Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: The Matter of Maladies in Tanzania

4 Healers and Their Intimate Becomings

4 Healers and Their Intimate Becomings In 2003, forty-six African countries marked the promise of traditional medicine by declaring the 31st of August to be African Traditional Medicine Day, an annual day of celebration. In Tanzania, this governmental recognition prompted the editorial page of the Tanzanian Business Times to issue the daring call to “bring on the traditional medicine men and women—and their midwives.” Who are these traditional medicine men and women? How do they conceive of their own healing practices? How do they imagine their relationship with the different substances involved in their treatments? In what ways do these traditional medicine men and women distinguish themselves from one another (and from biomedical doctors and “witches”)? Through which processes do they gain expertise and maintain credibility? What categories of knowledge and practice are meaningful to them? This chapter and the next turn to the therapeutic practitioners who have come to be called traditional. References to tradition in English gloss three different Kiswahili terms: asili, jadi, and keinyeji. Any connotations of a timeless tradition that represent groups of people as frozen in an exotic past that might linger with the English term begin to dissolve as Kiswahili pluralizes the nature of tradition.1 The frictions of translation suggest different, more subtle meanings and open up new questions .2 Asili carries with it a sense of that from which things derive, an origin. It is invoked to describe a base or a foundational element. In another context, asili is used to refer to a denominator in mathematics. The phrase kwa asili (“for the reason”), preempts an explanation for something. In contrast, jadi evokes a sense of ancestry, genealogy, descent, and lineage. Jadi has some resonance with mila, or custom. It speaks most eloquently to the multifarious hybridity of any object as it moves through generations. The third term glossed in English as “traditional” is the place-oriented word kienyeji. It implies locality—tradition in the sense of that which has come to distinguish and define an area. Sometimes when kienyeji is used in referencetohealers or medicineitsitsalittle sourlyinthe speaker’smouth. Tone or context can tinge it with the flavor of primitiveness or backwardness. Yet Hailing Traditional Experts 88 to others, this place-based characterization and the density of connections that it captures is not a problem but a strength. None of these terms (necessarily) define an unchanging past; rather, they evoke transformation over time.3 Asili, jadi, and kienyeji each suggest different temporalities and spatialities that are criticaltohealing knowledge.4 Asilisuggestsderivation—transformationfrom one state to another, the process of reasoning out, explaining, or following a train of logic. It is most often used in relation to medicine and efforts to scientifically investigate plant, animal, and mineral substances. The Institute of Traditional Medicine at Muhimbili is known as the Taasisi ya Dawa za Asili in Kiswahili. Jadi captures development through generations. Government training sessions for lay midwives refer to them as wakunga wa jadi, or traditional birth attendants. In official circles, jadi has become a respectful way to refer to traditional healers: waganga wa jadi. Outside of the official documents of the Ministry of Health in Dar es Salaam, however, this would be an unusual way to refer to healers. Much more common is waganga wa kienyeji. Kienyeji implies the growth of (and the growth out of) a place. The word localizes a healer or his or her medicine. This localizing, as illustrated below, is not only a reference to geographic locales or the blunt linking of medicine and linguistic groups of people (such as the Makonde, Sukuma, Shambaa, etc.). Keinyeji reflects the importance of specificity and the acts of specifying that lie at the root of some forms of healing. Healing in southern Tanzania enacts an epistemological commitment to temporal and spatial specificities and the forms of contingency such specificity makes necessary. Biographies of healers reveal the intimacies that shape therapeutic expertise. As healers reflect on the ways they have come to know about specific treatments, they disclose how the ontologies of African therapies emerge in conjunction with social commitments. Healers appear as an assemblage of relations, a site where time, place, medicine, bodies, and threats can be apprehended. Engagements with “the book” and “the bush” evoke different notions of knowledge. Both, however, articulate power in the (re)shaping of temporal and spatial trajectories, the (re) ordering of time and place. Both recognize the danger and promise that healers embody. Probing into the process of how healers come to know treatments...