ACCULTURATION AND CULTURAL ASSIMILATION
2. The Encounter between Western and Southern African Cultures
2.3. Accommodation and Assimilation of Biomedicine
2.3.1. Industrialization and Urbanization
We have seen that wars, natural disasters like droughts and cattle diseases and superstitions like umhlola among the Zulu and the cattle killing among the Xhosa had left many people dead and others very impoverished. Men had to go into industrialized centres in order to find employment and to help lift their families out of the abject poverty that covered the sub-continent. Western industries also beckoned to men who needed money to pay taxes like hut tax and the poll tax to allow the colonial power to recover from the South African War (1899-1901). In order to pay the 1905 poll tax imposed upon males people in Natal and Zululand, young men had to seek work especially after the poll-tax rebellion was crushed. Benedict Carton wrote:
The central historical event in 1908 and 1909 was not Dinuzulu’s trial;
rather, it was the surge of fugitive rebels and other African young men from the Thukela basin into labour migrancy. The forces of the industrial centres had already pulled more and more workers from Natal, and during Dinuzulu’s treason trial, Transvaal labour recruiters conducted an unprecedented number of ‘tours throughout Zululand’
with an eye to ‘supplying labour to the Mines.’75
G. C. R. Bosman wrote that in 1938, “The migration of non-Europeans in a certain sense also due to the “lure” of city life, but the exceptional de-ruralization of the native population, however, is mainly a result of the prosperity on the mines and the demand for cheap native labour.”76
The cities of Kimberley, Cape Town, Durban and the Witwatersrand all became industrialized and saw an influx of men who were eager to participate in a monetized economy of the two English colonies and the Boer Republics.77 Shula Marks connects industrialization with the new patterns of diseases that called for a new way of treatment. “The discovery of minerals in the last third of the nineteenth century – diamonds in Kimberly in 1868, gold in the Transvaal, first at de Kaap and Barberton,
75 Benedict Carton, Blood from Your Children: The colonial origins of generational conflict in South Africa. University of Natal Press: Pietermaritzburg. 2000, p.171.
76 G. C. R. Bosman, Industrialization of South Africa. Frima G. W. DenBoer: Rotterdam, 1938, p.129.
77 Helen Sweet, “Wanted 16 nurses of the better education type: provision of nurses to South Africa in
then in vast seams at very deep levels underground on the Witwatersrand in 1886 – transformed South Africa’s disease patterns and its health care.”78
Due to overcrowding and the squalor in industries,79 especially the mining industry, employers had to make sure that they had a healthy work force. Since a sick work force could only reduce levels of productivity and profits, industries had to recruit and retain healthy labourers. When recruited, the men had to be thoroughly examined to determine whether they had any diseases. That was so that prospective employers could avoid costly medical expenses while workers unproductively convalesced.
KwaMuhle Museum in Durban has permanent displays showing how men used to be examined before being allowed into the monetized economy in the urban area.80 When in the industrialized economy—for example in the mines—sick traditional employees had no choice but to make use of the Western medicine provided by the employers. We can observe how authority was exercised over Black bodies under the umbrella of Western medicine. This kind of control was based on the racial discrimination that Blacks were suffering in apartheid-era industries.
Among the Tswanas the system was similar but not identical. Some kgosi would select a regiment of the same age-group who were initiated together—called mophatho- to go to the industrialized centres for employment. A recruitment agency called the Employment Bureau of Africa (TEBA) would come into Batswana villages in South Africa and Bechuanaland and recruit for various industries. These men were also to undergo examination to determine their fitness before entering into a five-year contract. The money raised from the contracts was used by the tribal kgosi for development of the tribal area, to build schools and make roads. Indentured Indians working in sugar plantations around Durban had to use the Bayside and Addington Hospitals. These were originally meant for Blacks as their employers knew no other health system to help them when sick.81
78 Shula Marks, Divided Sisterhood . 1994, p.16.
79 For the description of the squalor in Kimberley see Shula Marks, Divided Sisterhood. 1994, pp.23- 24. 80 The explanation at the museum says that men who generally came from the rural areas were stripped naked and sprayed with water to reduce lice from their bodies before they were inspected. The exercise was dehumanizing as older men had to expose their nakedness before men too young to be their sons, and be treated like cattle in a dip.
