BLOGS
HOPE in a box in imizano yethu
Imizano Yethu township, Cape Town, South Africa May 2016
'Will a spiritual healer do?'
The interview had taken me two months to arrange and it still wasn’t arranged. And I had told the website the article was on Sangomas, not spiritual healers.
But what really was the difference? My theory went something like this: spiritual healers are found at hippie festivals propping up the bar and promoting their youtube channel while trying to sell you an overpriced wrist band that will realign your filthy, crooked chakras, while Sangomas are a deeply mystical South African phenomenon that 60% of the population consult for traditional medicine to solve daily dilemmas. The later's what glossy travel magazines want; an African shaman banishing witchcraft with herbal devotions in a mystical township ceremony. The Sangoma should be wearing animal skin with a painted face, and have decorated themselves with amulets made of human hair that I should photograph to show the reader how exotic Africa is. There are meant to be around 200,000 Sangomas in South Africa so how could it be so difficult to find one!
But people aren’t circus acts, I do know this, so I got out my note book and tracked a more real story altogether.
I was sat in a small dark living room in a house made of shiny corrugated metal in a black township called Imizano Yethu. The shinyness stops there as I had walked past gushing streams of running sewage to get there. The shack was owned by a slender woman whose kindly face and hospitable nature papered over the stresses of surviving on her own as her husband serves time for murder. She told me he was part of a community justice gang and had taken the fall for the home-made punishments they had metted out on local criminals in the absence of a proper justice system. Now she was trying to fend for herself and feed three children. She smiled sadly. You are welcome here. Now would I like a glass of coca cola?
I sipped from the can. All eyes on me.
'So can you explain to me what a spiritual healer is please?' I said to the quiet man seated next to me on the sofa.
'It is curing everything' he replied. 'Even if you have a spirit or demon, big debts or a stomach problem.'
I was none the wiser but no further explanation was offered. He simply opened his cardboard box to reveal lots of little glass jars and bunches of herbs tied together with elastic bands.
I realised he was offering hope in a box.
Everything looked grubby and a bit passed its sell-by date. Dried berries, a bit of snake skin, eye of newt and tongue of frog. But I wasn’t there to judge.
'So can it make me a better person and ridiculously good in bed?'
He laughed. 'Yes all of these but it will be expensive.'
'Ok maybe I can come next week and we can do a ceremony?'
'No that’s Sangomas.'
'Ok well, maybe I can take your photo then….?'
The guy’s a supermodel. He struts in front of the laundry line, a cornflower blue sky popping in the background like he’s in his own music video.
A boy stops to watch and chat. He’s been doing his maths homework and wants a break. He’s heard you can get a football scholarship to America if you get good grades and train hard.
Hope in dreams of America.
The lady of the house’s daughter shuffles over to me shyly. She’s reading a Fifty Shades knock-off she's downloaded onto her phone. She says it’s about awealthy man falling for an ordinary girl who lives somewhere poor. The man marries her and they live happily ever after.
Hope in a book.
I meet a fisherman who lost a thumb in a fishing accident. He's selling little wrappers of marijuana from his livingroom to fund his children’s school fees.
Hope through getting high and an education?
My host says everybody needs some hope in this township, that they need to believe life might get better one day. Alcohol, Sangomas and spirit healers are just the most popular ways of finding it for that glimmer of a moment when the future looks rosy.
The township burnt down last December. The flames jumped from shack to shack sucking out the oxygen and eating the ordinary possessions its inhabitants worked so hard for, in supermarkets, on construction sites, in white people houses, with such back breaking labour. Then amongst the rubble, each home got eight sheets of corrugated metal, a door and a window afterwards, and told to rebuild it themselves.
The township of the 30,000 inhabitants is now shiny and new, but the corrugated shacks are like scorching ovens during the day as the sun heats up the metal. And at night this is a curfew to stop the violence. Community patrols walk the streets, the toilets are too dangerous to use, so people use buckets in their bedrooms.
'Do you believe in Sangomas and spirit healers?' I ask the lady of the house.
