Introduction: origins and aims

The Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice (VPSJ) is a small community and voluntary organisation which was established in 1995 to work for social and economic change, tackling poverty and exclusion. To achieve its goal, the partnership uses two approaches: (1) the facilitation of an Active Citizenship Voter Education Programme and (2) the development of data on the cost of a Minimum Essential Standard of Living (MESL). The first focuses on communities in disadvantaged areas in which there is a low voter turnout. During the first five years of working in these communities, the VPSJ became increasingly conscious of the long-term effects of living with an inadequate income and the implications for standards of living, participation in society and access to education, health and social services. It was in the course of this work on active citizenship that a group of women became very interested in how the national income was distributed. It was in response to seeing the amount allocated to social welfare in the national budget and the wide range of people dependent on social welfare transfers that two of the women asked, “Will no one show the government what it is like to live on social welfare transfers and the national minimum wage?” “Will no one show them what people need to have to live on in order to have a decent standard of living, a life with dignity?” They went on to say, “The payments don't meet the cost of living even a very basic standard. They must be pulled from the air.” In response, the VPSJ began its work to develop data on the cost of a Minimum but Acceptable Standard of Living. As a result of developments in this area over many years, the VPSJ established the Minimum Essential Budget Standards Research Centre.

The VPSJ began the work on income adequacy by focusing on the first part of the women's plea. The question of adequacy was a crucial one for the VPSJ in its first attempt to explore the realities faced by households struggling to make ends meet.

The theory of moral sentiments and zombies

One of the most puzzling of the ‘occult’ entities with which sangomas have to deal is the zombie. The zombie figure may be a new type of entity. It is not ‘traditional’, although it resembles, in some ways, a witch's familiars and witches who take the form of animals. It has, however, become fully part of the cultural universe in Umjindi, as in most other small towns (Niehaus 2005, 2013).

Any market, including the market for healing, exists for the utilities and values that can be realised from it. The price for ‘divination’ (kupengula) varies according to the value the patient believes she or he can realise from it. Divination, one of the healing processes that involves an exchange between the persons of patient and sangoma, acts to clothe patients with knowledge of possible threats and opportunities and of areas where they show weakness or strength. These values may be further transacted, not just for ‘healing’ but for most other endeavours, including economic. People often consult a sangoma before a job interview or when they encounter problems at work or during a business transaction. Together with other ‘magical’ methods, the assistance of a zombie is also possible. The ‘use’ of a zombie, however, requires a fine calibration of belief and scepticism, knowledge (how to do it) and credulity.

The zombie is part of the work of the healer because the logic of the zombie is part of the same moral universe in which the sangoma works. Sangomas know about zombies, and most claim to know how to capture one, but they all also believe that if they do so they will lose their own power to heal. Commercial herbalists, known also as tinyanga, also often claim to be able to create zombies. But most people I discussed the subject with were sceptical about whether zombies could, in fact, be real.

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?’).

Much of the work of the healer actually has to do with teaching and learning. Many sangomas do not practise ‘healing’ at all, but rather specialise as teachers, or as herbalists. For them, the knowledge of bungoma is an end in itself. Learning bungoma eventually leads to initiation into a ‘school’ of sangomas under a teacher.

The knowledge sangomas acquire, however, is diverse and depends critically on the gobela (teacher). As in any educational system, not all teachers are competent. In many cases, the lithwasana changes teachers or even returns for further education under a new gobela once graduated and inducted into the mpandze ‘alumni’ group.

But whatever the quality of education, the fact that knowledge has been imparted and received confers expertise on the aspiring sangoma, who becomes, though education and practice, a technical expert. It is precisely the expertise of the sangoma that confers legitimate authority or capacity (emandla) and gives the sangoma a special presence (isithunzi). The expertise in the person of a specialist is one of the most important criteria for a healer to be taken seriously. It is also one of the primary characteristics of any practice of magic, especially in the context of craft and healing, as many have remarked (Childe 1949; Malinowski 1935; Rowlands and Warnier 1993; Schwemmer 2011; Tambiah 1968).

Sangomas are initiated only after experiencing a process of ukuthwasa, ‘enlightenment’, or ‘lightening’ that is described as being ‘under water’. .

They say that is ‘not like being under water, but being under water’ (Chapter 3). The process through which a student learns to be a sangoma, that is to acquire expertise of bungoma, is a hard one, but so is the role of the gobela. The student will have to learn to dance in the prescribed way to the rhythms of the ngoma, to enter trance and to learn from dreams. The student will also acquire a basic botanical knowledge of herbs and trees and of the animal products and minerals that go into healing potions. The process of teaching and learning is also never complete since the senior teacher can never transmit all that he or she knows. The initiated student will continue to learn over the duration of his or her career.

