Healing the Exposed Being

The Ngoma Healing Tradition In South Africa

Robert Thornton

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781776140206
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This ethnography explores the Ngoma healing tradition as practiced in eastern Mpumalanga, South Africa. 'Bungoma' is an active philosophical system and healing practice consisting of multiple strands, based on the notion that humans are intrinsically exposed to each other and that this is the cause of illness, but also the condition for the possibility of healing. This healing seeks to protect the 'exposed being' from harm through augmenting the self. Unlike Western medicine, it does not seek to cure physical ailments but aims to prevent suffering by allowing patients to transform their personal narratives of Self. Like Western medicine, it is empirical and is presented as a 'local knowledge' that amounts to a practical anthropology of human conflict and the environment. The book seeks to bring this anthropology and its therapeutic applications into relation with global academic anthropology by explaining it through political, economic, interpretive, and environmental lenses

CHAPTER 1

Bungoma or ‘philosophy of the drum’ in the South African Lowveld

There are many ‘traditional healers’ in South Africa. There are many healing traditions and indeed many different names and epithets for them, such as ‘witchdoctor’, ‘shaman’ or ‘rainmaker’. The term ‘sangoma’ is used here to refer to a specific set of healers who have undergone strict training, initiation and induction into a guild, college or lodge of such healers. Bungoma is the term used for the general practice and ‘philosophy’ or knowledge and expertise associated with this practice. Jo Wreford (2005, 2008), who, as an anthropologist, has not only studied the life and practices of the sangoma but has been initiated as a practising sangoma, also uses the South African English term ‘sangomas’ or the isiZulu form izangoma sinyanga. Here the focus is specifically on sangomas, or what John Janzen (1992) has called practitioners of the art and philosophy of ngoma, itself fairly pervasive in the Bantu-speaking areas of Africa south of the equator (Janzen 1992; Van Dijk, Reis and Spierenburg 2000). This book is based, as explained more fully below, on research in eastern Mpumalanga province, just north of Swaziland and near South Africa’s border with Mozambique.

The sangomas’ public rituals of dancing and drumming, their peculiar dress styles, hairstyles and reliance on ‘magic’ or ‘medicine’ (muti) are generally well known (Hammond-Tooke 1989, 1994; Hammond-Tooke and Schapera 1974), especially in rural villages and the townships of small and rural towns in southern Africa. Most South Africans know at least this much about sangomas. But what I have called ‘healing’ is more than curing illness, even though illness is one of the primary concerns of healing.

When the sangomas I talk about here ‘heal’ (kwelapha), they think of this as ‘making life’ or ‘making to live’ (kuphila). The word for ‘life’, imphilo, also means ‘health’. The root word, -phil-or ‘life’/‘health’, connotes not so much a state of being as being itself. When one greets another in South African Nguni languages (isiZulu, siSwati, isiXhosa), one asks, ‘Uphila njane?’ (‘How are you living?’). The standard response is ‘Ngisaphila’ (‘I am alive’) or ‘Ngikhona’ (‘I am here’). Without reading too much into these ordinary words, the greeting means that to be ‘here’ is to be alive and, more simply, to be. According to Van Dijk, Reis and Spierenburg:

Bungoma denominates a southern African discourse whose subject is the coming to fruition of life and whose object is to ensure this fruition and to remove obstacles to it ... [for us] it has become clear that ngoma may pertain to all spheres of life – the personal, the social, the political, the economic and the ecological (2000: 6; Engelke 2001: 148).

In other words, bungoma, in the sense that it is understood by the people and expresses the ideas written about here, encompasses the economic, political and ecological. Despite its scope, however, it remains a marginal activity practised by a small minority. Each of these social fields is examined in turn and throughout the work.

Most of these healing traditions accomplish nothing like a ‘cure’; most leave cures to biomedicine. The healing that these healers accomplish, then, is best understood as a response to life rather than – as is the case with biomedicine – a response to illness or disease. The individual person, caught in complex nets of relationships with other persons, is the focus of the philosophy and practice of bungoma. It is not simply the person – as ‘body’, ‘spirit’, or ‘soul’ – that the healer attempts to ‘work on’ (kusebenta) and thus to heal, but rather the network of influences that affect the life of the person.

The southern African philosophy of ‘life’ has been called ubuntu. The word means, most simply, ‘humanness’. Much has been written and said about how southern Africans understand the person to be the product of other persons. It has been positioned, for instance, by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and President Nelson Mandela, as defining a South African character and is based on a common South African saying, ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through other people)’, in which the root word -ntu means ‘person’/‘human’ (Tutu 1999: 31; Van Binsbergen 2005). This approximates the meaning of the Kiswahili phrase mtu ni watu (Kresse 2007: 169), ‘a person is people’, and similar maxims in most other Bantu languages.