'I don’t really believe it', she says. 'Sometimes it’s a con, they just take people’s money, but people are so desperate for hope here.'
And who am I to judge? I think to myself, I’m just a visitor and everyone I met was kind.
Daily horrors for JOBURG's lesbian community
Johannesburg, South Africa, May 2014
The South African murder trial you didn’t hear of starts in Johannesburg this week. I never met Duduzile Zozo - she had already been murdered and left in a toilet by the time I met the group of lesbian activists she was part of, but I do know Ayanda Msiza. And 26 year old Duduzile was Ayanda’s friend.
She told me of the corrective rapes and deaths of other lesbians in Joburg’s townships and the police’s regular refusal to take these crimes seriously.
‘I don’t feel safe walking in the streets where I live’ Ayanda said. ‘I cannot leave a bar late and I must avoid shifty areas in case I am recognised for my activism and targeted by men from the community.’
Although South Africa was the first country in the world to legally prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, a life spent looking over her shoulder is Ayanda’s reality. Duduzile Zozo’s rape and murder in the township of Thokoza on 29 June 2013 was not an isolated incident, and due to the sluggish nature of the polie investigation, it is only being brought to trial this week, 11 months after her death. Corrective rape, “a phenomenon in which men rape people they presume or know to be lesbians in order to ‘convert’ them to heterosexuality”, occurs in South Africa with a frequency that is difficult to count as many incidents go unreported. However less than a month after Duduzile was attacked walking home, Ayanda confirms that another lesbian was raped in the same neighbourhood and did report it but no charges were brought. LGBTI activist Thandeka* knows how this feels.
“I was sexually assaulted in March 2009 in Katlehong outside Johannesburg and the perpetrator is still at large. When I reported my trouble to the police they made a joke out of my statement and I experienced a kind of secondary victimisation on top of what I already went through.”
Confusion as to what the South African state’s protections for LGBTI rights amount to when eroded by tales of disastrous police handling, are also exacerbated by the government’s failure to vocalise criticism of LGBTI abuses elsewhere on the African continent, most notably in Uganda and Nigeria.
On a continent where anti-homosexuality laws appear in 37 of Africa’s 54 countries, South Africa’s progressive Constitution, and its struggle to guarantee equality for all, places it in an authoritative position to speak out on draconian LGBTI legislation passed in other African states.
But when the anti-homosexuality bill was passed in Uganda in February this year, despite calls from South African Human Rights Commission to condemn the law, South African President Zuma’s weak response was to state that South Africa respects the sovereign rights of other countries to adopt their own legislation.
Charitably, perhaps the South African government hopes to try and mend its own problems before it can lead by example? In April this year the Ministry of Justice launched the LGBTI Equality Government programme with the Deputy Minister of Justice stating the government was “aware of the gap between constitutional rights and the reality of their implementation”.
The three year programme, complete with a hard hitting televised campaign and a national intervention strategy aimed at strengthening the judicial system and public service institutions, has also created a rapid response team to urgently attend to pending and reported cases where hate crimes have been committed against LGBTI persons.
‘What does Sonke Gender Justice think about the programmes construction and likelihood of its success?’
As Duduzile’s friends and family sit at Palm Ridge Magistrates Court in Katlehong this week to hear Lekgoa Lesley Motleleng – a neighbour that lived one street away, tried for her rape and murder, it remains to be seen if justice will be served and how effective this government programme will be.
“What gay activists, and the communities they represent need, are officials in government, in hospitals and in the police force to be educated on what LGBTI rights mean in reality” says Ayanda.
“There needs to be some leadership shown from officials at the top and vocal condemnation of any type of abusive behaviour.” [If the government can do this then maybe they will bring about this change.]
The programme is too late for Duduzile, but will it help Ayanda and her friends in their community in which they live? Perhaps the test is whether Ayanda and her friends are not stigmatised by theircommunity and get to walk home safe at night.
* Thandeka asked that her real name be changed for security reasons.
