Maputo — In some parts of Africa, traditional healers are the first available person a sick person turns to when facing a health emergency. These healers are often a central component of the primary health care system. In Swaziland, for example, 85 percent of people with HIV/AIDs consult a traditional healer at some time during their sickness.
One response to the HIV/AIDS induced African health crisis is that traditional healers are increasingly asserting their role in society and demanding recognition and incorporation into primary health care networks being established on the continent.
The World Bank reports that in Mozambique, traditional healers played a particularly important role in helping individuals address the post traumatic stress syndrome symptoms that emerged as a common problem once the peace agreement between the Frelimo-led and the rebel movement Renamo came into effect in 1992.
The Association of Traditional Healers of Mozambique (AMETRAMO), reports that their members' workload for "mental cases due to the war" increased dramatically following the signing of the peace agreement. The work of these healers, and their role in creating a sustainable health care system, is often unacknowledged and poorly understood.
Maria Timane is one such healer. She is the person members of her community turn to when they have health or other problems. She lives at Ilha Josina Machel in the District of Manica, Maputo Province, in the south of Mozambique. "Ilha", or the Island, is in the fertile Incomati River Valley, and was badly hit by floods in 2000, which left extensive damage when the waters subsided.
Maria Timane was born on the Ilha and has always lived there. Her community was engulfed in fighting during the war waged by Renamo against the government and Mozambique's civilians. The rebels prized and sought control of the productive area as a source of food, and forcibly recruited many young people - both boys and girls - to join their ranks. When the war finally ended, many people returning to rebuild their lives found themselves confronting intense psychological and social problems.
Akwe Amosu met Maria Timane in Maputo in June, and she talked, in her native Shangaan, about her life.
Tell me about daily life in your community.
The first thing I do when I wake in the morning is walk to the fields where I grow my food. We usually produce cabbage, beans, maize and peanuts. I work until midday, then go back to my house and prepare lunch. In the afternoon, I work as a healer. I wait for clients. When the clients come, I listen carefully as they tell me what they are looking for. If I can help, I give them what they need. Sometimes they need drugs.
We are very poor at Josina Machel. We still work with very primitive instruments and tools. We don't have money to rent tractors to help us work the fields. Very few people have formal employment. Most of us are peasants, and now we are facing a drought, which will bring big problems for all of us living there.
Can you tell me about your work as a healer. How did you become a healer?
It began as a sad story. I was very, very sick. I had to go to stay in the hospital, but they couldn't help me there. Then someone said that my sickness needed to be treated by traditional healing, and so my family took me to a traditional healer. When the healer started playing drums, the spirit inside me came out and expressed herself and said that she wanted me to become a healer. So the healer became my master(teacher). He taught me treatments and showed me plants and drugs that I could use.
After several years of training, he gave me a sick person to treat; the person was healed, and the master told me that I was ready and took me back to my home on the Ilha, where I began to work as healer.
How old you were when you got sick and realized you were going to be a healer? And how long did the training take?
I was around 25 or 30 years old when I got sick and then began training as a healer. I stayed in training three or four years; when I was ready to go home my family had to pay some money to my master for the training he had given me.
It took me so long to finish the training because I always had to deal with my husband. My husband was baptized and Christian and he didn't want me to become a healer.
So why were you so sure that you should go on with it?
There was no way we could avoid it. It was my husband who took me to the hospital after he had taken me to many different people who were supposed to help me; some even gave me drugs. Nothing helped, and I became unconscious. So he realized that there was a real threat to my life, and he had to take me to this woman who played the drums for me. It was then I realized that I had a spirit inside me and that I had to become a healer.
Both you and your husband were Christians. Did you feel that there was a conflict between becoming a healer and being a Christian?
It was a matter of life and death for me, so I had to choose between living and becoming a traditional healer - or just dying.
Was it possible to continue being a Christian at the same time as doing the healing work?
It was not possible. I had been a Christian, I had been baptized and my children are still Christian; but not me. Yet I think, in a way, becoming a healer was a gift from God.
What kind of treatments did you learn during your training?
For example, Ku Femba. It is similar to the way doctors do their diagnosis. We try to figure out if there is a spirit provoking the disease. If there is a spirit, we want this spirit to come out and say what he wants. Normally the spirit is from the ancestors, and what he wants to say is that there is something wrong in the family or with the behavior of this person, and the ancestors want to see a change.
It can also happen that I do the Ku Femba and realize that there is no spirit responsible, or that the sick person has a normal fever. In those cases, I say "sorry, I can't help you" and the person goes to the doctor in the hospital who gives drugs.
Did you find the studying difficult. Were there many plants and techniques to learn?
It was difficult, and it still is difficult, because there are so many plants I have to use to heal people; but if you can't diagnose the disease, you don't give the medicine.
Do you normally only use plants, or are there other materials and techniques that you would use for treatment?
There is a special kind of ceremony, in which I use sea shells for divining, in order to tell the kind of problems the person has or when a particular ceremony has to be performed for the ancestors.
What kinds of problems do your patients or your clients bring to you? What do they ask you to deal with?