This mutuality of self-creation is very much the province of the healer, but primarily with respect to its darker, less talked about aspects. As people create other people they also retain lasting influence over each other. The ancestors (emadloti) are necessarily part of ‘humanity’, that is, ubuntu. Because of their humanity – and not withstanding their immateriality – they are both the source of misfortune and disease and the source of the power to heal these. This is because the ancestors have suffered and experienced violence and death and can therefore transcend them (Thornton 2008: 204–210; Ngubane 1977: 47–55). In other words, all persons stand not merely in relation to others – as friends, enemies, kin, spouses, colleagues and even strangers – but are also inescapably exposed to each other. It is this exposure or vulnerability to others that can ultimately weaken life itself and lead to illness, disease, misfortune and death. Each person is therefore an ‘exposed being’.

Few healers in southern Africa are in any standard sense ‘traditional’, if by this term we mean rooted in the past, or deriving their knowledge and practices from long-established usage and custom. The healers written about here, however, say that they are ‘traditional’ and are mostly content with the label ‘traditional healers’ (Wreford 2008: xii). One of the most popular organisations for ‘traditional healers’ holds this precise name: the Traditional Healers Organisation (THO). But they are also not ‘modern’. It could be said that they mitigate the failures of the modern and fill the aporia of medicine’s and modernity’s grand narratives with local knowledge or ‘‘local frames of awareness’’ (Geertz 1983: 6) and their own personal histories of seeking out what appears to be the closest thing to ‘tradition’ that can be found in their and our cultural environments (Thornton 1987). They mix and mingle ideas and practices, they innovate and change. The healers I have worked with and known as friends and collaborators travel long distances around the southern African region – they share knowledge, test treatments and collaborate with each other.

Surprisingly, the knowledge and practices of each healer are distinctively individual. Southern African traditional healers are less concerned with categories of disease and illness than they are with the intricacy of personal relations in the particular contexts of the patients they treat. Just as each patient is unique, so is each healer, and so is each intervention. It is not possible, therefore, to speak of healing – bungoma – as ‘culture’ or a ‘worldview’. While the practice and philosophy is not entirely coherent, there is what we might call a ‘grammar’ that structures action; however, each healing episode, like each utterance of a language, is different.

It has been common in previous literature about healers to associate them with a ‘culture’, thus Zulu healers are Zulu, Xhosa healers are Xhosa, and so on. This association presumes that traditional healers constitute a homogeneous cultural block that can be characterised in ethnic terms. This is neither accurate nor useful, since healers, their clients, patients and students come from across the breadth of southern Africa, and even outside of it. In southern Africa, at least, healers deserve to be understood on their own terms – as semi-autonomous cultural brokers, organic philosophers and creative agents.

These healing traditions parallel each other through people’s lives, apparently without one dominating or excluding the other. In fact, several parallel medical systems are understood as supporting each other (Wreford 2005: 1). Rather than being alternative or complementary, healing systems in this case appear to be understood as additive and parallel (Fadlon 2004; Pedersen and Baarts 2010). In the words of Judith Fadlon (2004), what was once ‘alternative’ or even opposed to biomedicine has now become ‘domesticated’. It is part of the same ‘market’ for healing.

Inge Pedersen and Charlotte Baarts (2010: 1068) describe clients of multiple complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and biomedical health providers in Copenhagen, Denmark, as searching for healing options and healers based on their notion of expertise:

Expertise is: (i) embodied and produced by means other than those used in evidence-based knowledge or abstract expert systems; (ii) constructed by making a clear-cut division between the roles and responsibilities of the practitioner and the user; and (iii) constructed on the basis of specific training or education that practitioners have achieved. The expertise that the users seek and construct is not necessarily available, and users therefore consult many different kinds of experts.

In general, three main forms of healing are practised by African traditional healers and their clients, all of which involve specific forms of expertise: (1) the healing practised by sangomas who have ‘graduated’ after a period of tuition and self-healing and passed through initiation; (2) the more general ‘doctoring’ practised by inyangas who (mostly) use or sell herbal remedies; and (3) the amaprofeti (from the English ‘prophets’) who practise faith healing in terms of one or other form of African syncretic Christianity. All these forms of healing make a ‘clear-cut division between the roles and responsibilities of the practitioner and the user’ (Pedersen and Baarts 2010: 1068), whether or not the services offered are in fact efficacious.

None of these categories is exclusive, however. Sangomas typically belong to Christian churches, and may also practise faith healing; some herbalists do too, and faith healers occasionally dispense herbs. Specific to sangomas, however, is their ritual incorporation into a particular profession in whose practices and beliefs they are trained. They undergo a rigorous and exhausting period of apprenticeship (ukuthwasa) and perform a ‘graduation ceremony’ – known as ‘eating the intwaso’ – often lasting several days and nights. Thereafter, as long as they have fulfilled a range of strict conditions they may pass into the full status of a sangoma and membership of their teacher’s school (Chapter 3). The process of teaching and learning the profession of the sangoma, then, distinguishes it from the many other forms of healing with which it runs in parallel and competes.