The politics of exposure

The arts of healing in the practice of bungoma are applied above all to relationships between persons, whether tangible flesh-and- blood or of other intangible kinds such as witches, emadloti (ancestors), zombies, emandzawe, or other ‘forces’ with apparent person-like agency, such as actual persons acting under the influence, or with the protection, of muti. Persons, in this sense, have intentionality and are believed to possess effective causal agency and, therefore, have ‘power’, emandla and presence, isithunzi.

If we may take a ‘market approach’ to healing, as I suggest in chapters 6 and 7, we may also take a ‘political approach’ to the influence of people in a social context that also includes other person-like agents. In this context people understand themselves to be exposed to other persons as active agents or as patients and victims. Since the patient is also a victim, and because the patient of the sangoma can also learn to be an active agent in control of others through the knowledge of bungoma, there is necessarily an implicit politics (in the broad anthropological sense) that underlies these roles and their relationships. By examining the problems that emerge from the micro-scale of social order we can, perhaps, create a picture of the environment in which the healer acts.

I have emphasised the importance of the ‘small-town’ environment in understanding how bungoma works in an otherwise ‘modern’ society such as South Africa. Here I explore the political culture of this small-town environment in order to provide the basis for understanding how persons interact in daily life and therefore to show how the ordinary politics of daily life sets up the categories of conflict in terms of which divination and healing therapies comprehend the kinds of conflicts and injuries that the ‘exposed being’ experiences.

Towards an analysis of local-level

political culture Anthropology and African Studies scholars (as well as political activists) have long resisted the idea that there may be different cultural bases to African political and social systems, preferring, instead, to rely on political concepts derived from European theory and experience. This chapter takes the risk of suggesting that there are indeed definable differences – specifically cultural differences – for political thought and action in local-level ‘African’ politics.

If bungoma is not a deficient or ‘traditional’ medicine, and not a science, is it not then a form of religion? If traditional healing is not fully traditional, can it be reduced to a single task that we call ‘healing’? Does its use of ritual, formulaic language, music, song and intangible person-like agents make it a kind of African traditional religion? Some scholars have argued that it is indeed a form of traditional religion (Chidester 1996; Chidester et al. 1997; Dovey and Mjingwana 1985; Kruger 1995; Mbiti 1975, 1990; Setiloane 1973, 1976, 1986; Smith 1929) and that it must be respected as such. But the argument that traditional healing is a limited, early, or ‘traditional’ form of religion – or, in the words of the missionary Edwin Smith (1929), a ‘twilight religion’ – has the same drawback as representing it as a simpler and alternative medicine. Both positions rest on the assumption that bungoma is a deficient form of something else, either a not-quite religion, or a ‘barefoot’ medical practice rooted in superstition and misunderstanding.

By presenting the philosophy of traditional medicine in its own terms we can ask in what sense it might also be a form of medicine or a form of religion. I would claim that bungoma is certainly a form of medical practice, even though it is not only a medical practice. It is not, however a form of religion, that is, it is not a deficient theology. Surprisingly, the earliest Christian missionaries agreed that it was not religion.

In order to understand how and in what ways southern Africans got along perfectly well without ‘religion’ we can explore why early Christian missionaries agreed that there was no religion in southern Africa.

Apotropaic magic

The problem of witches and witchcraft has been central to anthropology throughout the twentieth century. The anthropological literature is not about whether witches exist but rather about how to account for their purported existence: a cultural question of belief rather than an ontological question of under what conditions their existence can be taken for granted. These are simply the wrong questions. According to bungoma philosophy, witchcraft, like the healer's craft, is predicated on interpersonal exposure to the ‘power’ or ‘shadow/presence’ (isithunzi) of others (see Werbner 2015: 2–3 on the similar concept of seriti in Sesotho/Setswana). Witchcraft derives from a radical theory of the person as inherently infectious and vulnerable. Person-like agents cause illness, but not all agents of this sort are human, and not all are tangible; thus, their agency cannot be given a ‘social causation’ account in all cases.

