geographic spread was probably more indicative of different practices, as regards African Religion. We thought that's what was necessary to get the spread. GM: So you got images from different parts of the country… JS: yes, and also interview input… What was very interesting was that I took a copy of this book to Mr Jihana, who is the one who my son interviewed in KwaNdebele, I hadn't ever met him, and there was a time constraint as there often is, you know a lot of time,… this sort of thing is dictated to by things like time and, you know, just physical possibilities…29

25 Interview with Janet Stonier, author of a Religion Education textbook, Pinelands/ Cape Town, 21.03.2003. 26 Stonier/ Derrick, Sacred Places, pp. 5, 12, 13, 16; Stonier et al., Festivals and Celebrations p. 50.. 27 Edwards, 'Photography', pp. 15-29. 28 Stonier/ Derrick, Sacred Places, pp. 5, 27, 38. 29 Interview with Janet Stonier. 247

The images initiated, as well, a shift away from diviners as central figures of religious practice who were experts and could be interviewed as such, but who did not figure in the photographs. In this regard healers, who continued to receive broad coverage in the popular media, were sidelined in educational visualisations of the knowledge and the culture they represented. Within religious context healers were not installed as independent religious figures. Emphasis was placed on the significance of community and elders in African religious practice and this approach pointed not only to an alternative understanding of the central figures of religion. It indicated, at the same time, an understanding of the generational conflict that post-apartheid South Africa had to solve, and to which the educational books intended to contribute.

Newspapers and Magazines Further Explored In the popular media, conversely, healers continued to command the images of healing in much stronger a dimension. Diviners and herbalists became the virtual prisms through which people's hopes and insecurities became mediated, or were fractured. In the print media coverage became shriller, topics such as wealth and fame began to dominate the tabloids. The drama of HIV/AIDS sufferance prompted many stories while, at the same time, journalists of the more glamorous media remained reluctant to engage with the topic in a critical manner.30 Popular print media reported about healers in multi-faceted ways that were not necessarily aligned along the more stringent lines employed in previous days. Due to the significantly more hyped styles of recent coverage in the print media articles which still revolve around issues of witchcraft have been taken as an indication of "occult economies".31 They have been seen to emerge, both as a product, and as an instigator, of violence and belief in witchcraft. The behaviours which result from accommodation in occult economies have been regarded and considered as an expression of the materially hopeless situation of many individuals in South Africa. The contexts in which more recent articles in the tabloids have been interpreted are, namely, magic and the apparition of zombie monsters on a global scale. Interpretations of witchcraft discourses are, however, not only about people's interpretations of morality, they amount to a moral discourse in themselves that is almost theological in nature, and that is driven by a huge amount of idealism, shock and exhaustion from the ongoing drama of transformation. It is therefore also possible, however, to explore the more recent medial styles of newspapers and magazines against the background of medial styles of previous periods.

30 Interview with Fraser Mtshali, editor of Bona Magazine, Durban 07.08.2000. 31 Comaroff/ Comaroff, 'Occult economies', pp. 280-281. 248

Media styles have, indeed, been changing. The characteristic image of the popular healer in the print media had emerged in parallel to apartheid tightening its grip on South African society. The popular healer had been a product of the print media under apartheid and after the demise of the system the popular press started to hail consumerism and the idea of the free market. Unfolding its consumerist discourse, the media abandoned its previous history of struggle and social critique, however hidden this critique might have been.32 The tabloids also left behind their message that it was worth striving for adaptation and putting up with the circumstances. In a spiral of continuously increasing drama, many South Africans faced a basic "spiritual insecurity" that came as a result of the country's opening up, of markets liberalising and of society transforming.33 In this climate the image of healers, as presented by Bona, shifted drastically. The new strategy aimed at endowing their protagonists, including healers, with glamour and publicity. After 1990, a large portion of articles published related to big, powerful and controversial men.34 Mbatha Sosobala, Neverdie Mushwana, and Credo Mutwa were names of old doyens who began to feature in the magazine with striking regularity. Articles about these personalities featured in parallel to texts in which television, sports and music stars claimed to either be izangoma themselves, or to be supported by the muti of loyal African masters of herbal knowledge.35 Wealth, beauty and fame arose as values around which the medial messages revolved and in one way or the other, healers and popular stars seemed to embody all of these. Hardly ever was there a recollection of the modest, helping healer or isangoma from a previous age.36 Reports about haunted homes and classrooms became scarcer and

32 Bertelsen, 'Ads', pp. 221-241. 33 Ashforth, 'Spiritual Insecurity', pp. 39-67. 34 Gcabashe, Golden. 'The Mighty Sosobala.' Bona (September 1990), pp. 38-39; Gcabashe, Golden. 'The First Flying Inyanga.' Bona (September 1991), pp. 34-35; Gcabashe, Golden. 'I Became a Sangoma the Traditional Way.' Bona (May 1992), pp. 28-29; Zuma, Sbusiso. 'Sosobala has a way to stop the killing.' Bona (September 1993), pp. 22-23; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'Women Will Bring Peace.' Bona (July 1994), p. 29; Mtakati, Mike. 'My Eyes Cry for South Africa', says Credo Mutwa.' Bona (August 1995), pp. 14-16; Mgudlwa, Felix. 'Credo Mutwa Records His Works...' Bona (September 1995), pp. 36-37; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'Neverdie Uses Snakes to Heal.' Bona (May 1997), pp. 22, 24; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'An Old Ritual Called "Ukuthwala".' Bona (June 1997), pp. 22-23. 35 'Muti in Music.' Bona (January 1990), p. 10; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'The singing Sangoma.' Bona (September 1990), p. 75; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'Why Potatoes has Turned to Muti.' Bona (February 1991), p. 46; Nawa, Lance. 'There's something special about Noria.' Bona (May 1991), pp. 89, 91; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'I can heal any disease.' Bona (April 1992), pp. 34-35, 37; Mgudlwa, Felix. 'Stress Can Really Kill Beauty.' Bona November 1995, pp. 38, 40; Bongani Hlatshwayo, 'Nothembi's Cultural Mission Pays Dividends', Bona, (March 1997), pp. 34, 36; Mphotho, Mpho. 'A drama to bewitch you.' Bona (January 1999), p. 38; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'Baloyi: My bag does not stop goals!' Bona (February 1999), pp. 14-15; Mtshali, Frraser. 'Brenda Fassie thanks ancestors.' Bona (April 1999), pp. 14-15, 62-63; Phala, Daniel. 'Intrigue, jealousy, witchcraft... new TV drama has it all.' Bona (April 1999), pp. 58-59; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'Hear the Spirit!' Bona (October 1999), p. 68. 36 Bokala, Willie. 'Patients thank their sangoma.' Bona (May 1990), p. 36; Gcabashe, Golden. 'She mixes old and new.' Bona (April 1991), pp. 20-21, 23; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'Healer rescues zombi from slavery.' Bona (October 1994), pp. 20-21, 24-25, 27. 249 suddenly sounded effortless and old-fashioned.37 Healing became an activity that Bona, always in touch with its reading clientele, associated more vitally with church prophets and spiritual healers.38 At the same time, many African medicines were being identified, in academic writing, in terms and conceptualisations of folk medicine, becoming openly appreciated as remedies to which especially poor people resorted, and which were the last straws for those elderly people whose children did not care about maintaining the health of their parents and grand-parents.39 For some time the African potato, already used by healers in previous decades to "expel the devils from a person to be bewitched", as knowledge went in the 1930s,40 was suddenly rediscovered as a medicine against HIV/AIDS stemming from African ground. The African potato was said to have been used successfully to cure lung-sickness in cattle.41 The newly debated African potato became a hope in the struggle against HIV/AIDS. At a time, when the realities of HIV/AIDS caught up with a long-standing reluctance in South Africa to deal with the disease and its implications, people hoped and expected healers to find an herbal cure.42 "Whatever the controversy surrounding the use of the African potato, it is evident that from the depth of the African soil has sprouted a vegetable containing immense therapeutic potential and promise. Used correctly, it may very well provide a cure to several ailments", promised Bona in 1999.43 In a similar vein as Bona, Drum became even more excessive than ever before as regards its coverage of topics that related to healing. Wealth and fame, culture and identity became nodal points in which adverse realities merged. Healers, healing, the manipulative powers healers commanded, as well as the promises that lay in their activities, became the basis for permanent speculations. Throughout the 1990s Drum produced several portraits of rich and famous izinyanga and muti men.44 Once more they gave scope to the revived