81 Shula Marks, Divided Sisterhood. 1994, p.18.
In urban areas, where the government regulated the lives of Black people, it could enforce health inspection and general immunization. This was total control, not only of the Black peoples’ lives but also of their bodies. Through Western medicine, the government could mark one’s body, like branding for identity. The diminished will to resist Western medicine was the cost of settling in an industrialized and urban area.
On the other hand, urbanization and industrialization can be credited for arresting the decline of the Nguni-Sotho traditional health system. When men, and later women, moved into urban areas in search of employment in the mines and industries, they left behind their Churches. If the Churches offered any protection to the members and sympathizers, that protection was confined to the mission stations in the rural areas.
The missionary societies in the rural areas did not follow their members to the urban areas immediately after the discovery of minerals. Faced with the challenges of the new and hostile conditions of the urban centres, the converts had to find ways and means to survive. It was an opportune time to either revert to the Traditional health system or to join the Zionist-type Churches that were not opposed to such health systems.
Dedicated men from the kholwas established branch congregations of their denominations or founded their own churches in the urban areas due to the absence of their missionary leadership and guidance. In the late nineteenth century, men like Pambani Mzimba of the Presbyterian Church and Mangena Mokone of the Methodist Church are two examples of such initiatives.82 John W. de Gruchy has attested to the fact that the independent churches in the urban centres created space for Black people to be innovative in managing their Christian faith and traditional religion:
The independent churches served another significant purpose. The rapid growth of black urbanization, stimulated by migratory labour and post-war industrialization, had radically altered the socio-cultural existence of the black community since early twentieth century. As a result, much of the former tribal cohesion was fragmented and many personal and social problems arose without traditional resources
available to handle them. The independent churches enabled blacks to cope with this alien world of townships.83
The Zionist Churches that did not prohibit their members from using traditional medicine, quickly increased in towns where there was no competition from mainline Churches. Their unsophisticated Church structure and tolerance of traditional health systems made them attractive to black people in the urban areas. In the absence of church-friendly white people in these areas, especially in single men’s hostels, the Nguni-Sotho health system showed resilience and reversed the decline caused by the challenges of missionaries and missionary-trained Blacks.
In the absence of missionaries and due to poor preparation for an unknown urban life, the temptation to seek sustenance from the familiar became irresistible. Some mission societies like the HMS and the MELFC84 were of rural origin and not adequately prepared to help their kholwa deal with urban temptations. People from the rural settings had fears of a supernatural nature that needed to be allayed through traditional health systems. Ashforth was puzzled by the fear of the occult that gripped people in post-apartheid Soweto. He tried to make sense of it, as he wrote:
To understand why people can “still” believe in witchcraft despite no longer living in a world that remotely resembles anything “traditional,”
it is first necessary to understand how claims about their forms of agency embodied in material substances, objects, and images can be made to seem plausible. And if it is true that the people of whom I write in Soweto are living in a world with witches while also, and at the same time, living in the same world as people like me and the people who are reading this book, then the conditions of this plausibility should be describable without having to be translated from one culture to another or one putative scheme of rationality to another.85
What is happening today, where not only urbanized people but even Christians are continuing to fear witchcraft in the cities is, according to Ashforth, pretty “normal”.
83 John W. de Gruchy with Steve de Gruchy, Church Struggle in South Africa (25th Anniversary Edition). SCM Press: London. 2004, p.45.
84 Mission Superintendent Christoph ‘Mbokojwane’ Johannes used to visit Lutherans in Sophiatown and Roodepoort from Salem mission station near Piet Retief. He would conduct a service which included confession of sins and Holy Communion.
85 Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2005, pp.120-121.
Due to the segregation in towns, employed men initially had to live in single male hostels, but later families were allowed to live in townships. With regard to hostels, it is not a coincidence that the researcher Adam Ashforth and his bewitched friend Madumo86 had to find the traditional healer Mr. Zondi, in the Merafe hostel in Soweto. Traditional healing found a willing clientele in and around the hostels of South Africa, as Ashforth observed on many of his visits as a researcher:
Our interview was over. Clients were gathering in the waiting room.
At this time of the afternoon, commuters start arriving by train from Johannesburg, and Mr. Zondi has many clients who stop by for consultation on their way home.87