From the perspective of the sangoma's patient, if not from that of most contemporary social theory, witches are person-like agents, either tangible or intangible. They are not mere ‘representations’ of what could be interpreted as imagined harm triggered by social distress. To be vulnerable to witchcraft, however, one must understand oneself as an ‘exposed being’, exposed to a range of influences that can damage health or prevent ‘good luck’. These influences include other tangible persons, some of whom may be ‘witches’, but also other intangible persons such as ‘ancestors’ and ‘spirits’. The fundamental premise of healing in the southern African healer's paradigm is that if patients/clients can be given protection through apotropaic magics their ‘natural’ health and luck will be able to continue. The ‘exposed being’ – an existential condition of personhood as ‘patient’ rather than ‘agent’ – is vulnerable unless protected from illness, witchcraft and misfortune. In terms of this concept all persons are assumed to be well unless protection fails.

This approach helps us to understand the pragmatic efficacy of logically incompatible medical beliefs in conditions of medical parallelism.

If economic logic can be used to understand the use of zombies then the idea of the market for healing is a useful means for understanding how people choose healers, modes of healing and therapies. In this chapter I use the abstract idea of ‘the market’ as a way of thinking about how people conceive and transact values relating to health and healing in this small town. The market for healing described here includes a range of options. Some degree of informed choice is required. It is possible, then, to understand healing not so much as a ‘search’ or ‘quest’ for ‘therapy’ (Janzen 1978) but as the ‘infrastructures of information’ (Ozden-Schilling 2016) where every kind of cure, therapy or healing is, as Julie Livingstone says, ‘improvised’ (2012). Richard Werbner (2015: 169) speaks of diviners’ clients in the small village of Moremi in the Tswapong Hills, Central District, Botswana, ‘shopping’ or even ‘jockeying’ for their desired outcomes. ‘Clients go back and forth from one diviner to another’ or ‘turn to distant diviners, not merely for a special occasion or a crisis, but sometimes routinely’.

This market is governed less by price than by a parallel market for belief, for while healing and being healed are values that have a market, it is not always possible to evaluate the effectiveness, utility or economic efficiency (value for money) of any healing process. Thus it is difficult to establish a price for healing where ‘price’ can be defined as what sufferers are willing to trade for what they believe might help them. The efficacy of healing is partly contingent upon knowledge and belief that contribute to the placebo (or its negative twin, nocebo) effect; therefore, the efficiency of this ‘market’ is uncertain. But, as Livingstone writes in Improvising Medicine, her study of a cancer ward in Botswana, ‘care proceeds amid uncertainty in contexts of relative scarcity’ (2012: 6). Livingstone uses the cancer ward as ‘a metaphor for and an instantiation of the constellation of bureaucracy, vulnerability, power, biomedical science, mortality and hope that shape the early twenty-first- century experience in southern Africa’ (2012: 8).

While writing this book I became increasingly sceptical about the received categories that framed this discourse in anthropology and, more generally, in African Studies and the popular literature on ‘traditional healing’. Throughout this text, then, I challenge the many misconceptions held in the worlds of government, public health and medicine, in popular literature and in much of the scholarly literature, including anthropology, my own discipline. Most importantly, I argue that bungoma is not, as is often supposed, about witchcraft or ‘muti killings’. It is also not primarily concerned with curing physical disease. It is not a makeshift psychology and does not provide either ‘barefoot doctor’ services on the cheap, or bush psychotherapy. It stands on its own, as I have tried to show.

Critique would be sterile if I could not offer an alternative way of seeing – that is theorising – the practices, knowledge and beliefs in the context and time that concern me here. I have tried, then, to present a more-or- less coherent set of terms and concepts that might allow us to re-imagine this rich fund of African knowledge and give it its due.

Much of what I say about the little corner of South Africa in which I worked can be generalised. Ngoma, as practiced in Barberton and Umjindi, is but one facet of a vast set of flexible yet sturdy concepts and practices – all designated by the root word – ‘ngoma’ – that are pervasive throughout the southern half of Africa. Ngoma in its many forms has been understood as ‘cults of affliction’, as ‘deep knowledge’, as ‘tradition’ itself. Its simplest, referential meaning is ‘drum’ and ‘dance’. But it is all of these and more. I have tried to show ways in which it is, or can be understood as political, economic, ritual, ecological, philosophical, medical and even empirical. Whatever else it is, however, it is not religion and it is not tribal. Thus, I argue that it cannot be usefully comprehended as, for instance, ‘Zulu religion’.

The healer is embedded in the southern African landscape and his or her world is not confined to the human, but is multi-species and trans-ethnic. The material logic of magic in healing uses parts of plants and animals and minerals such as ochre as intrinsically active agents. The sangoma feels – dreams (-phupha [isiZulu], -toro [Sesotho-Setswana]), senses, or ‘hears’, (-zwa [isiZulu], -kwa [Sesotho-Setswana]) – that things like animals, plants, stones and other parts of nature, including the landscape, have agency: they act and can be guided, but they are not inert ‘ingredients’ or tools. By contrast, in the popular imagination muti herbs and animal parts are inert substances, or materials, that healers use as a medical doctor uses pharmacological chemicals or prosthetic devices. Instead, in bungoma, these items speak directly to the healers and their patients, not through a biological or physiological process, but as an intangible presence. This is what connects the healer, the patient and nature and leads them to the therapeutic process.