37 Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'Classroom haunted by ghost.' Bona (March 1993), p. 21; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'Family haunted by ghost.' Bona (January 1994), pp. 16-18; Davey, Zed. 'Indian family haunted by Zulu- speaking ghosts.' Bona (January 1996), pp. 24-26. 38 Bokala,Willie. 'Mr Maruma's healing hands.' Bona (November 1990), pp. 52-55; Bokala,Willi. ''Nothing will separate me from the Word of God.' Bona (September 1991), pp. 36-38; Mqhaba, Daizer. 'Everything Witches Do I Will Undo.' Bona (August 1993), pp. 26-27; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'The Power of Prayer.' Bona (March 1995), pp. 78, 80; Masiba, Ponko. 'MaSpampool - faith healer.' Bona (February 1998), pp. 30-31; Hlatshwayo, Bongani. 'Thulani has the spirit of healing.' Bona (April 1999), pp. 22-23. 39 Du Toit, Brian M. 'Modern folk medicine in South Africa.' South African Journal of Ethnology 21: 4 (1998), pp.145-152. 40 Felix. 'Native Medicines.' South African Outlook (01.08.1931), pp. 156-157. 41 ibid., p. 157. 42 '98 years of muti along.' Drum (31.07.1997); Nobin, QX. 'Traditional healers have a lot to offer.' Echo (05.02.1998); Bona (January 1996), p. 8. 43 Bridgraij, Ajith. 'The African Potato: Said to keep HIV on hold.' Bona (March 1999), pp. 22-23. 44 Mitchell, Colin. 'The flying inyanga.' Drum (March 1996); Mseleku, S'busiso. 'A Loaded Flying Inyanga.' Drum (August 1991); Makatile, Don. 'Muti man's magic snake.' Drum (14.11.1996). 250 authority of Credo Mutwa.45 Connected to these elements were several stories of show stars that pushed their image by claiming that not only had they taken the medicine of success, but that they were izangoma and traditional healers themselves.46 As a counter-image to these, Drum also reported about cases in which belief in magic became the cause of personal ruin for the superstitious.47 They referred to the successful use of muti in sports business.48 Especially for the Tanzanian discourse, sports medicines have been identified as a continuation of once potent war medicines. People are involved in no wars, but the waganga had adapted former war medicines for protecting, in these times, football players and to make sure that teams win their matches. 49 It may be difficult to transfer this connection directly to the South African context but, given the language of fight and survival sported by magazines, it offers an appealing interpretive moment. Muti, which appeared to be such an indispensable ingredient of success and fame, failure and destruction, attracted readers' responses. Some argued that muti was the wrong way to become rich and famous, and that those who really succeeded had earned their reputation through other ways such as hard work and a good education.50 Others may just have bought the magazine and may have taken inspiration from the stories, or may have found in the heroes of success portrayed role models for their own pursuit of life. With less dramatic momentum, Ilanga continued to take a concern, less in the advance of individuals and families, but rather in the issue of community maintenance. In some critical articles journalists reported about izangoma involved in attacks on families accused of witchcraft.51 In other cases, izangoma were held responsible for kidnapping and burying children and selling body parts.52 The newspaper did, though, report as well how, without the intervention of izinyanga and izangoma, diviners and witchdoctors, families faced incidents of

45 Makatile, Don. 'Mbeki's darkest hour.' Drum (01.07.1999); Mutwa, Credo. 'Our year of fire.' Drum (23.01.1997); Makatile, Don. 'Village of the Earth Mother.' Drum (09.01.1997); Msomi, Thuthu. 'In the steps of the master.' Drum (23.07.1998). 46 'TV star Mirranda Javu talks about why she became a traditional healer - she is SA's most stunning sangoma.' Drum (May 1996); Hart, Karen. 'Mirranda - our most stunning sangoma.' Drum (June 1994); Lengane, Jefferson. 'Muti against bad luck and jealousy.' Drum (27.05.1999). 47 Maluleke, Justinus. 'Doomed by the curse of the induna', Drum (30.12.1999); Mzinyati, Mafu, Dr./ Mayisela, Thandi. 'Crippled by the power of superstition.' Drum (30.12.1999). 48 Mola, Jake. 'Muti in the ring.' Drum (April 1994); Maluleke, Justinus. 'Killed by a fake sangoma.' Drum (20.02.1997); Jacobs, Sipho. 'My sangoma almost killed me.' Drum (December 1994). 49 Swantz, Medicine Men, p. 126. 50 'What muthi?' Bona (May 1999); 'Youth beware of Satanists!' Bona (July 1997); 'Mandela, "Muti-Man".' Bona (May 1997). 51 'Suspected Family unhappy.' Ilanga (18.01.1996); 'Escape of suspected witchdoctor after attack', Ilanga 26.09.1996; 'Naked witch escaped', Ilanga (31.05.1999); 'Threats of Killing a Woman who is suspected of bewitching (thwetshulwa) her son.' Ilanga (22.09.1999); 'Woman suspected of witchcraft saved by police - community expelled her.' Ilanga (15.09.1999). 52 'After bones were dug out from grave, isangoma foretold that something would happen.' Ilanga (04.10.1999); 'Found with private parts of human beings.' Ilanga (24.11.1994). 251 terror in their houses, how they were unable to attribute the unbearable disturbances to an identifiable person or event. Diviners, some of whom were affiliated to churches, whilst others of them acted independently, helped cast out demons and invisible dwarfs, kept in check unknown forces as much as burning fires and clothes.53 Healers, as well as stories about them, epitomise the modernist, democratic project of making invisible forces visible and of making motivations become transparent. Politics of the state, democratisation and economic development are structural transformations which are outside of the command of individuals and communities. Such remote processes take part somewhere else, where they cannot even be perceived, but they impinge, nevertheless, painfully as much as substantially on people's fortunes and on the survival of families. Healers translate these experiences into idioms with which, or against which, communities can actually operate. They speak of witchcraft that results from the fact that people hate development, and they explain that students do not manage to pass their certificate examinations because they spend every night working, unwittingly, as hypnotised zombies in their neighbour's field.54 Healers pose the question whether communities obstruct their own development, and that it is up to the communities to identify the "culprits". For people, either individuals or communities, it is easier to act against witches who enslave zombies than to recognise what they gain from political and economic transformations of the nation. This phenomenon is an indication of the fact that wealth and fortune have dramatically been taken out of the hands of those who have once been able to pursue them. A historical case serves as a reminder that there was a time when the trade with cowries resulted in a re- definition of the properties of the West African God Orí. As God embodied and signified wealth and all fortunes of life now, that cowries were synonymous with and indicative of wealth and fortunes as well, the monetarisation of trade naturally impacted on people's religious beliefs and views of the world.55 Names as much as properties of gods and spirits have been subjected to change ever more dramatically in the age of globalisation and democratisation, leaving individuals and communities yet more impoverished or glamorously rich, and increasingly more unable to independently direct their course.