Each type of healing augments the person in different ways. Healers can be described as participating in a market for healing, which allows for the operation of parallel healing traditions as though they existed in a market. For instance, the role of zombies – persons who are magically captured by their controllers in order to work for them – can be understood in terms of marginal utility and the ‘hidden hand’ in classical economics (Chapter 6). The participation of healers and their patients in complex exchanges of ‘energy’ can also be presented as a kind of market for healing (Chapter 7).

Some might attribute the apparent efficacy of parallel healing methods to what could be called ‘belief’ (Good 1994: 40) and the ‘placebo effect’, but it is now known that these effects are physiologically real, genetically and culturally variable and contribute substantially to overall health and perception of pain in biomedical practice (Bishop, Jacobson, Shaw and Kaptchuk 2012; Finniss, Kaptchuk, Miller and Benedetti 2010; Hall, Loscalzo and Kaptchuk 2015; Kirsch 2011; Wiley and Allen 2013: 69–70). The placebo (Latin, ‘I shall be acceptable or pleasing’, from placer, ‘to please’) effect refers to the fact that if a patient believes a medication might or should be effective it will have some effect, despite the fact that there is no active ingredient, or nothing, that is, that will have any measurable physiological, chemical or medicinal effect on the body.

But I have also seen as much scepticism as belief in my years of interaction with the southern African tradition of bungoma. There are no grounds to conclude that the success of traditional healers in the context described is due to a generalised cultural acceptance of the practice simply because it is ‘traditional’. Rather, belief in the healing power of bungoma is a pragmatic choice in a multi-therapeutic environment (Flint 2008).

During my experience with healers and with healing in one part of South Africa it was difficult to identify a single structural theme, or even an identifiable and stable social or cultural structure. Accordingly, a number of the standard categories of social analysis are discussed, including religion (Chapter 2), politics (Chapters 4, 5), economy (Chapters 6, 7) and science (Chapters 9, 10) in an effort to approach bungoma through a multi-modal analysis that exposes its essential kaleidoscopic quality.

As an ‘economy’ it exhibits a number of market-like qualities that allow clients and patients to select one type of healer, or even many at the same time. Notions of the zombie, as the occult capture of persons in a way that deprives the zombie of agency – that is, of personhood – in order to secure profits or to ‘bring money’, rest on obvious business metaphors. The capture of zombies is even discussed as a form of ‘outsourcing’ (Chapter 6). But bungoma is also political because people have power over one another and are vulnerable or exposed to others. This notion of mutual exposure of persons to each other, and to other forces, is fundamental to the way in which bungoma is conceived and how it works. However, this also implies a play of social power in a way that demands a kind of political analysis. But, since this ‘political’ analysis is limited to the local scale of person-to-person networks, it is not political in the standard sense of having to do with negotiation and the distribution of state resources. Alternatively, ‘scale is an effect of power’ (Dilger, Kane and Langewick 2012: 16) and the limitation of traditional healing to the local is inevitably bound up with its struggle in the general economy and politics of healing. ‘Healing and medicine in Africa reveals a great deal about politics and power, social organisation and economic conditions’, Dilger, Kane and Langewick (2012: 1) argue, as well as about ‘global regimes of value and local practices of valuing bodies, kin, and community’.

Many have argued that traditional healing in Africa should qualify as ‘religion’, that is, as a proto-religion that anticipates Christianity in some way, especially the belief in a ‘high god’. The first missionaries, such as Robert Moffat (1846) and David Livingstone (1857), soundly rejected this idea (see Chapter 2), but later missionaries and Christians have wanted to bring ‘African’ religion into the fold of world religions (Chidester 1996; Chidester, Kwenda and Petty 1997). Indeed, African traditional rituals and practices have made a deep impact on the practice of Christianity in southern Africa.

It is argued here, however, that African healing practices do not constitute a deficient or proto-religion any more than they are a deficient or proto-medicine, or a deficient science (Chapter 10). Instead, it seems that they are a radically material logic (Chapter 2), a magic of objects constituting a distinctive southern African ontology that deserves to be understood in its own right. Traditional healers experiment and develop their knowledge accordingly. They hold a rich fund of knowledge about plants, animals and minerals. In this sense they do possess a science. But it is also possible to see them as hunters and gatherers when they set off to ‘dig’, as they say, in the bush for healing plants, animal parts and substances and minerals.

In examining traditional healing through the lenses of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements and dedication
• Chapter 1: Bungoma or ‘philosophy of the drum’ in the South African Lowveld
• Chapter 2: The material logic of evil and the augmented self
• Chapter 3: ‘Cleaves Water’, eats intwaso: Becoming a healer in the bungoma tradition
• Chapter 4: The transmission of knowledge in bungoma
• Chapter 5: Healing conflict: The politics of interpersonal distress
• Chapter 6: Marginal utilities and the ‘hidden hand’ of zombies
• Chapter 7: The market for healing and the elasticity of belief
• Chapter 8: Apotropaic magic and the sangoma’s patient
• Chapter 9: Magical weevils and amaryllis in southern African ritual landscapes
• Chapter 10: Magical empiricism and the ‘exposed being’ in public health and traditional healing
• Conclusion
• References
• Index