An apple a day keeps the doctor away. But nobody in Africa
would want to keep the witches away. An article in the British Medical Journal tells us that witchcraft (now known as Tribal Medicine or Traditional Healing) is growing and appears, according to the BMJ, to be readily
accepted by ordinary doctors as useful in dealing with many problems of their patients.Mind you, in the UK and the USA, other sorts of witchcraft are perfectly acceptable. Let's see, there's osteopathy for instance, and you will
have noticed that whenever you go to an osteopath you are always lucky, because whatever your problem may be, the cause of it is invariably a little derangement of those vastly important vertebrae. This can almost always be
remedied by some judicious pushing and shoving to get them back into that unbroken line, detectable by the osteopath's Xray fingers, which will lead to health. In reality lots of healthy people, including JL, have splendidly zigzag
spines.
And then there is homeopathy, meaning that like cures like, though just why it should do so is not awfully well explained. And, amazimgly, homeopathists tell us that the more water you put into rum or whisky
or atropine the stronger it gets.If you can believe that you can believe anything, including believing that homoeopathy will help you.
Next comes aromatherapy. Your problems can be relieved by smelling summer-cut grass, essence
of pure white lily,and, just for your special case, a tiny dose of powerful asafoetida. Anyone who accepts this treatment for a lump in the breast deserves to die from breast cancer. Goodbye, darling.
And the best I
can say for practitioners of astrology and their credulous readers is that they confine themselves to the the very vaguest prophecies, couched in the most ambiguous terms, just as they have been doing since the Sibyls of Corinth
sat on those holy tripods above the vapours of the underworld. So astrologers sensibly don't concern themselves with the past, only with the mistiest future. So wise. Indeed, the ancient phrase, Sybilline terms, means virtually
undecipherable.
From the life-enhancing Carnegie Library, next to the Law Courts, I picked up an interesting book called The African Genius, by Basil Davidson. It's one of those books so tightly bound that merely to
hold it open makes me out of breath, and as for reading it at lunch no spoon or fork or knife will suffice to keep it open. From the workshop a large cold chisel will just serve.Thank you, Basil, for the health-giving exercise.
Basil writes well and elegantly but presumes an already large knowledge of his great subject. Sixty-five tribes are shown, on the map of Africa, all sub-Saharan, but my special friends, the !Kung, are omitted, as is the reason for
their existence, the great, dark, widely delta-ing Okavango River.
But such criticism is trivial. He writes with much insight into African Witchcraft and why it is valuable and necessary. I will do my best to explain.
When we
were in Kenya, if one of my friends had been killed and eaten by a lion, I would have been sorrowful and I would also enquire why he had been out of his tent at night. But Davidson puts me straight. In tribal Africa nothing happens
by chance. The true question is who was it that made him get out of bed and seduced him into the path of the lion? It might have been an ancestor insufficiently honoured. An angry creditor with an unpaid loan. A new wife,
inadequately embraced. An old wife, forsaken. A cattle-debt, old, and by him forgotten. An ancestor incensed by the failure to avenge a family killing. How ignorant I am, I recognise now, to be unaware of these various causes
of lion-bite.
Other disasters may follow if the true cause is not revealed and then corrected or appeased, or paid. It is the witch-doctor who can discover the original cause and for a modest fee, advise you how to
correct it.
How sensible, then, to ask the expert who can give a suitably useful answer As a reasonably experienced and maybe skillful doctor of the Western variety I could not compete on that playing field. I would
refer my unlucky patient to the consultant witch-doctor, and be interested to hear his diagnosis and also his remedies.
The witch-doctor, though aware of the probable extent of my awful ignorance, would merely ignore it and get
on with more important matters, as is the general habit of consultants, thank Heaven.
Davidson quotes from an anthropologist who lived among the Chewa, a tribe in Malawi, north of the Zambezi River. I regret that the figures seem
not to add up in the manner I would expect surgical figures to behave. Marwick collected 194 cases of misfortune, from losing a spear to marital quarrels, disease or death. In 83 cases the victim had been (in terms of tribal
behaviour) at fault, and in another 34, someone closely associated with the victim as a relative or friend had behaved badly. Sixteen people had failed to repay a debt of some kind, 12 had been much too successful and showed it, 9
had been quarrelsome, 7 were sexual wrongdoers and 5 mean or avaricious. For you and me these problems would have been due mostly to chance or to differences in character, but to the tribe they showed the workings of Evil, set in
motion by bad behaviour, but capable of being put right by a suitable approach to the powers of Good.
To be too successful is definitely tribal bad behaviour; it sets you apart from the tribe and makes you arrogant. Like
the Greek hubris it is the pride which comes before and needs the punishment of a fall.
Davidson refers to these witchcraft beliefs as a science of social control. In no way can they be regarded as any kind of science, for
the truths and facts and findings of science are always provisional, subject to change, and very likely to be changed. In contrast, the belief systems of witchcraft provide logical explanation for every disaster. Even death in old
age is due, like lion-bite, to human bad behaviour and/or punishment by the watching spirits of the tribal ancestors. Those spirits live in a perfect environment, like Heaven or like an African Garden of Eden, and are much
concerned that the current members of the Tribe should keep to their high standards.
The African systems are much closer to religions, in which beliefs are much less subject to change and in many of which the idea of the Will of
God is a useful alternative to chance.
In Western medicine the placebo or sugar pill is statistically found to be more effective than no treatment. Of patients who take it some 55 or 60 percent are improved. Indeed, an
alternative view is that what is effective is that widely used drug, the doctor herself, practising under her framed and displayed Diploma.
To the African, then, the witch-doctor, practising under the sign of the snake, should
have the same or even greater success. Best news of all for Ministers of Health is that the witch-doctor requires no capital-intensive Hospital.