53 'After seven days: demon cast out by prayer.' Ilanga (15.-17.04.1999); 'Residents disturbed by invisible dwarf.' Ilanga (11.12.1991); 'Those who are suspected of killing people by witchcraft will be taken to the witchdoctors and diviners.' Ilanga (15.08.1996); 'Two lodgers troubled by something invisible.' Ilanga (26.03.1997); 'Family haunted by something unknown - expensive house left.' Ilanga (12.12.1996); 'Anxiety about something that is burning clothes.' Ilanga (04.03.1999); 'Amazed family saw bird without lungs and intestines.' Ilanga (11.-13.02.1999); 'Another family escaped the burning fire.' Ilanga (25.11.1999). 54 Smith, 'Buying a Better Witch Doctor', p. 150. 55 Ogundiran, Akinwume. 'Of Small Things Remembered: Beads, Cowries, and Cultural Translations of the Atlantic Experience in Yorubaland.' International Journal of African Historical Studies 35: 2-3 (2002), pp. 427-458, here p. 448. 252

Apart from these more dramatic challenges, the popular magazines also reported about issues of culture and identity, in which South Africans commanded a proper voice. Ilanga ran some stories reporting about the revival of forgotten rituals towards which healers and traditional leaders consented.56 Other newspapers gave accounts of the mixing of Catholicism and traditional beliefs.57 They brought features about witchcraft in Great Britain and Haiti.58 This turned the world of spirits into a global phenomenon and explained that African belief in witchcraft was nothing that stood in opposition to trends in other parts of the world. In the 1970s and 1980s the interest of white people in African healing had been taken as an indication that African culture was, by no means, to be looked down upon. Africans were reminded to hold in esteem what at least some white people did not outrightly dismiss as negative, foolish or futile. In the 1990s and subsequent years spirit phenomena documented in America and Europe seemed to play a similar role. They enhanced the worth of what was important to African people and what was on their minds. One reader argued that, if "Westerners", who represented not only success, science and education, but also power and efficiency, experienced witchcraft which existed in Europe and America, witchcraft in Africa, which many South Africans still viewed with scepticism, should be taken as a reality, and as an incentive to appreciate healers in South Africa more unambiguously as they commanded the skills to cope with dangerous an afflicting situations.59 In the context of debating culture and identity, popular journalism returned, once more, to the motif of the "white sangoma".60 Previously, the initiation of white people to the world of the spirits and of African diviners, as well as the apprenticeship of white people with African herbalists had been taken as a signal for Africans to appreciate their own cultural heritage. In South Africa's most recently undergone period of transformation, however, the topic gave rise to controversy. Some readers held that white people did not belong to an intimately African tradition. It remains difficult to ascertain whether this can be taken as an indication of the fact that the apartheid maxims had finally taken root and effect, namely that pursuant to said maxims African traditions belonged to African people and, moreover, according to which African ways of life were irreconcilable with the cultural traditions of

56 Mathe, Sam. 'Restless spirits on the road of death.' Drum (02.12.1999). 57 Ngwenya, Kaizer. 'Enjoying mass with your ancestors', Drum (13.05.1999). 58 Randles, Jenny/ Hough, Peter. 'Safe in the arms of angels.' Drum (15.05.1997); Jane Williams. 'Night of the living dead.' Drum (19.12.1996). 59 Nobin, QX. 'Africans and Christianity.' Echo (23.04.1998); Nobin, QX. 'Sangomas, state and mental health research.' Echo (06.08.1998). 60 Cullum, Melanie. 'Black and White Magic - Phineas and Rae, Egoli's amazing inyanga team.' Drum (June 1994); 'Secret Power of a White Sangoma.' Drum (December 1992/ January 1993); 'The White Sangomas of Natal.' Drum (December 1989/ Jan. 1990); Maluleke, Justinus. 'Life of the child sangoma.' Drum (29.04.1999). 253 white people. The tendency to claim African traditions for Africans can also be read as a new appropriation, as an emancipation from interference by outsiders. Some readers now claimed publicly that white people did not understand African traditions because they had not been raised with nor socialised into these traditions. Against a climate of general unease, one healer introduced and asserted a reconciliatory stance explaining that she did not want to

exclude [the white people] from being sangomas purely because their practice differs from ours. Not all black sangomas heal in the same way – your style depends on your training stable. To be a sangoma is to have open communication with your spirits, your ancestors, who will tell you what to do and how to heal sick people. As long as the white sangomas have that power to heal or to help, we can't doubt their credibility.61

If the media are to be taken seriously, more white people than ever before these days decide to become diviners and are being instructed by African diviners. Whereas it is difficult to determine on the strength of reports in the media the reasons why these people should want to become diviners, or to ascertain their social role, it can be argued that they no longer symbolise the value and the worth of an African tradition. White izangoma are accepted into the profession, but the worth of the tradition is embodied in, and represented by, African diviners themselves. Against this background healers' professionalisation received positive resonance. The formation of professional associations was welcomed as it promised to be a step towards "fighting thugs, [and] crime that is taking place under the name of healing."62 Ilanga hoped that close links of surveillance between the associations and the KwaZulu-Natal Ministry of Health would guarantee a more controlled radius of healers' activities.63 Journalists viewed the formation of the associations with particular scepticism whenever democratic principles were not upheld in the associations.64 Professionalisation, and hence the integration and control of diviners and herbalists, was also a topic explored by UmAfrika, albeit to a lesser extent. Their primary concern rested with the encounter between "traditional" and "Western doctors", and they placed special emphasis on the dignity the profession was keen to attain. UmAfrika described how "traditional doctors" were wearing gowns in graduation ceremonies and receiving certificates.65 They expressed the hope that associations would be likely to unite

