46. Body, Soul and Spirit: Sangomas, Plants and Worldviews

Monday was Memorial Day! But we didn’t observe it. We did school instead. We started out our day at a hospice for palliative and chronic care in Knysna. It provides free of charge services to the lower income areas of the community and focuses on traditional medicines and herbal remedies that people like to use since it is a huge part of African medicine. We met a guy named Frank Muller who spent the next two days with us. He is a doctor but he researches African traditional remedies and actually puts a lot of faith in healing via chemical substances in plants since it is technically more natural to receive vitamins through dietary (fibrous) paths than through multivitamins and supplements so it’s better for your body to do it the way evolution relied on than via synthesized substances. Interesting points. 

            We got to watch some ladies making a substance out of different leaves and Vaseline. It is used as an all-purpose skin treatment in a gel form and a deeper muscle/arthritic treatment in an oil form that seeps deeper into the body tissues. These two older community members shared with us their history and affiliation with the project. They have been volunteering for many years, sharing their remedies and treatments with the community for minimal costs (only R5 for a bottle) to buy the supplies and sustain the project.

After our visit, we got take away pizza and drove up to the mountaintop where we enjoyed the incredible views and the yummy pizza.

They call it the "Map of Africa" - do you see it?

I felt like this view was too beautiful for pizza.

Then we drove to George Botanical Garden where we waited for our profs who had gone to pick up a guest lecturer for us. We played volleyball with an old random soccer ball while we waited. It was fun!!

Playing volleyball/soccer

The Medicine Mound at George Botanical Garden

Then a guy named Richard came to lecture us on traditional African medicine. He has a bachelors in chemistry, an MD, and he is a natural sangoma, called to heal body, soul and spirit in the art/science of traditional African medicine. It was a very weird experience. I don’t really know how to explain it. He had a lot of interesting and radical views. But he comes from a completely different worldview than I do. He taught us what different plants do and showed them to us in the healing mound of the botanical garden and then when we got to the top of this mound, we had a lecture and Q&A session. He was a freedom fighter and was actually sentenced to life imprisonment during apartheid but then he escaped to Mozambique. He’s been a healer from a young age, but he also went to medical school in Russia because he was curious but as a black man he could not attend medical school in South Africa during apartheid. Now he practices free of charge in a very low income area of George. He practices sangoma healing though, not western medicine.

After the botanical garden experience, we drove way out into the middle of nowhere to a place called Laila’s arms. It was a farmhouse converted into a quasi restaurant. But we were the only people there besides the owner/cook and a few of her staff members. We had a debriefing session with Dr Snyman and Dr Muller about what we had just witnessed. And then we took a break to eat some delicious home cooked food and then went back to our debriefing session. I think I’ll have to write about this later because I’m still terribly confused and don’t know what to make of it. Probably because I come from such a strongly Christian & Western/material worldviews background, this was an extremely intellectually challenging exposure for me. I just struggled to understand, to conceptualize this belief system. But I acknowledged that and as always, when I have a gut reaction to something, I get unsettled and don’t like to accept it. I like to analyze gut reactions and challenge them. See where they come from and why. So I asked Dr Frank Muller a million questions and that helped me a lot. But I’m still mulling it over in my head. 

Then finally it was time to leave and we drove back to Knysna where we were spending the night at a backpackers called Afrovibe on Myoli beach, a lovely, quiet beach with warm beautiful water. It was pitch black when we got there, but almost all of us went out to the beach as soon as we put our bags into our dorm rooms because how could we not?! It was so beautiful. I even lay down in the sand at one point at the end of a row of people and then Dillon jumped over us. We went from three up to six people (and somehow I always managed to be on the far end…scary!) 

I was walking back to our hostel when Mariah and I saw a sky lantern floating towards the beach from the town, and we raced, following it. It landed on the beach and we ran over to it just before the flame died out. It was beautiful and I decided that sky lantern is something I will have to add to my bucket list. Good night, Beautiful World!

Good Morning, Beautiful World!

Early morning by the Indian Ocean.

Monday morning, after visiting the beach and saying farewell to the Indian Ocean, we visited Nelson Mandela Municipal University outside George, a nature campus with lots and lots of fields and natural spaces and things like that…where students can study environmental science, animal sciences, conservation, etc. It was a lovely surprise for me, and a beautiful campus. I think I might transfer…. A man named Quinton Johnson spoke to us about his work with plant remedies. He is isolating the active ingredients in traditional African medicines and studying the orgo of those compounds. Ick. Haha Just kidding, it was really interesting and he was a very very charismatic speaker. He’s won prizes all over the world for his science and wrote a book of which he gave all of us free copies for coming all the way from Chicago to visit him and listen to him. Then we went outside and had a discussion on Worldviews – we broke it down into the five predominant worldviews in South Africa: Christian, African traditional, Secular, Muslim, and Hindu in order of decreasing population percentage. Frank asked for one of us to represent each worldview, and surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) we were able to represent all five to some extent. Maybe Northwestern is more diverse than everyone thinks… We had a student who is first generation Nigerian, I represented the Christian, we had a girl who practices devout Islam, a guy who is agnostic and someone whose family follows pretty strict Hinduism. Go us for being so diverse! Frank asked each of us questions and asked us to explain them from our represented worldview. It was really cool, and also really interesting for me to see how similar several of the religious worldviews are. Makes me wonder how people get into wars over the little technical stuff when a lot of the big picture things are so similar. Ugh people!

            After our lecture and discussion ended, we departed for Stellenbosch. It was about a five hour drive back, but we put on some tunes and had a sing-along party in the car taking turns DJing with our iPods (for those of us whose iPods had not been not stolen).