HAREM PANTS IN THE REFUGEE CAMP
Mtabila Refugee Camp, Kigoma Region, Tanzania, October 2011
The refugee camp looks halfway between a low security military base, with a flimsy attempt at barbed wire fencing round the perimeter, and a muddy farm yard with lots of goats, chickens and grubby children running around. Driving beyond the reception area, its just like any rural east African village fenced off from the outside world: one room rectangle homes made from red mudbricks, corrugated iron roofs, all nestled in green glades. But the difference is that the refugees can't leave their 12km squared world without a permit.
So on my first day I got an extraordinary reception. Those that know me will laugh at the denial, but I honestly was'nt having a fashion moment. I promise it was nt like “Oooo Im working for the UN, I must do ‘aid worker chic’ today”, it was just what came to hand that morning. I was wearing ‘harem pants’, those sort of dropped-crotch, Prince Aladin, middle-eastern trousers popular with MC Hammer. So three hundred Burundian children had never seen these before, and some of these children hadnt seen many ‘Mazungos’ or white people before. So the combination of one wearing the other was big news in the camp. Howls of laughter, lots of finger pointing, hundreds of little children streaming like ants towards me through the mud, all to get a look at the white girl in the strange trousers. And the thing is that 2 out of the 5 pairs of trousers I have with me are harem pants, so I sort of get pointed at wherever I go on harem days, and the kids all bring their friends to have a look when I walk past which is both very cute and a bit annoying. But I think I can take being laughed at by the under 10s.
For the first few days there was lots of sniffing and covert eye-dabbing from me. All the children are beautiful, shaven headed, impish and just want your attention. They are filthy dirty and have no school to go to (more about that later), and I found one small child wearing a T-shirt with Barrack Obama and the word ‘change’ written on the front, while another was albino with his skin all covered in red raw blisters. The kids hang around the perimeter fence of the reception area waiting for my chappati at the end of the day. It is very hard to look at sometimes.
Once upon a time, their camp was a lively place with schools and markets and employment schemes. But since 2009 the camp has been officially closed. Tanzanian want the Burundians to go home, so they have taken away all the good things once offered at Mtabila which the Government think incentivise people to stay. The schools are all shut which has resulted in younger and younger teenaged girls getting pregnant, and there are masses of kids hanging around with nothing to do. The refugees are no longer allowed to grow their own crops either, the markets and incentive worker schemes have all been forbidden, and the refugees must depend on their livestock and twice monthly food hand outs from the UN instead. I think that a life spent not being able to make your own decisions, depending on the fluctuating benevolence of a foreign Government, in a confined space because of a war you didn’t create, must leave your human potential devastated. It makes my own spirit incredibly sad.
Once upon a time the Government averted its eyes to people leaving the camp to work or shop. Now they are arrested. UN staff went to the prison a few weeks ago to free the refugees and then the Government arrested the UN staff also!! All are now released but the battle lines have been drawn: the Government is looking to send the refugees home and to find every fault with what the UN does (imaginary or otherwise). We are all expecting trouble.
So I spend my days in a leaky shed, sharing a room with men from the Tanzanian Ministry of Home Affairs. I work with a Sudanese man from Khartoum with refined tastes, shiny shoes and a PHD in bio-medical science from Cambridge and there I sit reading the most atrocious transcripts from the 39,000 people being interviewed on their experiences during the Burundian genocide. The UN interviewers and the Tanzanian Government then make a decision on whether each family should return to Burundi or stay in Tanzania. None of the Burundians want to return. 50% of the camp is under 18 years old, thousands will have never seen Burundi, thousands of others fled a genocide they witnessed at close range, first hand experiences of watching loved ones butchered to death with machetes. Most are terrified to go back to this place others call “home” but the decision needs to be made, as under the terms of the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugee status can be taken away when the situation in the country is deemed to have 'normalised' and UNHCR and the Tanzanian government have determined it has. And if countries are to continue to take in refugees during times of crisis, they need to have a mechanism to send people home too.
*As of 2016, this region of Tanzania is once again hosting Burundian refugees as civil strife and extra-judicial killings are terrifying the Burundian people into exile.