by Namhla Tshisela

Calling as a sangoma made her ditch career in accounting

Meet Amanda Gcabashe, a finance wunderkind who is now one of South Africa’s rare breed of high tech sangomas. She asserts that taking this ancient African wisdom into cyberspace will shatter stereotypes about this revered but misunderstood call from the ancestors. Gcabashe launched the website last year after nearly 10 years of practising as a sangoma and an inyanga.

“You can buy a book if you want to find out, for instance, about astrology, but you will not find anything about traditional healers,” Gcabashe says. “There are many of us throughout the continent but we are relegated to the corners of obscurity.”

She says traditional healing has always been shrouded in secrecy and as a result has acquired a stigma. She hopes her website will “create interest about learning more about the healing art of Africa”.

Gcabashe says: “Whenever there are news stories about izinyanga or izangoma they are always negative.”

Her site offers introductory lessons to those who are not familiar with the practice. A glossary of terms is included and some of the myths that persist about izangoma and izinyanga are explored. She says people expect traditional healers to be “old men or women who live in little huts in rural areas”.

Some struggle to contain their incredulity when they meet the 34- year-old. She consults from her home at a country estate in a suburb on Gauteng’s West Rand while her home in Northriding is being renovated. The only thing that gives her away as a sangoma is the black, red and white ibhayi she wraps around her body, partly covering her denim skirt and a yellow Stoned Cherrie T-shirt. Her straight hair is tied in a ponytail.

“The website was not a way of advertising myself,” she says. “Clients hear about me through word of mouth.”

She believes consulting a sangoma is “a personal thing” and she maintains a strict code of confidentiality with her clients. Gcabashe grew up in a Christian home and felt more inclined to live a life in the ministry because “I used to pray for people”. But a series of dreams and her first visit to a sangoma convinced her otherwise.

“I must confess I accepted the calling out of fear. People would tell me that if I ignored the call I would get sick or die. I had no intention of dying at 24. I still wanted to own a bank,” she jests. She started the process of ukuthwasa in 1999 while serving articles with a chartered accounting firm, becoming the first in her family to heed her vocation.

“My mother ran away from her calling all her life,” Gcabashe says. “My grandmother was married to an Anglican priest and could not practise as a sangoma because it was considered taboo”. She says there is a common misconception that traditional healers do not believe in God.

“African traditional religions do not frown on prayer. It is not my place to convince dogmatic people about the credibility of our practices. Why do we have to limit God to Anglicans or Christians?” She does not regret heeding her calling and forsaking a life in the corporate sector.

“I can’t say whether my life has changed for the better or for worse. I have gained and experienced things I wouldn’t have had as an accountant. It is not about my career or bank account anymore. It’s about how I can help others,” Gcabashe says.

She does not throw bones. She counsels and dispenses medicines (imithi) she prepares. She wants to open an indigenous health clinic in Soweto that will offer an affordable and multi- dimensional approach to health care.

“Health is not just about aches and pains. It has an emotional and psychological aspect. Sometimes people just want to be heard and counselled, and we offer that,” she says. She believes a time will come when traditional and Western medicines will be used together to treat various ailments.

“No one has bothered to study our medicines. The reality is that Western doctors and traditional healers faced the same problems of death and disease.” About attitudes to healing, she says medicines are useless if patients do not change their behaviour. Referring to HIV-Aids she says: “I don’t claim to cure Aids. I may dispense medicine to lower the viral load. I also don’t encourage patients to stop taking ARVs because I believe in a multipronged approach. My medicine does not affect the efficacy of the treatment, but their vitality.”

Log on to her website www.mphutungwane.co.za and enter makhosi, her mystic world of traditional African healing.

source: Sowetan newspaper

Twenty years into the pandemic, people are looking for new ways to live with HIV, and for some alternative medicine has become part of the answer.

The TsaBotsogo Community Development and Training Centre, based in Dobsonville, Soweto, a sprawling township south of Johannesburg, South Africa, works with teachers to identify vulnerable children in the community and refer them to the centre’s trained volunteers for counselling. This year the organisation took 30 of the children to camp for a week, hoping to give them a chance to play, make friends and build better relationships with TsaBotsogo volunteers, said executive director, Kefilwe Ndaba.

“The Rolls Royce of Healing?”

The camp was where you might least expect to find talk of alternative medicine, chakras and biofields, but Amanda du Toit and a several other “energy medicine practitioners” arrived to help balance the children’s energies, she said.

The term “alternative medicine” is often used to describe practices outside the realm of your typical MD or nurse, and can include homeopathy, the ancient Indian practice of Ayurvedic medicine and naturopathy, in which healing is believed to be associated with nature.

Practitioners of energy medicine like du Toit believe physical illness is caused by imbalances between such energies in the body. They say they use physical energy, such as vibration, as well as less tangible forms of energy like “biofields”, or the subtle energy believed to be within all living things, to heal certain physical illnesses.

Using a system developed by a United States-based entrepreneur known as Master Del Pe, these women say they have learned to read chakras – the supposedly seven centres of spiritual energy in the human body in yoga philosophy – and can open and close these centres in order to balance the energies in the body.

By the end of the session, most of the younger children were asleep, while the older ones sat quietly with their eyes closed. The session involved no physical contact or verbal communication between the women and children, which du Toit said was an advantage when working with children, who might not be able to verbalise what they were feeling.

