Old gods and new - superstition on the Dark Continent
michael-the-sangorma
“Why are you even thinking about this? Get your arse on a plane already!”
She was perhaps the most direct tarot reader that I had met. Odd that I was even there, since I had long ago given up any belief that there was anything in the divinitive arts other than applied psychology.
Yet there I was, throwing myself into the mystic. Indecision has a lot to answer for, and fear of missing out has often seen me travel towards one event until the anxiety builds up about missing another, and turn back. Repeat and ramp up the anxiety until I miss out on both. As such, I know why so many grab at anything magical. Freedom from anxiety is welcome relief, even for myself, even as a skeptic.
So ten months later, my new fiancée was on top of me on my couch telling me that I must go with her to her country, else the wedding would be off. So a year after that saw me in Port Elizabeth, introducing myself to Mr Saddler, who would be my headmaster.
My wife’s family was not part of either the African or Christian beliefs. From sophisticated Pretoria, Phillip was a man of academia and science, and Margaret a fiercely dominant Afrikaaner who only ever uttered a prayer as a political tactic in a board meeting.
They were intensely supportive of each other, though, so when sister Yvette got hold of some new pet belief, as she seemed to do every month, it was accepted with no outward hint of doubt. As a result, belief in spirits, dream catchers, homeopathy and auras would abound. One was when Yvette became convinced that writing words on water bottles would imbibe the water with properties of that word. Soon the bookshelf was loaded with bottles of Confidence, Happiness, Love and Calm.
It was hard to tell what Phillip thought of Yvette’s views, but he gave the impression that he had seen each phase come and go with no particular damage, so drinking a few bottles of Compassion in support of his beloved daughter became a means of expressing affection. Besides, I think it made him chuckle inwardly as he reached for a bottle of Humour.
It was in conversation with Yvette and Phillip that an odd thing happened. I was reviving my long-dormant new-age roots on souls and reincarnation. Normally the skeptical editor in me would take a break and go find something else to do, but on this occasion, with Phillip beside me, actively listening, not saying anything, the skeptic in me stayed and got to hear me speak.My inner skeptic patiently listened to me talk, but as it heard more about reincarnation, chakras and reiki, I could feel its unimpressed assessment of what it heard, and tapped me on the shoulder to say that it would like a word with me at my earliest possible convenience.
Which turned out to be beside a lake the next morning where it calmly insisted that a discord wouldn’t stand and urged me to clear those mental cupboards out, into the lake. Forty minutes later, I returned to the house and announced that what I had said the day before was complete bollocks.Mr Saddler took me on as one of his teachers, I returned to Australia to finish my teaching degree, and returned to Port Elizabeth a year later.
What I hadn’t realised was just how religious my new home was. Not just your regular, easy-going Anglicans, or people who turned up just for Easter service and a cup of tea, no, these were full-bore happy-clappy creationist Christians.
This dawned on me as I was sitting in a café overlooking the bay, reading Dawkins’ evidence for evolution.A friendly waitress served me and asked what I was reading, so I flipped closed the book and showed her the cover. “Oh,” she said, “Do you believe in evolution, do you?” Being raised in Australia may have spoiled me. I tend to treat creationism as a mental disorder. Some degree of insane. But here was a genuine creationist, and she did not appear to be drooling.
I reached for rebuttals: That ‘belief’ was irrelevant when examining evidence, that she might argue that it was ‘just a theory’, which would have me in an argument about scientific terminology, that for me to answer ‘yes, because...’ ignored the lack of need for belief when examining evidence, which I didn’t have on hand. But wait - I did! I had a whole book full of exactly the kind of scientific evidence I needed right under my fingers! All I needed to do was to imbue a wealth of scientific understanding into her head in the limited time before she moved on to another table. Reading passages of text would take too long, but images, yes! I would demonstrate my counter-argument with images! With the fate of the entire of Western progress depending on my answer, I championed my defence of the scientific process with this sterling speech:
‘It’s got pictures.’
…it’s got pictures. The waitress gave me a look like I had just announced that I had filled my trousers, and she walked away.I quickly discovered that this creationist philosophy was not restricted to waitresses. I chuckled at a humorous Bible quote on a fellow teacher’s fridge, only to find that they were serious. A man spruiking for a youth camp confidently assured me that all atheists wake up planning the most amount of evil they could do in a day, and when I finally got hold of the fellow who ran ‘Atheists in the Pub’, he told me that it had been disbanded a year prior due to him being the only one to turn up.
I also visited a sangorma.
Witchdoctors hold high status in African culture, and they aren’t to be questioned, out of fear that they will point the bone at you and turn your own bones to jelly. Sangormas are used to bless your life, to help you find love, to put curses on your enemies. I entered and sat in a darkened room covered in black plastic like an indoor tent, with the heady smell of unidentified smoke and limited ventilation.
As soon as I had sat down, he scanned my appearance and told me to go get him more money for materials. I didn’t. I left.Aside from attempts to extract money from tourists, sangormas would regularly be called in to help one soccer team win over another. A team would call in a sangorma who would make a magic potion –muti - out of chicken blood to be soaked into their socks. The sangorma would keep them in the ritual until 2am, the team would wake up tired for the game, and lose. I believe that superstition also made them shoot long-shots at goal and pray, which may go a long way to explain the lack of dominance of the national team.
Chuckles at this superstition are often heard coming from white South Africans as they head to their church to pray for a winning lotto ticket.My school principal, Mr Saddler – lovely chap in every respect – earnestly gave sermons that were a good mix of positive encouragement and burning brimstone. An opinion that was greeted with nods and smiles with every teacher on staff as he went on to say how God formed the world with a wave of his beard just 6,000 years ago, along with the first man, fully formed and ready to go.
