The Sunday News
Pathisa Nyathi
WHEN the world was not globalised, different communities experienced some health issues that were peculiar to their localities. Humans have the capacity to deal with adversities that they experience within their areas. Their intellect allows them to interact with the broader environment and adapt to it as demanded by their unique situation. As a result, traditions are developed and these become reflective of the critical relatedness between man and his environment.
What is important is that traditions are not cast in stone. When the environment, in its broadest sense, undergoes changes, the state of dynamic balance shifts as new accommodation is sought and achieved. Traditions, given the ephemeral lifespan of man, may seem enduring or everlasting. This is not true. Traditions represent and are reflective of a balance struck between man and his environment over a long period.
The situation has changed after globalisation, largely driven by insatiable greed, itself facilitated by technological advances such as in shipwright, navigation and aviation. Diseases have been introduced to new environments where hitherto, communities were not aware of them. As a result, communities are not aware of how to deal with them. However, where there was little or no interference, communities began to domesticate newly introduced medical conditions.
The coming together of communities, regardless of emerging relations, embraced more than trading, exploitation, colonial relations, and embraced the less obvious health issues. However, where relations of dependency characterised contacts, defeated communities lost the initiative to deal with their health issues resulting from contacts with foreign communities that left their lands to seek new products to drive their economies as their tastes went wild and scientific technologies came to their support.
Where communities no longer have the initiative and total control over their environment, reliance and dependence characterise them. They are no longer able to get on top of a situation that confronts them. They are resigned to what more powerful communities dictate, at high cost to them. Remedies to health issues have to be provided by perceived new messiahs. Dependent communities watch hopelessly as their worlds begin to shrink. The known and named world begins to collapse over them. Whatever situations emerge, they have no names for. Where an enemy is not known, not understood, and therefore unnamed, there is little or no chance to deal with the situation.
This is where Africa finds herself today: total dependence and total expectation that when pandemics break out, theirs is to suffer quietly, perish quietly and resign themselves to the vagaries of a pandemic which they can’t even name. At best they indigenise names rendered in languages of those who have named emerging health issues. For example, coronavirus has become ikhorona in IsiNdebele. How much is understood beyond the name, is anyone’s guess. It has to be appreciated that understanding of a disease is never universal. Africa had her own understanding when there were no microscopes to view microbes. A disease is understood on a community’s terms.
What a wandering way to get to the gist of this article. I did promise that we were going to deal with social distancing among the BaNyubi and BaJawunda peoples. I notice only now that in the previous article I erroneously referred to the Talawunda when I meant to refer to the Jawunda. The names of places referred to would have indicated we were dealing with Jawunda people rather than the Talawunda of Brunapeg and Kezi.
What we should observe in the advent of the coronavirus pandemic is that its understanding and measures to curb its advance are coming from outside of Africa. The vaccine, when it does get to Africa, will have been extraneously developed and, as a consequence, Africa will become more dependent on foreign countries regarding medical remedies. Racial considerations militate against remedies emerging out of Africa, black Africa in particular. What makes all this the more sad is that Africa herself is resigned to her terrible condition of debilitating dependence.
Some years back I got to know about the health condition afflicting one man. For him to be successfully treated, he had to use a mixture of herbal and other concoctions in which was included one critical ingredient; a human bone from one who succumbed to a condition named, in IsiNdebele known ufuba. It was a respiratory condition that troubled the man. He therefore, in African health terms, needed to be healed by means of using a bone from one who died from a similar if not the same condition.
It will be apparent that the understanding of disease is related to the community’s medical knowledge. Ufuba is a condition that fights ufuba.
In Western scientific terms, it would be expressed as like poles repel, unlike poles attract. Yet Africans too express the same idea in a different way. For example, in Western terms, it might be that one who suffered ravages of a particular viral disease, developed antibodies.
Have we not seen serum from survivors of coronavirus being tried out on healthy individuals in the hope they would develop immunity. The understanding is that those who have suffered from coronavirus and survived have developed antibodies which may be used by other individuals to fight the virus in their own bodies.