61 Bona (September 1999), p. 10. 62 'Agreement made between diviners and Health Department.' Ilanga (05.07.1999). 63 'Dr. Mkhize elected chairman for the diviners.' Ilanga (03.10.1996); 'One of the most known hotels has organised its diviners for the customers.' Ilanga (01.02.1999). 64 'New agreement about the support of traditional medicine.' Ilanga (26.08.1999). 65 'Traditional doctors challenge Western doctors.' UmAfrika (26.-30.10.1999). 254 various kinds of healers.66 The potential incorporation of izangoma and izinyanga, traditional doctors and diviners into mainstream church cultures represented another point of reflection.67 The official professionalisation of African healers occurred in South Africa at a time when HIV/AIDS was disrupting society in unprecedented ways. More stringently than in any of the previous periods of healers' attempted efforts towards official recognition, their activities are linked to the struggle against one particular disease against which neither the public health sector nor the healing experts have much to offer. First suggestions of how the role of healers could be envisaged in the context of HIV/AIDS were taken up in a cursory fashion by the print media towards the late 1980s. Speculations to this end received impetus from the developments of the subsequent decade.68 In the 1990s, especially after an impulse in 1993, reporting about healers became more stringently related to their efforts towards professionalisation and the role they could possibly play in counteracting HIV/AIDS.69 Right from the beginning of the emerging debate healers claimed – not only in South Africa – the somewhat dubious potential of finding a remedy from African soil.70 Even though African healers may not be central to treating HIV/AIDS, many people living with HIV/AIDS in South Africa do not have immediate reasons to reject their claim. Healers offer hope where institutions and individuals who should take on responsibility provide none. They offer false, disastrous and even deadly advice where scientific medicine knows better.71 From the perspective of a desolate to non-existent public health sector, healers promise additional resources, support and advice in the sphere of home-based care. Healers may be considered useful in helping distribute condoms and for the treatment of concomitant opportunistic infections, and contribute to the shaping of attitudes and patterns of risk-incurring behaviours. They may even be identified as multipliers in the popular re-interpretation of cosmological

66 'Izinyanga and diviners want to be equal with Western doctors.' UmAfrika (16.01.1993); 'Fight between doctors and diviners.' UmAfrika (12.-16.10.1999); 'Traditional clinic uses Western medicine.' UmAfrika (16.- 10.07.1996); 'Before Western doctors there were diviners.' UmAfrika (29.05.1993). 67 Mbokazi, Zanele. 'Cultures and Christianity.' UmAfrika (11.-15.04.1995); 'Cultures or African cultures cannot hold up with Christianity.' UmAfrika (24.-28.03.1998). Mainstream refers here to the culture of the so-called mainstream churches, which at some stage in South African history evolved out of the former mission church contexts. Mainstream churches are a group of institutions distinct from the African Independent Churches, which more often than mainstream churches include healers among their office holders. 68 Mkhize, Khaba. 'The value of African healing.' Echo (01.05.1986); ' Pharmaceutical firms blocking traditional healers in Zimbabwe.' Echo (06.10.1988); Mkhize, Piwe. 'Inyangas want to see if they can cure Aids victims.' Echo (17.12.1987); Ranaka, Clifford. 'Can They Cure Aids?' Bona (December 1987), pp. 64, 66. 69 Lengane, Jefferson. 'Ripping off a dying man.' Drum (19.08.1999); 'AIDS education and the colourful world of sangomas and condoms.' Drum (August 1993). 70 Schoffeleers, Matthew. 'The AIDS Pandemic, the Prophet Billy Chisupe, and the Democratization Process in Malawi.' Journal of Religion in Africa 29 (1999), pp. 406-441. 71 See also the South African novel by Langalibalele Felix Mathenjwa. Lingering Hope. Goodwood 2000. 255 views.72 This brings around, yet again, the issue of healers' legitimacy. Are they worth trusting? How can they prove their allegiance to society? At a moment in time, when the world has become more pessimistic as regards African health, popular attitudes have started to assess African healers in more positive terms.

Back to the Original Objective Having pursued a long and meandering path, healers were acknowledged by the South African state in September 2004. Since 1994 some companies have already started to introduce limited alternative health-care benefits, and have allowed employees to claim a restricted number of visits to traditional healers under the companies' medical plans. The Traditional Health Practitioners Bill of 2004, which recognised and regulated the practice of South Africa's African healers, was unanimously passed by Parliament.73 Essentially, it concentrated on the creation of a statutory council for "traditional healers" and regulated their registration. The Council will have a maximum of twenty-two members and it will be composed of registered traditional healers, a representative from the Department of Health representative, community representatives as much as a registered medical practitioner and a pharmacist.74 "African health practitioners", a rather legalistic and technical term of more recent days, became now popularly dubbed "traditional healers", a term that itself had assumed common acceptance over previous years. Diviners, herbalists, traditional birth attendants and traditional surgeons were finally permitted to apply for registration and would be able to claim fees from the medical aid schemes their patients belong to. Doctors For Life International, an organisation comprising medical doctors, dentists, veterinaries and other health professionals, protested against the bill, warning that healers must be kept out of South Africa's health care system because their medicines were potentially harmful for patients. More specifically, the organisation doubted that the government's aim of controlling healers

72 Schoepf, Brooke Grundfest. 'AIDS, Sex and Condoms: African Healers and the Reinvention of Tradition in Zaire.' Medial Anthropology 14 (1992), pp. 225-242; Wootton, Jacqueline C. 'The Role of Traditional Healers in the Fight Against AIDS in Africa.' Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 5: 3 (1999), pp. 225-228; Dilger, Hansjörg. "'Aids ist ein Unfall": Metaphern und Bildlichkeit in AIDS-Diskursen Tansanias.' Afrika spectrum 35 (2000), pp. 165-182; Nicoll, A. et al. 'Lay Health Beliefs Concerning HIV and AIDS – A Barrier for Control Programmes.' AIDS Care 5: 2 (1993), pp. 231-241; Naur, 'Indigenous Knowledge'; Naur, 'Traditional Healers'. 73 Matomela, Nombini: 'Recognition for traditional healers', in: BuaNews (15.09.2004) www.southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/health/traditional-healers [visitied 09.05.2005]; Afrol News (09.09.2004), www.afrol.com/articles/13912 (visited 9.5.05); 'Healers licensed in South Africa' (BBC News world edition 09.09.2004) news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/Africa/3640270.stm (visited 9.5.05.) 74 Ndaki, Kanya, 'Regulating Traditional Healers', health-e (30.08.2004) www.health- e.Organisation/za/news/article.php?uid=20031097 (visited 9.5.05) 256 would constitute a policy that would, in reality, be implemented. Part of the problem was that the legislation failed to detail the actual minimum requirements or to stipulate the standards of training or practice that would have to be met in order for individual practitioners to be regarded as traditional health practitioners. The Minister argued that she would determine these issues upon consultation with the Council. The underlying philosophy was, quite clearly, to provide registration first, and to ascertain the principles of said integration in the course of negotiations taking place at a later point in time. By means of this legislation South Africa integrated African medicine into the public health care schemes in such a way that neighbouring countries had implemented some time previously. Botswana, Malawi, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and other countries have recognised a number of national and regional healers' associations with memberships ranging between 6 and 52,500 individuals.75 Even in Mozambique, where after the country's independence African healers were not legally recognised, policies started to change in 1989 when a national association of healers was formed – not yet recognised by the state, but supported by the Ministry of Health.76 It remains to be followed up what, in actual fact, will change for the African health practitioners, which experts will be welcomed in the fold of approved health services, and how the registration will impact on their legitimacy with patients as much as on their activities, and whether schemes for the sustainable utilisation of medicinal plants will be implemented, remains to be followed up. Historical science ceases, to a large extent, to provide suitable and adequate instruments for an analysis of the dynamics underway in this regard at the moment of writing. It does, however, furnish, a perspective and it does, fortunately, provide an understanding of how patients actually understood the objective to maintain their own health. In East Africa, "the lines of debate between indigenous and modern medicine were drawn in the age of the tribal dresser" which referred to the time- span between the mid-1920s and 1930.77 In South Africa a similar debate started about the same time shaped by particular South African historical constellations, but up to the recent recognition of healers it also resonated with more broadly discernible dynamics on the continent. Throughout the African continent a rich reservoir of terms has historically been available for labelling or categorising and describing African healers. The most common terms which were in use in South Africa appeared in this study. Depending on the period and

