D i s p a t c h e s 1 4 independent NOVEMBER 10 2013 THE SUNDAY T OMORROW in the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) in Bloemfontein, a penniless gogo from a remote rural area, will be pitted against a multimillion-rand Dutch-owned company in a six-year- long battle that remains trapped between South African mindsets of coloniser and colonised. The case of Johanna Mmoledi, 46, a chef de partie who was fired by the upmarket country estate Kievits Kroon outside Pretoria, after taking a month’s unpaid leave to get heal- ing for her psychological affliction – via sangoma training – reopens tomorrow in the SCA. Kievits Kroon, owned by Dutch businessman Ton Verachter (which, ironically, means “despiser”) – fears so deeply that “Africans will diag- nose themselves and turn the work environment into total disarray” that it has spared no expenses in a costly and relentless legal pursuit of a woman who earned a mere R4 000 a month. Since 2008, Kievits Kroon has refused three court orders (CCMA, Labour and Labour Appeal) to reinstate Mmoledi in her job – by escalating the battle to higher courts, perhaps to the Constitution- al Court if the SCA also rules in Mmoledi’s favour. Scratching under the veneer of what poses as a labour dispute lies an undisclosed battle of ignorance and prejudice that has raged in Africa since the first colonisers set foot here. For Mmoledi and her three chil- dren the consequences of this tena- cious six-year wrangle were devas- tating. They lost everything. She cannot obtain UIF, or new employ- ment, due to bureaucracy: by court order she is reinstated, but in reali- ty she is not. They had to leave their Pretoria home for a remote rural area. However, this case is not about Mmoledi. It is about what she sym- bolises – namely the emergence of global legal reforms around Indige- nous Knowledge Systems as equal to Western systems. Ethan Watters, in his book, Crazy Like Us, says: “Western healers are steamrolling indigenous expressions of mental health and replace them with their own concepts; the West prescribes to the rest of the world how it must define wellness, healing and mental disease, how it must go crazy.” Renowned Dutch cultural and international psychiatrist Professor Joop de Jong, founder of the Trans- cultural Psychosocial Organisation (largest NGO providing mental health services in more than 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe), says: “Traditional healers are the primary care mental health providers for the majority of global communities. The fact that new psy- chotherapies are no more effective than older ones – despite their ‘evi- dence-based status’ – is sometimes hard to accept. Healers have been described as the ‘ideal’ primary care workers (as) they are geographical- ly, culturally and financially accessi- ble. The question remains how to involve healers in our public mental system… Talking about healers always elicits intense emotions among all levels of the population.” Article 31 in the UN’s declaration on the rights of indigenous people states that “indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, pro- tect and develop their… sciences, technologies and cultures, includ- ing… medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions”. Unfortunately, through colonisa- tion, many black South Africans have been so stripped of their own expressions regarding mental health that even arguments from Mmoledi’s black legal teams over the years have missed this historical moment to dynamically forge SA legal reforms that are already sup- ported by global movements who advocate for the integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems into mainstream health practises. And so Mmoledi’s constitutional right to health is absent in this case. Lengthy expert evidence on the rights to culture and religion – which are easy to find – are submit- ted; instead of using the more com- plex but available evidence that establishes African traditional healing as a recognised health paradigm. Constitutional rights to health are clear to everyone – irrespective of religion or culture. Why pose these as a main argument? Sango- mas have never been called “priests” – they have always been known everywhere as amaquirha (doctors, healers). What is this focus on religion and culture when discussing Africa? Is the Western paradigm not a culture, a well-disguised religious belief system posing as atheism? In six years no expert evidence was lead by Mmoledi’s team to demystify sangoma training for the Western business community. Both Kievits Kroon and Mmole- di’s legal teams seem to know noth- ing of how sangoma training works. It is erroneously referred to as a “course” or “classes” – as if taken in good health – and not as a process of illness leading to recovery – which, if successfully managed, will lead to initiation as sangoma. Carl Jung says: “A good half of every treat- ment… consists in the doctor’s examining himself… It is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal.” On both sides there is a denial, or omission, of the fact that Mmoledi was ill; that she suffered from a psy- chological issue – in a similar way that a “Western” person/employee can suffer an issue – and enter a therapy “course” for months to re- establish themselves. A cultural psychiatrist, Dr Vera Bührmann, explains in her book Living in Two Worlds that the “clin- ical picture of thwasa (a sangoma trainee) resembles an emotional dis- turbance, accompanied by physical symptoms… and (they) become real- ly ill physically… “The belief in the ancestors have many similarities to Westerners’ concept of the unconscious, his experience of the archetypes and his