“[Energy medicine] is like the new generation of healing; it’s very effective – like the ‘Rolls Royce’ of healing,” said du Toit, who characterises Del Pe’s approach as a mix of Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. “We believe it’s the medicine of the future.”

Del Pe came to South Africa in 2006, punting free lessons in his newly developed form of energy healing geared to help those living with HIV and AIDS deal with opportunistic infections and other related illnesses.

He has returned several times since, charging roughly R1,500 (US$191) for one-day courses such as “Charting Your Seven Life Cycles”.

A very grown-up reality

According to a 2006 study by South Africa’s department of education, 15 percent of children will lose at least one caregiver to HIV/AIDS by the age of 14 years, placing them at an increased risk of poverty, malnutrition, exploitation and school absenteeism.

The South Africa government has spent more than R563 million (US$72m) since 1997 on community-based interventions aimed at, among other objectives, safeguarding at-risk children. If the country meets the goals set out in its national strategic framework for HIV and AIDS, 30 percent of vulnerable children and child-headed households should be able to access social benefits and grants by the end of 2008.

However, the psychosocial and emotional needs of children like those at TsaBotsogo are often harder to budget for and even harder to identify, according to UNAIDS case studies.

“Many of them feel like they are alone,” Ndaba said. “Some of them talk, say they know they don’t have a parent, that it is difficult to go to school with nothing in their stomachs, but some are too reserved,” she commented. “It’s not easy for them to open up, that’s why we’ve been playing lots of games, praying for them, hugging them, trying to get them to trust us and open up.”

Sophie Kekana, a counsellor at TsaBotsogo, said working with the children was challenging. “You can see from afar their needs – some are sick or hurting, others are bitter. A lot of them are poverty stricken; you can see it in the way they eat.”

“At least now they know that they are not alone, that they have mothers outside [of their families] that care for them,” Ndaba said.

Consent underlines all approaches

As the epidemics of HIV and AIDS drive on, people may be turning to new ways of caring for those affected, but child rights activists caution that the consent of both parents and children is essential, regardless of the type or style of therapy.

“[Alternative medicine] might be perfectly harmless but my concern is: ‘how would you explain something like this to children’s mothers?’” said Noreen Ramsden, materials developer for the Durban-based Children’s Rights Centre.

According to Ramsden, administering alternative therapies like energy healing without informed parental consent reflected a certain element of manipulation, and threatened to undermine a parent’s right to guide their children’s upbringing.

TsaBotsogo’s Ndaba admitted that energy healing was not originally on the programme, and was therefore not explained by teachers to caregivers at the time they obtained consent for the children to go camping.

Helen Meintjies, a senior researcher at the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town, agreed with Ramsden, cautioning that the danger of manipulation was very real when working with people who were unwilling to say ‘no’ in the face of something they viewed as a favour.

“Consent issues apply across the board when working with children, regardless of the activity, and that means kids must be informed [of the activity] in a way that’s understandable,” Meintjies said. “Don’t underestimate the importance of kids understanding what they are entering into.”

This report was originally published on PlusNews.

A South African endemic medicinal herb, with the botanical name of Sutherlandia frutescens may hold the key to the treatment of HIV and Aids it has been reported in many places including the BBC news site, and by Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa, who in recent years has become a good friend of controversial author and speaker David Icke.

Credo Mutwa, however, got the name slightly wrong and refers to it as Suderlandia Fructosate, and this has led to very many enquiries on message boards online where people have been trying to track the herb down. Some botanists also refer to Sutherlandia frutescens as Lessertia frutescens, which confuses matters further.

Sutherlandia frutescens is also known in English as cancer bush and balloon vine, and it grows naturally throughout the dry parts of southern Africa, in Western Cape and up the west coast as far north as Namibia and into Botswana. It is also found in the western Karoo to Eastern Cape and has been cultivated as an attractive garden flower.

Sutherlandia Frutescens, sub-species Microphylla has been undergoing clinical trials to assess its immune-boosting properties and evidence suggests that this plant can improve the quality of life of thousands of people suffering from HIV and full-blown Aids.

The South African San people who know it as “Insisa,” use Sutherlandia frutescens as an energy booster and an anti-depressant, whilst Afrikaners call it the “Kankerbossie” or cancer bush, because of its properties in treating people suffering with internal cancers.

Phyto Nova, a company specialising in herbal remedies first started researching the bio-chemical properties of Sutherlandia frutescens and they were so convinced it could be used to help HIV and Aids sufferers, that they contracted farmers to plant acres of the herb as a safeguard against over-harvesting of it in the wild.

The Phyto Nova company has been manufacturing and supplying high quality Sutherlandia frutescens tablets, gel and powder.

originally published on Enjoy France website here.

You may also be interested in reading this detailed write-up on the Sutherlandia treatment here.

Dr. Moira Gunn talks to the chief of a rural South African village, Chief Advocate Mdutshane, and a South African government scientist, Dr. Makhosandile Rebe, about genetically modified crops in South Africa. And on Bio-Issue of the Week, science journalist David Ewing Duncan reviews former President Clinton’s keynote speech. This edition of BioTech Nation was broadcast from the BIO2006 conference in Chicago.

Download interview with Chief Advocate Mdutshane and Dr. Makhosandile Rebe here.