75 www.sardc.net/imercsa/zambezi/Znewsletter/issue3of1/medicinal.htm [visited 24.04.02] The Zambezi Newsletter of the SARDC IMERCSA State of the Environment Reporting Programme for the Zambezi Region 76 Jurg/Marrato, 'Mozambican Experience'. 77 Iliffe, East African Doctors, p. 59. 257 group of speakers, terminology varied and changed over time. Ambitious urban healers themselves referred to a wide range of terms to denote their expertise and to translate their status to a state bureaucracy they could not be expected to possess more than scant knowledge. As detailed in chapter 3 the almost exclusively male writers called themselves izangoma, izinyanga, herbalists, dingaka, "native doctors" or "native race doctors". Some used titles such as "Herb Dr., non-medical", and as a group they conceived of themselves as a "nation" or a "profession" aspiring to civilisation and progress. By means of this terminology they were positioning themselves relative to the specialists of the medical field rather than the realm of religion. They also denounced the use of such terms as "witchdoctor" and discredited "bogus doctors", "robbers" and "gang stars", terms which referred to people who were bringing disorder to the community. When the popular debate ensued in South Africa, a wide range of terms was played with, and these included, yet again and anew, labels alluding to the sphere of religion. As has been explored in chapter 4, the media reported about "modern witchdoctors", "smilers", "Mother Sangoma", the "professors from the University of Witchcraft", "prophets", "soothsayers", "cannibal witchdoctors", "killer inyangas", "unpaid sangomas" and of many more. Frequently, their emphasis rested in the use of adjectives that accompanied the established labels. In its combination, the designation and the adjective described a character or a situation. In contrast to the inventive terminology the print media experimented with, the coffee table books resorted to an ethnographically correct vocabulary, in its turn interspersed with the colonial lexicon of popular expressions. Chapter 5 attempted to cover this particular range of terms. "Witchdoctor" was a recurring label often used without derogative meaning. Healers were also termed "priest-diviners", "colourful individuals" and "representatives of the ancestral spirits". "Characters in magic" engaged in "ancestor worship", and individual healers were presented as "young woman witchdoctor", "novice diviners", a "youthful Zulu diviner" or, for instance, an "herbalist at work". The thrust of the vocabulary pointed into the direction of religion, less to issues of maintaining health and social order. Especially when compared to the print media's use of terms, the terminology employed by coffee table publications appeared rather limited in scope, more stereotypical, less mocking and, at the same time, less provocative. In the academic field scholars of African medicine and of "healers" shifted to the use of "traditional healer" as a descriptive and conceptual term. When social history started to be in the ascendent in the late 1960s though, in particular, in the 1970s, re-interpretations of social and cultural meanings of health and affliction became a prime focus. Scholars in this field introduced a conceptual duality between tradition and modernity, traditional and western 258 medicine, which healers themselves had once described in terms of progress and science, and that the popular media tried to capture in a variety of ways, albeit mostly through provocation and controversy. In the years of post-apartheid transition biographical documentaries brought back to mind a wide range of popular uses of terms referring to "healers" as illustrated in chapter 6. Sarah Mashele, who from the magazines was known as a "fortune teller", received a different label in the documentary written about her. According to this "she is really an inyanga… that is a person who heals sick people and gets rid of evil. She is not a sangoma who sings and dances and tells your fortune… She is not a witch or wizard who brings evil…"78 Katie Makanya used the term "inyanga" as a collective noun for "smellers-out", "herbalists" and "sorcerers". In her context, Dr McCord distinguished between "licensed herbalists", whom he detested deeply, and "heathen inyangas", with whom he even cooperated in some of his treatments. Joseph Zulu, the novel that operated with tell-tale names, used the name "Dingaka" for "the King's chief isangoma". The power of izangoma was counteracted by "uGogo", the elderly woman, who also knew, gave advice, and protected. In Mashudu the "inyanga" was equated with the "herbalist", the "diviner" with the "sangoma". The title of the book made reference to "witchdoctor", a term in use since the nineteenth century and which, in different periods of time, had been associated with varying notions of what a witch was and did. In the popular media she has been labelled "witchdoctor of Houghton", "Venda's white daughter" and been portrayed as one partner in "Phineas and Rae, Egoli's amazing inyanga team". Currently terms such as "traditional healers" and "African health practitioners" feature prominently in official discourse. Unofficial and popular discourses are, as can be inferred, always broader in scope, and more local in variety. They reflect versatility, personality and personal experience, while official discourse applies and confers conceptual labels or categories. Differences are levelled out in official discourse, as a response to the broad categories of "witchdoctors" and "western doctors". As in most recent times, the "witchdoctor" is no longer the colonial figure, once cast in terms of "the primitive", "pre- logical thinking", but is now understood in terms of "occultism" and, for instance, "ritual murder", it becomes not a special requirement to design counter-images and an alternative vocabulary with comparably all-encompassing reach. Hence, the terms "properly" in use right now with regard to "healing" stress civil rights and cultural status as well. They do this in a vocabulary which is potentially convertible in global debates around health and indigenous

78 Simon, Inyanga, p. 3. 259 knowledge.79 "Traditional knowledge practitioners", often abbreviated as "TMK", is therefore one of the latest creations.80 "Shaman" has not become common for the description of South African healers, even though healers of southern Africa are sometimes compared with these.81

79 See for instance the relatively new journal Indilinga: African Journal of Indigenous Knowledge Systems, itself a co-operation between universities in Southern Africa, in particular South Africa, and Norway: www.indilinga.organisation.za (17.10.2005) 80 Frommer, 'Protecting Traditional Medicinal Knowledge'. 81 Thorpe, S. A. Shamans, Medicine Men and Traditional Healers. A Comparative Study of Shamanism in Siberian Asia, Southern Africa and North America. Pretoria 1993, pp. 80-126. 8

Conclusions Health-Seekers, Healers and the Transformation of the South African State

