4 - Healers Negotiating the Local and the Global

Summary

In Okhahlamba, death attendant upon AIDS was not perceived as the outcome of a neutral affliction for which there was no cure. Rather, death, on the scale with which it came to dwell among people, was tied up with the notion of a continuance of past social dissonance and histories of oppression, racial discrimination and dispossession. This chapter explores these understandings of a preponderance of death and illness, and how they intertwined with people's relationship with the state.

I approach the latter relationship tangentially by marking the ambiguities with which modernity was viewed from the point of view of two healers. To do so I draw on diverse conversations with them, as well as others, about the phenomenon of ill-health within the context of divisive histories in general. In their accounts, the failure of the wider world to support rural worlds is couched in apocalyptic terms, terms that reveal a sense of shared alienation from centres of power.

In tracing the life story of Ntuthuko Hadebe, an inyanga (the most common term for a diviner/herbalist of some kind), I seek to show how his relationship with worlds beyond the one into which he was born, and to which he returned, was expansive. In his life of migrancy, he welcomed opportunities through engaging tenaciously with the ‘ways of the road’ and by keeping ‘his eyes open’. All that he encountered beyond his place of birth was coloured by the inflection of his calling as an inyanga. The second story is that of an isangoma (a diviner), Nonhlanhla Duma, a woman who was herself HIV positive and whose account of being called to undertake training as a diviner marked a return to an edge of difference, at least for the duration of the journey to her trainer's home. Her being summoned by an ancestral voice steered her, against her wishes, away from Johannesburg and its ways. Both accounts contain the importance of maintaining ‘custom’, not only in relation to healing, but in relation to a re-evocation of ‘tradition’. Yet in the face of the AIDS epidemic, both healers insisted that they had no solution to the disease within their own healing frameworks. The isangoma also spoke volubly of the favourable effects of antiretroviral treatment.

The chapter considers the parallel existence of indigenous notions of health and healing and those belonging to bio-medicine, as well as their frequent combination.