And so it was that I was to teach old-Earth science, in the land of three-million-year-old human fossils, to eleven-year-old creationists, where I would face questions like ‘Sir? What about Adam and Eve, Sir?’ An immediate answer was on the tip of my tongue, but it was an answer that would get me sent back home to Melbourne. ‘Do you go to Hell if you kiss people before you’re married, Sir?’
‘Qaqamba, I’d like to answer your question,’ I would say in deliberate tones ‘but I think the answer I give is going to be different from the one your Mama wants you to hear, so, uh, look over there!’ whereupon I would run away. Unfortunately, they could run faster than me, so I set up a question box. ‘No theology’ said the ice-cream container with a slit in the lid.
This was added to later with ‘No personal questions’ after a spate of ‘What’s your wife’s name, Sir?’ At my leisure, at the slow end of an hour, I would pull questions out of the box. The first one said ‘What’s theology, sir?’ which I ought to have thought of answering earlier. I described it as clearly as I could while still remaining neutral, but I would still get questions like ‘What’s God’s dog’s name, sir?’ which I would throw over my shoulder in response.
My battle was not against religion, though. Not against mythology. These youngsters’ futures in a religion-filled city depended on them fitting in and making connections with others, and this usually happened in their church.No, my war was against superstition.
Every week there were reports of children getting exorcised to death for liking to sleep under the stars, or suffering epilepsy. Others died when their parents thought that a visit to the witchdoctor, or prayer, could replace medicine, and if you were born albino, you lived in fear that a sangorma would make a soup out of your limbs.
I would read the more palatable stories to the class, like, say, the monkey that was kicked to death by a crowd in Johannesburg for being a witch as an example of the kind of thinking to avoid, but I suspect that it rather served to reinforce it.
Then there was Marikana.
In order to highlight the dangers of believing superstition, my classes followed the story closely. In 2012, two rival unions of platinum miners each wanted to entice more members with their promise to get them triple the current wages. They set up battle lines in front of the mine at Marikana, and a stand-off began. The riot police were called. They had no real part in this dispute, and they were mostly just for presence since they certainly didn’t want to get between the warring parties.
Unwilling to attack each other, the miners eventually formed the bright idea to attack the police. They called in a sangorma who performed various rituals and applied muti to their chests. ‘Police weapons will bounce off you!’ he said to them, ‘But only if you run forward. Don’t look back! Believe or it won’t work!’
And so, believing they were invulnerable, they charged at the line of police with weapons high, and the police responded. 34 people were killed, 78 injured.
The police were blamed, and the mine owners, apartheid, magic monkeys, but nobody questioned the sangorma.
Back in my classroom, I thought that this would be a clear example of the folly of superstition, as well as errors in politics and economics, and some students did, but most of the class decided differently. The bulk of the class merely believed that the other side must have had a better sangorma, or ignored the whole deal and blamed the police and big business, which is exactly what public opinion did.
This was around the time that we were about to lose the whole middle field to drought.No stranger to urban droughts, I swung into action, arranging an inspection and obtaining a quotes for water tanks, and bathroom taps that couldn’t be left running. But the office of President Jacob Zuma came up with a better plan to solve this no-rain business:
They would pray.
Mid-March, in the middle of what was supposed to be rainy season, every school in the Eastern Cape, all 200 or so, were to take an hour from noon on a school day to pray as hard as their little hands could press together.
I opted out, got on with marking essays, discreetly noted the date on a calendar, and put the quote for the water tanks somewhere safe though it was never seen again.
Five and a half weeks of dry followed before a light sprinkle in late April. Principal Saddler was quick to mention this in assembly. ‘You see? We asked God to make it rain, and it DID rain!’ Hoorays and cheers could be heard even as the grass of the middle field was ploughed out and replaced by astroturf.
Later in the year I asked them how much time had passed between prayer and deliverance, they insisted ‘Next day, sir!’ Which dovetailed nicely into a lesson about rainmaking, and how the pharaohs of Egypt kept people believing in their divine power by having people believe that they could control the annual floods. If any of them made any connection between this and the events earlier that year, none of them showed it.
I rounded off this lesson with the advice that if they ever found themselves as leader of a superstitious country, just convince the people that you are a god, and you will be one. Oh, no, sah! You’re wrong, sah! No way, sah! You lie, sah!
So, in the name of science, I made one of them into a god. Pholisa was keen to volunteer. Wanted to be god of netball. And so it shall come to pass. A flock of grade one kids, aged about 6, had passed my window on their way to the lunch shop. Pholisa was to walk in front of them, looking godly, and everyone who wanted to take part would kneel, bow down and worship her, praising her godliness, offering proclamations to her divinity, and see what happened.
The bell went, and the class scurried out the door a little more excitedly than usual.
Reports later indicated that almost all the first-graders get down on their knees and join in, several wanted to touch her skirt, and one asked for a bike. All joined in but one, who loudly proclaimed: ‘She’s not a god, that’s my sister!’ and was hushed for the heretic that she was.
A week later, Pholisa asked if I could make them stop. But, well, what power do I have over a god? She went on to become a school prefect, and I like to think that her time as a minor deity was what gave her uncanny command over all of her assigned class.
Well, all but one, who was still miffed that her sister was a god.
Back in Australia now, I am glad to be no longer surrounded by superstition and fallacious thinking.Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going with an empath to a heart-circle discussion on how homeopathy can cure the autism caused by vaccines.