South Africa's post-apartheid transformation joins a sequence of interlinked historical changes, transformations and transitions which occurred over a long period of time and to which, in this study, processes of South African healers' professionalisation and popularisation have been correlated. The utilisation of this particular combination of lenses was aiming at an attempt to read structural transformations from the individual vantage points of a legally marginalized, yet aspiring group of professionals which, in turn, was reflected against the perspectives of the collective of people who tended to consult these experts, albeit almost never articulating themselves in records that could easily be traced for the sake of historical writing. The majority of people in South Africa, on whom the changes impacted, either to their advantage or to their disadvantage, who had to cope with the ascendancy and the crisis of the apartheid state and who, at a later stage and in the context of the democratisation of the South African state, experienced the effects of globalisation as much as the changing forms of a continually high level of violence in the country, were at the receiving end of any of these various transformations. Generally speaking, the history of healers' professionalisation and their popularisation was hoped to be, concomitantly, a reflection of transformation and a case study of how transformations in South Africa affected the people who did not command these dynamics. In the aftermath of the South African War, the formation of the South African state was characterised by its accelerating scale of industrialisation, by the ensuing formation of classes this process entailed as one of this consequences and by an ever increasing intervention of the state in the private and personal spheres of South African people. The early decades of the twentieth century marked a decisive transformation, even though neither white racism or capitalism nor, in fact, the highly specific, even peculiar form of South Africa's racial capitalism, were new to the country.1 The system of migrant labour, having intensified since the late nineteenth century, the development of the sector of secondary industry from the mid- 1930s onwards as much as segregation, the exclusion of black people from central political

1 Marks/ Trapido, 'South Africa since 1976', pp. 2-3. 261 institutions of the South African state, formed part and parcel of this transformation which, in turn, were instrumental in solidifying the basis of the new South African state. Rural reserves were being transformed into reservoirs of cheap, unskilled African labour for white farmers and industrialists, while a particular urban transformation was a concomitant of this process. The massive influx of rural Africans into urban areas lead to the creation of a stable workforce in towns and cities. Living conditions in urban habitats were squalid, particularly as the state inhibited and hindered the social and economic aspirations of the nascent African petty entrepreneurial elite. This was the price imposed by the segregationist state upon its African population in order to protect its white constituency. For the African population, the effect of the transformation taking place during this period was "ambiguity". African leaders as, for instance, the Zulu king Salomon ka Dinuzulu or John L. Dube, had to be shrewd interpreters of tradition and skilful manipulators of people, white as well as black.2 As a response to the loss of autonomy and the ambiguous role they were assigned in the white state, chiefs frequently opted for the way of black adaptation. A small, educated elite monopolised salaried jobs and tended to accept the premise of liberal ideology, with its distinction between "barbarism" and "civilisation". The members of this new elite saw themselves as modernisers of society, while a handful of African political organisations strove to improve the lot of the mass of the subordinate people on a national scale. Against this background African diviners and herbalists and their clientele experienced an urban transformation in the decades between 1930 and the late 1950s. With the numbers of Africans in towns and cities on a steady increase, and with the creation of a vigorous proletarian culture and informal economy, healers' activities began to assume a different nature. Of most importance, diviners, herbalists and other experts of health intended to bring themselves back to the public realm, and they wished an official acknowledgement of their social role. Around 1930, therefore, healers began to submit documents to the authorities to effect and bring about the acknowledgement of their professionalisation. The key notions around which they wished to structure that profession were "science", "progress" and "civilisation", the very values Christianity and British imperialism had implanted into South African society and which the aspiring elite had made concerns of their own to an astonishing extent. Healers conceived of themselves as bearers of culture, but also as agents versed in forensic matters who offered to act as brokers or mediators of social order, even assisting the police. Urban environments of African health production did not abrogate patterns of rural

2 Marks, Shula. The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in Twentieth- Century Natal. London 1986. 262 healing, but placed new emphases on professionalisation, on a concern as regards scholastic education, and on the commercialisation of medicines. As has been shown in chapter 3, the leading heads of the associations did not immediately concern themselves with the management of the major diseases of this period, such as, for instance, malnutrition, tuberculosis, or syphilis. Nor did they enter into a debate with the state authorities about the nature and workings of the spirit world on which they depended to exercise their skills. It would have to be regarded as an overstatement to claim that healers, healing or their clients actively contributed to the nature of the transformation coming about in this period, but they reflected the process. Healers' concerns stood in the shadow of the concerns of the nascent African elite and the politically articulate. Healers envisioned a conservative social order in the urban environment, and articulated an active role in the current transformation. The creation of official networks as documented in the profession's very own correspondence, indicated that healing remained no longer a local issue, but that the profession aspired to act on a nation-wide basis, if not in terms of universally accepted skills. Such ambitions gained no acknowledgement, firstly because they were not taken seriously, and secondly because from the official point of view it was not the participation of Africans that was being envisaged but, conversely, their subordination. Healers showed, however, how much consensus there could have been, and how advantageous it could have been for the state to act in co-operation. Their activities showed, as well, that in attempting to achieve their aim they did not necessarily give in to such dominant processes as, for instance, the formation of ethnicity. It is, in fact, the case, that the processes of healers' professionalisation before the late 1950s draws attention to a number of counter-experiences of identity and less dominant developments which were later neglected in historical assessments of this period of transformation but which, as long as this period was lasting, formed experiences and concerns of the people who lived through the change underway. In a subsequent period of transformation, which aided and assisted the segregationist state of the 1920s and 1930s to develop into the emergent and gradually consolidating apartheid state of later decades, healing underwent a popular transformation. The rise of Afrikaner nationalism, on the increase since the 1920s as a response to British imperialism, culminated in the electoral victory of the National Party in 1948. The apartheid state imposed minority rule upon a majority, pursuant to which the initially held ideas of an ideology of "separate development" were channelled into a coherent set of apartheid policies in the 1950s. Their key concern was the elimination of black participation in the central political system, to which end the racial laws of the segregationist era were extended and the application of those 263 laws was tightened up in the name of racial domination. By means of this transformation, South Africa set itself apart from historical developments towards post-colonial realities that were beginning to shape countries and societies outside South Africa. Between 1960 and 1964 the British transferred power to local nationalist parties Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi and Zambia whereas, in stark contrast, South Africa was far removed from such an option. In 1965 the white settler government of Rhodesia postponed the transfer of power by asserting sovereignty over the colony and by resorting to a unilateral declaration of independence. From 1966 to 1968 Britain transferred power to Africans in Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland, while Mozambique and Angola became independent in 1974 and 1975. In South Africa, transformations of a different kind became manifest. By means of a maintained emphasis on ethnic difference and through a policy of forced evictions of Africans from urban areas and their enforced transfer to the countryside, the state's policy of "re-tribalisation" of the majority of the population effected and brought about a corresponding transformation to the consolidation of the apartheid state.3 Adaptation and resistance were the responses with which Africans reacted to the state – either by conforming and, therefore, evading and accommodating or, in contrast, by bringing to bear their opposition. The South African state, yet again, propositioned and advocated the independence of ethnically designated homelands, pursuant to which the Transkei became "independent" in 1976, and Bophuthatswana followed suit in 1977. Two years later, Venda was declared an "independent" homeland, and finally, in 1981, the Ciskei joined the group of "independent" homelands. The creation of "independent homelands", or Bantustans as they were called, was intended, by the state, as an industrial decentralisation policy and with the intended aim of controlling labour migration.4 Through such transformations and by means of obstructing processes of wide-reaching transformations, as they did occur in neighbouring countries, it came about that, one the one hand, the hopes and aspirations of the African elite were stymied and dashed. On the other hand and in addition to this the material gap between employed Africans and employed whites widened significantly as evidenced by the dramatic increase in African unemployment figures – in 1977, for example, some 26% of Africans were estimated to be without work. African resistance induced a new phase of state transformation. While the South African state had been successful in eliminating political opposition in the 1960s, the 1970s formed