A world beyond the human: The multi-species trans-ethnic world of the healer

A healer's use of a large beetle (Brachycerus ornatus, Red-spotted Lily Weevil) and the beetle's food plant, the poisonous bulb known as ‘Bushman's poison bulb’ (Boophone disticha or Ammocharis coranica) illustrates this transcendence of ethnic and even human boundaries. These cultural practices link a species of beetle, a plant and specialised healing practices that transcend the ethnic, political, racial, and linguistic boundaries of San (|Xam, among others), Khoe (‘Koranna’, ‘Hottentot’), Bantu-speaking peoples and even southern Africans of European ancestry (see Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk 1962 for the variety of plants used across all ethnic groups). These relationships extend over considerable historical time and are embedded in a landscape that they help to shape and which, in turn, presents possibilities and constraints for human dwelling (Ingold 2011, 2012).

A person becomes a sangoma primarily through a sustained period of training, often triggered by a period of illness described as being under water, or in a river. Many sangomas insist that they truly experienced a long period ‘under [or in] water’, eyamanzini. They say they have met the snake that lives in the water. This figure of speech expresses the flow and transmission of knowledge that allows the novice to acquire control over those disembodied, intangible ‘persons’ we call ‘spirits’.

For the sangomas of eastern Mpumalanga, knowledge (lwati [siSwati]; ulwazi [isiZulu]) is the ocean, lwandle. Water (emanti; amanzi) flows like blood and semen (igazi) across generations and flows like knowledge from teachers to students; the bodies it flows into and out of only contain it temporarily. The snake (inyoka) is sinuous, like water. The sangoma feels the pressure of the persons around him or her and is exposed to them as one is exposed to water. Some of this pressure comes from other people, but it also comes from spirits and ancestors and from medicine or muti, the magical substances that heal or protect. All these constitute forms of the person, have intentions and motives and can pressurise like deep water. The eyes are closed but the mind sees in this medium. To carry this burden is like being submerged, while to emerge means the burden can be carried successfully. The constant allusions to water, blood, foam, rain, rivers and the ocean are references to the master trope of water as flow and pressure and of becoming and being a healer.

One can never rely fully upon a supply of water. Like knowledge and rain it can come in torrents or not at all; it evaporates, it soaks in, or falls on, another place, another person. While Michel Foucault taught us to think of power as flowing like water in the channels that knowledge and ‘discourse’ provide (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 184; Foucault 1972, 2008; Gordon 1980), for the healer knowledge is water and water is the medium through which power and knowledge move.

Healing in a time of public health

Reasoning incorrectly from empirical evidence, the magical logic of the traditional healer arrives at conclusions that cannot be scientifically demonstrated because it generalises too broadly from discrete (‘accidental’) instances of success. But this is not only a logical error it is also a strategy to recruit clientele or patients by claiming that some specific empirical success can be generalised to any patient.

Public health practitioners must also recruit both patients and experimental subjects. The ostensible object of public health, however, is not its ‘public’ (patients and experimental subjects) but rather the abstract biological notion of the ‘population’. In order to reason from population to patient, public health must invert the magical logic of the healer: it must reason from the general to the specific. The randomised controlled trial (RCT), for example, seems to specify effectiveness for the single instance from the statistically general case and creates the impression for its audience, the public, that its findings are proportionally valid for any and all instances. Thus magic and RCTs exhibit invalid chains of reasoning based on sound empirical observations.

This is what I call ‘magical empiricism’, that is, a property of both the ‘evidence-based’ medical systems and interventions deriving from the RCT, and the ‘magical’ medical systems of traditional healing and complementary and alternative medicine. But the difference lies in the fact that the traditional healer and his or her patient do not lose their social being like the subject of the modern medical and public health regime who can be characterised as having only ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998: 10) as an element of the ‘population’. This, in turn, allows us to understand the appeal of the healers’ magic, their flawed logic and, often, their surprising efficacy.

The magic of the healers

Magic, as James George Frazer showed in The Golden Bough (1922) and other works, reasons incorrectly from empirical evidence, arriving at conclusions that cannot be scientifically demonstrated. But magic is much more than this. While Frazer backs up his argument with oceans of ethnographic data, my claim here is more limited.