They come because of stomach aches or infertility or epilepsy; when they give birth they have to come to me two months later, and I give them some kinds of medicine. I believe that if you don't introduce your baby to the moon, he'll become ill whenever we have a full moon; so when the baby is two months old, they have to bring him to me, and then I give him a special kind of medicine in order to avoid that disease, and against epilepsy.
People also bring their emotional problems to you. Is it true that people came to you because of the trauma they suffered during the war?
There were people who came to me because they had nightmares or bad dreams; because they had killed people or had seen dead bodies. Some people felt, when they were sleeping, as if they were still in the war; some would wake suddenly and start running, for instance. I gave them some medicines. It was like a cleansing ritual, they had to take a bath with this medicine and make infusions - boil it and cover themselves with a blanket to inhale the steam.
Did you need to talk to them about their experiences? Was that also important?
It was really important, because there are different treatments for different kinds of trauma, so you have to ask the person to describe their experiences and listen carefully to their accounts. Not everyone saw dead people, and not all of them had to kill people.
Some just saw, some had to kill. It is important to know what happened and what they see in their nightmares. If you had killed someone and you always remember the fact or you feel you are constantly reliving that situation, I may give you a special kind of bath and a powder. Also we use the clay bowls we have here, put the powder in one, add some fire so that it makes smoke. You put that in your bedroom for a week and the nightmares disappear.
Did people suffer very much from the war on the island?
Many people were kidnapped, captured and kept in the [nearby military] bases. Many had to stay there until the war came to an end, although some managed to escape and go back home.
What about the women? Did they experience special problems, of rape for example?
It was most difficult for the very young girls, around ten years old, because they were forced to have sexual intercourse with older men, even as children.
In our tradition you have to have your first menstruation before first sexual intercourse, so it was very bad for these young girls. They didn't have any education in these things. Normally, when a young girl has her first menstruation, you tell your mother and she goes to your aunt, the sister of your father. The aunt is the one who comes to you and gives you a kind of education, how to look after yourself, what kind of people you can relate with. We have a lot of taboos.
These young girls didn't pass through this ritual, so it was really difficult for them because they didn't even know what was happening. When they came home, they were afraid when a man or a boy got close to them because of the hurt in these bad experiences.
It was difficult, too, for the young boys because they had been socialized in a very aggressive situation. They had learned to kill; they were taught that if you don't kill, you get nothing to eat, nothing to drink, so they had to kill to survive.
When they came home it was difficult for them to obey their parents. At the bases, they had power; they could use guns, so people had to obey them. Now, back at home, they had to obey their parents. It was difficult for them to negotiate things and to ask for things. They were used to just having whatever they wanted, even women. It was very difficult for them to be reintegrated into homes and the community.
Were you able to do things which could also heal the community, not just the individuals?
During the war, when the situation was really bad, we made a place where people could feel a bit safe - we made a fence, and put power on it, so people could at least sleep there. During the day, people went to the fields and collected things to eat.
When the war stopped and people had to go back home, not all of them knew where they belonged...how they would fit back into place. So people came to me in very large groups asking to go through these rituals so that they could manage to go back home safely. Some of them had been far away and they didn't know whether or not they would be well received back home. So they wanted this kind of ceremony.
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It had also happened quite often that people of the same village had to fight one against another; one would be of Frelimo and the other of Renamo. People didn't know how these people of their village would receive them when they returned. So there were very large groups of people who went to healers and just wanted to pass through these ceremonies.
The ceremony did not have to take place where they were originally captured - they could go to the traditional healer, wherever they now were, in large groups, and pass through the ceremony. Then they could face each other.
And is the ceremony effective? Does it then become possible for the community to come together again?
It worked. One sign of the success is that most of these girls and boys are now married and have their own families; women who were married before the war went back to their husbands, and there were cases of husbands coming to the traditional healers and asking for treatment for their wives so that they could again live together; it worked.
I and other traditional healers know we should make a similar ceremony for the whole country, at a national level, but to do this we need the consent of the Frelimo government. The government says that it is organizing this. A lot of traditional healers were not acknowledged in the past; when Frelimo came, we were abandoned. Now they are trying to organize them again and return their traditional role. Only then will it be possible to perform such a national ceremony.
When you look back, were you happy at first, at independence, and at the ending of colonialism? Was that a big step forward for you, your family and your community?
During the colonial times, the ones in power were the whites - the Portuguese. At the time of independence, things changed and we had Mozambicans coming into power, To ask me if I think life improved afterwards, I cannot answer the question. We were not asked who should be in the government.
What I can say is that life is quite difficult for us poor people. We cannot afford to buy the products we need for our life, that is why we are very glad when organizations like the one from Mr. Boia Efraime, [the director of Rebuilding Hope, an NGO working to support the Ilha Josina Machel area] come and work with us because they give some kind of support for the children - school books and other things.
You talked about the poverty in your community. Now that the war has finished, do you feel optimistic, or do you feel there are still big problems to be solved?
I'm an optimist. If it wasn't for the floods, I think we would be moving ahead - the poverty wouldn't be like it is, because we can work the fields. If you are healthy and you can work, you can manage to fight against poverty.