Interestingly, in the communities that we are referring to, the same principles were applicable although couched in a different language, in line with their own understanding of the disease. Ufuba, as understood by the BaNyubi, BaJawunda and indeed, many other African groups, was understood as a condition where the affected person experienced respiratory challenges, exhibited through difficulty in breathing.
The condition was infectious and could thus easily infect other members of a community. It should be noted that the people concerned never referred to either bacteria or viruses as causal agencies. A language consistent with their knowledge and understanding was used.
What may be viewed as social distancing was applied, albeit differently. Those who suffered from ufuba were the ones isolated by and from communities. What becomes clear from the modus operandi is that the condition was understood to be incurable. The sick were thus left to die — but without spreading the disease to healthy members of their communities. The areas where the BaNyubi and BaJawunda lived were characterised by several mountains. In the case of the former, there were the Matobo Hills with numerous caves. It was equally the same among the BaJawunda. In their areas there were several mountains: Magwe, Zhomba, Zhobwe, Betsa, Bedza, Gobatema, inter alia.
Identified persons afflicted with ufuba, a respiratory condition, were removed from their communities and taken to caves in mountains where they were left to face the inevitable — death. Caves were their final resting places. My informant, Baker Mathanda Dube, uSekaTanki, tells the story of one ufuba victim who was confined to a cave shouting feebly, “hadza nezembgwe!” The person was hungry and appealing for sadza. Zembgwe is pearl millet from which sadza is made. No one heeded his desperate appeal. Community members were all aware of the hazards of the disease and recognised the measure being taken — for their own good. This is an important difference between then and now where some people do not subscribe to the adopted measures to curb the cononavirus. To them the measures are externally enforced, and given, some choice they would not bother adhering to the measures. Internal conviction is lacking.
Caves in the Matobo Hills are littered with several degenerated and parched human bones from victims of ufuba. The man that I referred to got to know, through spiritual guidance, that there were these bones in caves which were to be part of the medical ingredients that he was to use and get healed. Indeed, the medicines, including fragments of human bones, were burnt in a potsherd and the man inhaled smoke issuing there from and recovered from the disease.
Mathanda was quick to draw my attention to the injunctions that accompanied the death of one who had been isolated. Here one gets to appreciate how a disease is understood differently and how dealing with it is in line with the broad worldview of community. What a community believed in was total severance of the disease, ensuring that it was not spread beyond the dead. The fate of the deceased’s property was important in that regard. His/her possessions ranged from personal effects to livestock. The disease was chastised, driven away, as it were. The disease was viewed as some condition that ought to be expelled, terminated in a manner as we saw with regard to zhambuko.
One way the disease could spread beyond the “pyramid” of the dead man was the manner in which his/ her property was handled. Cattle, sheep and goats, in fact, all livestock were to be left alone without them being shared among his/her relatives as was the case in a normal situation. Livestock was left to wander uncared for and unclaimed by relatives. Mathanda draws my attention to a number of sickly individuals and others who died as a result of having inherited the property of one who died from ufuba. The progeny of the dead shared the livestock contrary to known practice.
“Umuntu wakhona ufa ehoqa.” The victim experiences difficulty in breathing (hoarse breathing). That was the result where the deceased’s property was shared among his/her relatives. Greed was the cause of their problem. Dealing with the condition was at different levels. There was social distancing of the sick where they were confined, physically, to a cave where they were cut off from the healthy. The healthy were being protected from the sick who were suffering from a communicable disease such as ufuba.
Secondly, there was the belief that the condition of the dead was communicable spiritually to those who share his/her blood. The way that was done was through inheritance. Those who shared the property of their relative who succumbed to ufuba was never to be inherited, be it household items or livestock. Where this injunction is ignored, the disease is symbolically transmitted to living relatives who inherited the deceased’s property. Whereas the deceased got the disease through inhalation of a virus, her/his relatives get it in a totally different way. For lack of a more appropriate term, we could refer to it as blood-spiritual infection through which a disease if acquired.
This applies to a people who advance the idea of a human as comprising body and spirit. Essentially, a disease is tackled through a community’s worldview, beliefs and cosmology. It is never or should never be a question of comparing the forms of knowledge and intervention strategies. Each community has its own way of dealing with a medical situation confronting it. God never created a people with a monopoly of ignorance and stupidity.