3 Motlhabi, Mokgethi. The Theory and Practice of Black Resistance to Apartheid: A Social-Ethical Analysis. Johannesburg 1984, pp. xvii. 4 Tomlinson, Richard/ Hyslop, Jonathan. 'Industrial Decentralisation, Bantustan Policy and the Control of Labour in South Africa.' African Urban Quarterly 1: 3-4 (1986), pp. 220-234; Southall, Roger. 'Botha Reformism, the Bantustan Strategy and the Marginalization of the South African Periphery.' Labour, Capital and Society 15: 2 (1982), pp. 6-39. 264 the period in which the Black Consciousness Movement represented that deeper strand of Africanism within African nationalism that helped emphasise and reassert pride in African culture. Of equal importance, the multi-faceted movement rejected the imposed division among African groups and confronted white domination with black solidarity. The uprisings in Soweto resulted in brutal violence by the state in 1976, initiating a new culture of protest and a phase of heightened struggle and resistance against the authoritarian state. By the mid- 1980s ungovernability characterised the situation. The problems confronting the South African state had become truly formidable while the African organisations challenged the stability of the social order without being able to transform it. The state proved itself of being incapable of re-asserting, leave alone re-establishing its own authority without resorting to increasingly coercive measures and repeatedly declared states of emergency between 1985 and 1989.5 The most violent phase of this transformational process took place between 1984 and 1987. Between September 1984 and December 1987, official statistics recorded almost 3,000 deaths which were directly related to the political struggle. Some 45,000 people were detained, about 70,000 people were left homeless in the Cape winter of 1986 after the razing of Crossroads – a sweepingly sharp increase in casualties compared to former periods, especially when recalling that during the uprisings of 1976 and 1977 a "mere" 575 deaths were estimated to have been immediately connected to political violence, and "only" some 2,500 people to have been detained. In 1960, the year of the Sharpeville massacre, 69 people had been shot, and some 11,500 Africans detained.6 In effect, violence permeated society to such an extent that analysts of this phase of South Africa's transformation began to refer to a culture of outrage about which a virtual "epidemiology of violence" could be written. Defining this overwhelming affliction, it was argued that

the epidemiology of South African violence must include such features as the high rates of violent crime, the patterns of crime and punishment, the rise of urban vigilantes, the high rates for road and work accidents, suicides and many other varieties of violence which have become part of the very fabric of 'ordinary' South African life.7

Apartheid itself appeared as a major source and guise if not incarnation of violence. Due to the migrant labour system, apartheid was responsible for the large-scale and systematic

5 Marks/ Trapido, 'South Africa since 1976', p. 43. 6 Manganyi, Chabani N./ du Toit, André. 'The Time of the Comrades – Reflections on Political Commitment and Professional Discourse in a Context of Political Violence', in: Manganyi, Chabani N./ du Toit, André (ed). Political Violence and the Struggle in South Africa. London 1990, pp. 1-28. 7 ibid., p. 5 265 destruction of stable or reliable family life. Apartheid was the cause of uprooting and relocating whole communities. The violent fabric of life in the mine compounds was understood as another immediate effect of apartheid. Even more, the massive increase of pass law arrests violated South African society substantially. Imprisonments for purely statutory offences as much as floggings and, not to mention, the highest known rate of judicial hangings in the world, marked the very fabric of South Africa's violence in the 1970s and 1980s.8 The domination of women, youth gangs, vigilante and counter-vigilante activities not only caused upheaval in the country but foreshadowed the immense, quasi internalised level of violence that amounted to much more than clearly-confinable political violence. African people in the townships, in particular, were trapped in this culture of outrage, whereas it remained possible for many whites, should they be so inclined, to carry on with "normal" life in segregated social and residential environments. Against this backdrop of increasing violence and coercion the image of healers underwent its popularisation. It experienced an amazing popular transformation in African newspapers and magazines, as chapter 4 has reconstructed, while, at the same time, it was denied transformation in the ever more popular coffee table books analysed in chapter 5. Remodelled or transmogrified to mediums of entertainment, healers were endowed with a nation-wide significance, albeit in very different styles. As a result of this, discourses about healers became multi-directional, whereby healers themselves quite often exercised but little discursive influence. It seems as if the authoritarian state, as well, developed a sustained interest in promoting a positive image of African healers, particularly of diviners, in order to "teach" Africans about their "proper" cultural heritage and traditions of obedience. Many African people remained sceptical about healers who acted with a political design, or who had formed an alliance with people who held political power. The socially aspiring, in particular, needed to be convinced of the worth of the representatives of an aspect of a culture that had in its entirety lost admiration. They argued that izangoma did not represent African culture and tradition, but that African culture and tradition had changed. Readers of coffee table books, in contrast, were exposed to recurring tropes of African tradition and its major agents. Such debates placed healers in relation to their patients, tourists and those who merely held an opinion about them, and for whom it was potentially easier to articulate an opinion on healers rather than on apartheid. In parallel to this, the African population continued to suffer not only from the afflictions apportionable to apartheid, but also from the physical and mental diseases attributable to apartheid. Kwashiorkor, a disease characterised by severe protein deficiency,

8 Marks/ Andersson, ' Epidemiology and Culture of Violence', p. 36; Rob Turrell? if so, add to bibliogr. 266 and marasmus, a wasting disease, ultimately induced by contaminated food and water, were common. Other prevalent diseases included pneumonia, gastroenteritis, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid fever, rheumatic fever, and venereal disease.9 Neither in the popular press nor in the picture books were the activities of African healers viewed in connection with this health environment. As regards popular health concerns, a different perspective was required in order to gain understanding and access. After the demise of the apartheid government a transformation of a different nature was finally set in motion. The former foci on struggle and resistance were supplanted by the metaphors of transition and transformation. Violence did not cease to be an overpowering issue, and in certain respects the notion of transformation is imbued with continual aspects of the concept of struggle, whereas, at the same time, it is indicative for an about-face, a change of unprecedented quality as well. One focus of academic investigation rested on democratisation and the achievement of majority rule. Whereas, in this sense, the transition to democracy has largely been achieved, the more deeper-rooted and thorough transformation of society is, to this day, still ongoing and forms, consequently, the core of numerous debates. South Africa is expected to transform itself into and thereby create a modern state and society. Hopes are held for it to become a global player in terms of economic aspects, as it has been identified as a decisive factor as regards security in the region. To live up to these multifaceted expectations, South Africa is also hoped to create and, thereafter, benefit from the dynamics of a well-performing civil society sector. For that reason "civil society" has become a concept which has been widely discussed in the South African transformation process. Many civil society actors who assisted in bringing down the apartheid regime have assumed responsibilities in political office and as managers of stately funded institutions or as the leaders of the economic sector. The "old" civil society sector is bereft of its elite and its most sturdy representatives, and undergoes, in the wake of this change, the process of struggling for new visibility and redefined legitimacy. Representatives of the state and the civil society world have sometimes clashed over the issue as to who is responsible for defining the conditions of society and South African transformation. These struggles fall into a period in which, almost world-wide, the desire to redefine the meaning of society coalesces with "populist strivings for moral community and social being at a time when a triumphal neoliberalism calls into question the very existence of society…".10