obligation to pay attention to these as they appear in his dreams, visions, fantasies and in his sponta- neous, creative activities. To remain healthy, (this is not) nonsense or ‘just imagination’… “The difficulty (for Westerners) is the term ‘ancestor worship’. It seems more correct to talk and write about ‘ancestor reverence’ and ‘ancestor remembering’… The claim that prolonged resistance to the ancestor’s call can lead to insan- ity is not to be taken lightly… neg- lected cases of thwasa can become psychotic… In Western psychiatry it is accepted that early treatment of psychological problems is desirable, i.e. before the condition becomes chronic or too disruptive for the individual, his associates and general environment”. Sangomas vs employers are more about the right to health than rights to culture/religion. HR should advise employees with thwasa symptoms to see a qualified sangoma. Dr Jo Wreford, an anthropolo- gist, emphasises that “diagnosis of a calling to ukuthwasa must be made by a qualified isangoma as the con- dition is distinguished by resist- ance to biomedical doctors”. Kievits Kroon’s HR manager treated Mmoledi’s sick certificate with contempt and informed Mmoledi that she will be fired – whereas a white employee reporting similar issues is likely to have been advised to see a psychologist. Kievits Kroon’s argument that Mmoledi’s absence from duty was not due to circumstances beyond her control, is countered by Bührmann: “One is often forced into analysis by inner conflict or an intolerable life situation, and not by rational reasoning or conscious choice… The inner compulsion is so strong that one has little, if any, choice.” It will be a sad day when Mmole- di’s endeavour to heal, which in a Western paradigm would be consid- ered prudent, is judged as an offence by the Supreme Court – effectively denying the future of African tradi- tional healing – at the very moment in time when its recognition takes off in global indigenous knowledge movements. From a psychological perspec- tive, it will destroy a unique way of working with the subconscious or human psyche. South Africa is one of the few accessible places in the world where the power of ritual and ceremony is still alive and practised more or less in its original form. Many foreigners and academics flock to this country to study ritual and to partake in it for healing pur- poses. Many discover healing through it. African ritual and ceremony is a global treasure. It is ours. Let us reclaim world sanity by protecting this Indigenous Knowledge System with solid sangoma training, clear information, cross-cultural fertilisa- tion and appropriate legal reform. ■ De Wet is a Pondo and Swazi- trained sangoma and freelance writer living in Cape Town. A n n e l i e d e W e t Indigenous healing must be respected in the workplace D OES anyone under- stand Joburg’s idea of a clean city? The cleaning isn’t just about removing litter. It also involves taking hawkers off the pavements. “Operation Clean Sweep” has not only seen thousands of hawkers pushed off the streets, but has also cut off their source of livelihood. Officials reckon hawkers are part of the city’s unseemly sight, a manifestation of urban decay. In removing them, city planners hope to bring an end to “illegal trading; illegal dumping and littering; land and building invasions and other by-law contraventions; illegal con- nection of infrastructure including theft of electricity and the lack of a sense of civic pride and owner- ship”. Downtown Joburg sounds like a real mess, doesn’t it? Any law-abiding citizen must of course sympathise with the city government. It is, after all, their job to maintain law and order. However, a closer look that casts the eye beyond this particular inci- dent, to how the city has generally treated its hawkers, reveals a much more fundamental problem than just a dirty pavement. A two-year study on poverty, inequality and patronage-politics that the Mapungubwe Institute is scheduled to release next Tuesday, shows that officialdom suffers from a paradigmatic problem. In hawkers, city planners don’t quite see entrepreneurs. They see a nuisance. Inevitably, the official demeanour is to control hawkers, limit their movement so that they don’t infest the entire city. In other words municipal by- laws and initiatives don’t seem geared to aid hawkers to thrive, but effectively retard their economic activity. Take the trading permits, for instance. Permits confine hawkers to a particular spot. This meets the city’s impulse for regulatory con- trol, but is unhelpful to hawkers. In the interviews conducted as part of the study, hawkers complained that their economic activity flourishes on mobility. They go where their customers are located, moving from one spot to another. A construction site, for example, is an instant market to hawkers. They sell foodstuff and other daily needs to labourers at the site. Once the construction is complete that customer base disappears, but a new construction site elsewhere provides yet another customer base. To capitalise on the mobility of their customers, hawkers need to be similarly flexible. Tying them to one spot is obviously unhelpful. If not downright disruptive, hawkers berate the officialdom of being inconsiderate. They’re not forewarned of roadworks, for instance. This probably appears trivial to some of us. But repairs on roads that carry a large concentration of pedestrians and even motorists interfere with business. It denies hawkers of cus- tomers, which entails a potential loss of income. Because they sell perishable food-stuff, quick sales are crucial to prevent their stock going off. The hawkers we interviewed