The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Mabhena
One of my ancestral praise names is Mahlekanemamba. In English the name simply describes a terrible fellow who laughs with deadly Black Mambas. As a metaphor the name is pregnant with warnings and threats about the powerful abilities of an individual that can make jokes with and laugh at death that is embodied in Africa’s deadliest snake, the Black Mamba.
It is one of my ancestors who brought this name to life, gave it legend and passed it down the generations until it found itself in my assortment of names that I use to remind myself of my substance in the face of the adversities of life.
The Mabhenas also randomly circulate as the Mpofus of the Nyandeni stock from the eMantungweni parts of Zululand. When they are angry or just too happy they are fond of calling themselves, Masokangomkhonto, the ones that circumcise themselves with the spear, they are proud children of Sgwegwe the son of Bingweni, a collective of hunters, warriors and notorious healers. Mahlekanemamba was such a healer.
Amongst other herbs and objects of healing he had a portent portion of anti-venom that made him famous to a point of notoriety. After eating Mahleka’s porridge that was mixed with many bitter herbs an individual could take a bite from any snake including the deadly Mamba and still not die.
To dramatise the power of his concoction Mahleka would personally chase snakes, including the Black Mamba, and kill them with bare hands by twisting their necks, in the process taking many bites. Before killing the poor snakes he would tease and play with them to mock their powerlessness towards him. That is where the name Mahlekanemamba came from.
For his powers, real and mythical, he became a companion of the rulers of the day and was almost always part of the King’s party. Many cattle and wives became his. Rumours circulated in the villages that he actually ate the snakes. And so was he feared, and even loathed. I can confirm that he actually ate some parts of snakes and did include the snakey portions in his famous porridge that he fed to his patients to fortify their immunity to venom.
The logic was that once an individual had some articles of snake, and some unknown herbs, in their blood they would not die of snake bites as random fellows would especially after a strike from the Black Mamba. My Khokho’s drama with snakes, the play with them and bare-handed slaughter of the deadly reptiles, was really nothing more that the marketing strategy of an enterprising healer.
He had to dramatise his healing powers before enchanted and frightened audiences, otherwise he was a cool guy that just knew how to mix herbs and snake meats to fortify the human body against deadly venom. The whole of the African continent had such herbsmen as Mahleka that possessed arts and sciences of healing people from different ailments, maladies and conditions. Such characters as Mahleka were assets to their communities.
When colonialism landed they were turned into suspects that were criminalised as witchdoctors at the best and accessories of the devil at the worst. I am reliably informed that some Christian missionaries worked overtime dissuading villagers from patronising Mahleka that they framed as the Devil’s ambassador of sorts. Up to this very day, in Africa, traditional and indigenous healers and their sciences and arts of healing are frowned upon and even demonised by our westernised and christianised societies.
The Great Epistemicides
Systematically and structurally colonialism killed African arts and sciences of survival including healing itself and other various ways of immunising and fortifying the body. My raw experience from the village of Siganda in Nkosikazi is that Africans had their own vaccines, not just herbal remedies to seasonal diseases like flue, fever, malaria and some pestilences.
People would eat and drink isihaqa, intolwane and other generic herbs and plants that were known to strengthen the body and prevent or minimise sickness. Africans, before, during and after the colonial encounters had a symbiotic relationship with nature and its plant and animal objects. African science, especially the science of healing, took many modes and angles including how human beings learnt from animals.
From the many stories that I have gathered from the legend of Mahleka I have drawn a lot of insights into how some healers learnt from wild animals. One good day for instance, Mahleka encountered a fight to the death between the Mangoose and the Black Mamba. Mangoose and Black Mambas habitually fight, kill and eat each other. Whoever dies first in battle becomes lunch for the winner between the two, one a cat and the other a reptile.
Mahleka watched carefully from a generous distance as the two deadly rivals gunned for each other’s lives. The Mangoose happened to win that day, simply by striking the spine of the Mamba and collapsing the reptile, much like we have frequently seen in National Geographic channels. But the Mangoose had taken too many bites and it was a matter of a very short time before it would also collapse and die of Mamba venom.
So before it settled to its snakey dinner it rushed to the nearby shrubs to frantically bite and chew at a certain herb that it swallowed dutifully. The observant Mahleka did not miss the lesson about the anti-venomous qualities of that herb that from that day became a key ingredient of his famous concoction. Such lessons have been lost to western education and ideologisation.
The knowledge of nature, animals and plants that Africans had, the symbiotic relationship has been corrupted and largely abandoned. Ordinarily, as an educated and modern African, if I can claim that, I am supposed to be ashamed of the healing ways of my ancestors that are now framed as primitive and even barbaric. We have been educated away from traditional and ancestral knowledges, forced to entirely rely on western science and medicine as the only legitimate and credible mode of preventing diseases and healing us from maladies.
Every day we step on shrubs and herbs that have many medicinal and healing properties that we have been systematically and structurally educated not to think of or know. About our ancestors we are taught that they were witches and wizards, not healers.
The African continent is home to immeasurable plant and animal species that, besides largely being food, are loaded with medicinal qualities. The traditional and natural medicinal resources of Africa have been lost to Africans that are now scientifically and medicinally dependent on Europe and America. Medical ignorance and medical poverty of Africans has been another way in which imperial and colonial Europe underdeveloped Africa.
How Africans have been educated away from nature, led away from their relationship with plants and animals, has been a great epistemicide. Epistemicides, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos called them, are the systemic and structural killing of indigenous knolwedges and native histories that colonialism did in Africa and Latin America.
Our traditional arts and indigenous sciences of medicine and fortification of the body, immunisation, have been destroyed. Our grand arts and sciences have been reduced to superstition, myth and harmless legends.