9 Thompson, History of South Africa, pp. 203-204. 10 Comaroff, John L./ Comaroff, Jean. 'Introduction', in: Comaroff, John L./ Comaroff, Jean (ed). Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa. Critical Perspectives. Chicago 1999, p. 3. 267

Yet again, the transformation of the state impacted on society and on those whose voices are not heard in everyday news coverage and intellectual debates. The ability to articulate themselves in the process of societal transformation as much as against the transformations wrought upon society, rested with a minority of the verbally and rhetorically capable and of the activist. Beyond the spheres of the state, when it comes to South Africa's involvements into global economic dynamics and of civil society, individuals and communities cope with change in the context of the enormous metamorphosis. They are, quite frequently, disillusioned, trapped in poverty, beset by powerlessness and insecurities of many kinds. In the academic literature the drama of this transformation has led to new emphases on analyses concerning the modernity of witchcraft and the occult, but also on complex arrays of spiritual insecurities. The majority of South Africans have not only to come to terms with but, at the same time, make sense of much ill fortune, of suffering from actual disease and death. They are exposed to "unmanageable dangers, doubts and fears" which are taken as resulting from forces invisible and therefore difficult to fight.11 Healers of various expertise concern themselves with such dangers and people must, again, decide about the extent to which as individuals and as a society they want to rely on this expertise. It has largely remained in the scope or range of obligation of individuals and communities to decide, through interpretation and determination, which action to take. Not all responses are possible to evil and threats. When confronted with such evil and threats, the range of feasible responses is limited but, at the same time, most people are still able to decide between at least two or three options. Witchcraft violence, spiritual insecurity and occult economies have become modes of academically explaining the ongoing struggles of those who were not necessarily involved in the liberation movements, even though they were longing for liberation, and of those who were perhaps members of trade unions and yet did not have discernible voices to articulate their agony and quest for survival, or of those who were maybe part of youth resistance movements, and yet beset and overwhelmed by problems. Their struggles, hopes and disappointments have taken a new drive under the novel conditions which currently frame people's experiences and ambitions. And academics use concepts of witchcraft to interpret in a combative and creative way the ongoing drama of people's struggles which, at times, leaves them perplexed. Accusations of utilising as much as performing witchcraft and the use of magic to achieve material ends are not new to South Africa. And yet, they seem to re-emerge in a post- modern guise in the post-apartheid era. In the post-apartheid era, in South Africa coinciding

11 Ashforth, 'Reflections', pp. 41-42, quote p. 63. 268 and synonymous with an era of globalisation, witchcraft addresses the problem of illicit accumulation. "Occult economies" are argued to consist of people exploring strategies to achieve material ends and eliminating competitors and are identified as those who grab more than their fair share of the cake that has to "go round" in order to sustain the community as a whole.12 The contentious issue of witchcraft is still an expression of conflicts between genders and generations, and of commonly felt injustices when it comes to the redistribution of wealth. Violence, so prevalent in the critical phase of the apartheid state, has found an additional outlet and expression in so-called witchcraft violence. Between 1985 and 1995, infamously, some 300 cases of reported witch-related killing took place in the Northern Province. During the first six months of 1996, however, 676 people were killed.13 As it has been shown in chapter 7, the most recent expressions of witchcraft have assumed a much shriller and wilder stance and tone than in previous years which gives rise to the question why this resort to witchcraft and the occult is taking place at this point in time and why it had not occurred previously.14 Read against the background of the longitudinal popular uses of images, a variety of contexts may be taken into consideration, even today, in which current issues of witchcraft, unbearable afflictions and desperate strategies to make sense of them, or to overcome them, can be understood. They could possibly inform political analyses of witchcraft. In this way, once more, the history of healers' professionalisation and of the popularisation of their image could provide a counterweight and in some respect even an alternative context of study against which to come to terms with the disturbing issues of witchcraft occurrences, in potentially similar a manner as the history of healers' professionalisation provided alternative perspectives on dominant processes of the formation of ethnicity in urban environments in the 1930s. The unease and the thrill witchcraft is almost invariably associated with, and the overlapping of healing and witchcraft emanated in an exemplary fashion from such a genre as the biographies explored in half fictional and half documentary ways in chapter 6. For healers, more immediately, the impact of revived witchcraft discourses in South Africa entails that they have to distance themselves vehemently from any connection therewith. And, as experienced previously, this need to respond to a negative preconception does by no means lighten the task for healers to shape the actual image of their profession. After healers' official acknowledgement had finally been achieved in September 2004, it remains open to debate in which terms this official acknowledgement and the possibility to register will impact on the

12 Comaroff/ Comaroff, 'Occult Economies'. 13 Ralushai quoted in Comaroff/ Comaroff, 'Occult Economies', p. 285. 14 ibid., p. 282. 269 course of professionalisation that has meandered its way through a history spanning several decades. It has been shown that over the numerous intervening years many voices mingled and became entwined with each other – a process mirrored in the ambitions of the profession, which were changed, adjusted and redefined. The newly gained legitimacy of the state, the endemic prevalence of HIV/AIDS in southern Africa, as much as many people's ongoing marginalisation mark the most recent context in which South African healers have to find and establish their social role. The history of healers and their craft in South Africa does not run a linear course but appears at times to represent a history of histories. As such, in addition to the fact that the history of healers' professionalisation and of their popularisation in South Africa provided a historical development in itself, it does as well add variety to the current master narratives in South African historiography – of which there is still a sufficient number – and thus illuminates processes of identity formation and transformation from perspectives difficult to grasp but nevertheless important to consider.

9 Bibliography

Archival Sources

South African National Archives, Pretoria, Central Archives Depot: SAB Department of Health GES 1782 25/30A GES 1783 25/30D GES 1784 25/30E GES 1784 25/30F GES 1785 25/30G GES 1786 25/30H GES 1786 25/30J GES 1787 25/30K GES 1788 25/30M GES 1789 25/30S GES 1834 74/30

Office of the Governor General GG 1216 33/311 Department of Native Affairs (Naturellesaken) NTS 7275 537/326 NTS 9302 1/376 NTS 9302 2/376 NTS 9303 4/376 NTS 9303 5/375 NTS 9303 7/376 NTS 9303 9/376 NTS 9304 10/376 NTS 9305 12/376

South African National Archives, Pietermaritzburg, Natal Archives Depot: NAB CNC 50A 1/MAT 6/1/201

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Working Papers, Conference Presentations and Theses Chidester, David. 'Religion Education in South Africa: Teaching and Learning About Religion, Religions and Religious Diversity.' (paper presented at Oslo Conference on Religion Education Syllabus 2003). Krige, Sue. 'Segregation, Science and Commissions of Inquiry: The Contestation of Native Education Policy in South Africa 1930-36.' (paper no 398 read at Wits Institute for Advanced Social Research, Johannesburg 1996). Kros, Cynthia. 'Origins of Bantu Education: The Prelude.' (M. A. thesis Wits University, Johannesburg, 1994). Petersmann, Sandra. 'The English-Language Press in South Africa on Key Issues of the Apartheid Regime: the Dilemma between Fundamental Critique and Immanent Opposition. (M. A. thesis, University of Hannover, 1997).