Weeding Out the Quacks

Five hundred strong, outstanding medicine men trooped into Pretoria last week for their first great convention. They came fully dressed for the occasion, with headdresses of beads or feathers, clanking bracelets and earrings, and costume jewelry made of bones, shells, bells, animal horns and beer-bottle tops. Officially constituting the African Dingaka Association, they were the witch doctors from the Union of South Africa and their cousins from Rhodesia, Bechuanaland, Swaziland and Basutoland.

Said President Lukus Somo: "We have come to reaffirm our faith in the old native customs and in the spirits of our ancestors." The witch doctors had another, more practical purpose: they wanted government recognition of their professional organization.

To impress the government with the seriousness of their calling, they voted -L-10,000 to set up a medical school in Johannesburg--to help "weed out the quacks and illiterates from among the medicine men," as Somo put it. The school will be in a two-story building, with shops for witch doctors and herbal-I ists on the ground floor. In its syllabus will be a course in "throwing the bones" --a method of diagnosis in which four-inch pieces of ivory or ox bone are dropped on a sanded floor.

Officially, the convention took a dim view of ancient "prescriptions" in which parts of the human body, charred and powdered, are used. The advertising of such muti (medicine) has just been forbidden by the South African government. Ingredients for this muti are usually obtained by ritual murders, of which there have been a dozen in Basutoland alone this year. The witch doctors in convention assembled asked the government to lift the advertising ban on muti. They forgot to explain why it is all right for them to use human organs, but wrong for the "quacks" (nonmembers of the Dingaka Association) to do so. They also forgot to tell where they get the human parts for their own prescriptions.

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