for the study felt quite strong about get- ting advance warning of impeding repairs on their “business sites” so that they’re able to prepare accord- ingly. And the problem is not confined to Joburg. The Western Cape’s Over- strand Local Municipality suffers from a similar problem, albeit in a different form. It is a problem of unequal access to the natural resources of the area. Hermanus, for instance, which is a coastal town, is endowed with nat- ural beauty and has a thriving fish- ing industry. The town’s coloured residents, however, bitterly com- plain that they don’t enjoy similar access to the sea as the established fishing industry. Only a limited number of licences are issued to fishermen. They fish largely for subsistence. They don’t have boats, do packaging of their “catch” or marketing of the fish. This commercial aspect of the industry is dominated by estab- lished white business. They have the capital base to take full advan- tage of opportunities offered by the industry. Inequality thus offers a lopsided benefit from what is a nat- ural endowment. In other words, coloured fisher- men fish for subsistence, while white business does so for commer- cial gain. This contrasting benefit from the ocean has consequently led to racial tension. Fishermen see the limit imposed on the number of licences as a way of entrenching commercial domi- nance over the industry. They dis- miss conservation measures geared at protecting fish population as a ruse to keep them out. Their sense of grievance is aggravated by the sense that coloured folks in Hermanus are criminalised. They complain that a mere sight of a coloured man wear- ing a swimsuit at the ocean is an instant police suspect for poaching, while a white person in a similar outfit doesn’t attract similar police attention. Just as in the case of Joburg, Hermanus’s poor feel that the municipality is not on their side. Instead, they charge that it sides with property developers and the town’s wealthy white residents, a significant number of whom are foreigners. The town’s natural beauty is a magnet for property developers and property seekers. From the inter- views with locals, it appears that the municipality is eager to make Her- manus attractive to wealthy resi- dents. An example of this, we were told, was the municipality prioritis- ing constructing entertainment facilities, such as golf courses, over providing housing and basic ameni- ties for its residents. And locals, especially those with houses facing the ocean, are being approached by property-seekers to sell their homes. This, and munici- pal behaviour, has even created a sense among some of the poor local residents that there’s a “conspiracy to drive them out” of the town to make way for wealthy people. If not by prejudice, poor people also protest that efforts purporting to promote local economic activity are blunted by sheer nepotism. In Free State’s Nketoana Local Municipality, near Ritz, numerous co-operatives, most of whom are led by women, are idling. Locals were encouraged to form co-operatives in order to take advan- tage of various economic activities that would supposedly follow in the community. But now they complain that ten- ders go only to certain companies. For a semi-rural place such as Nketoana, whose economy has his- torically relied on a flagging agricul- tural sector, unemployment is a dire problem. What is certainly clear is that South Africa’s policy regime and official conduct is not consistent with the country’s high level of poverty and unemployment. There’s no urgency to assist struggling informal traders out of poverty. And the informal sector already employs a sizeable number of peo- ple, almost 2 million. This is quite significant for a country that’s fail- ing to create jobs. It also shows self-initiative that should be commended. Too many South Africans, more than 16 million, already depend on social grants and services. These range from cash-transfers and free electricity to paraffin and food packages. Their livelihood is effectively sustained by the state. This is not viable, especially because the revenue collection is dropping while the number of recip- ients of social welfare is increasing. Informal trading lightens the burden on the fiscus, enabling peo- ple to fend for themselves. And for a city that claims to be the best “African City”, Joburg’s posture is mind-boggling. Africa’s economy suffers from a structural problem that is a legacy of its colonial past. It’s primary- based, with a relatively small indus- trial sector. That is why the infor- mal sector is booming on the entire continent. Africans have taken to creating a livelihood for themselves. Joburg cannot be located in Africa, yet hope not to suffer from African problems. Or the city telling us that we “shouldn’t think like Africans, in Africa… generally”. ■ Ndletyana is head of the Politi- cal Economy Faculty at the Mapun- gubwe Institute for Strategic Reflec- tion. In hawkers, city planners don’t quite see entrepreneurs – they see a nuisance, writes M c e b i s i N d l e t y a n a Operation Clean Sweep… dirty game? VOLATILE: P o l i c e a r r e s t e d h a w k e r s a r o u n d J o b u r g ’ s C B D i n a c l e a n - u p o p e r a t i o n o f t h e c i t y ’ s s t r e e t s o n O c t o b e r 2 4 , a t t i m e s u s i n g f o r c e t o h a v e t h e m r e m o v e d . F o r a c i t y t h a t c l a i m s t o b e t h e b e s t “ A f r i c a n C i t y ” , t h e M e t r o ’ s d e c i s i o n s o v e r i s s u e s i n v o l v i n g i n n e r c i t y t r a d i n g i s m i n d - b o g g l i n g , s a y s t h e w r i t e r . PICTURE: ADRIAN DE K OCK “ AFRICAN RITUAL AND CEREMONY IS A GLOBAL TREASURE