Anthropology in the Margins: Comparative Ethnographies

6. AIDS as Witchcraft in Post-Apartheid South Africa

In 1999, in a scene replayed tens of thousands of times in recent years in South Africa, a relative appeared at the Khanyile family’s door in the shack settlement of Snake Park on the outskirts of Soweto to inform them of a funeral. A cousin in a town not far off had passed away. He was a young man, in his late twenties or early thirties, and had been sick for some time. In their message announcing the funeral, the dead cousin’s parents specified nothing about the illness, other than to say that he had been sick for some time. The relative visiting the Khanyiles, however, whispered the cause: isidliso. The Khanyile family took note. Isidliso, also known as “black poison ,” is an evil work of the people they call witches or, in the Zulu language of the Khanyile household, abathakazi. Along with whatever treatments the deceased relative might have secured from medical practitioners in his town, the family knew without being told that he had been taken to traditional healers to combat the witchcraft manifest in the form of isidliso. All Khanyile family members, except one, concurred with the diagnosis. Moleboheng, twenty-seven and skeptical, thought that the cousin’s story was “nonsense.”1 141 6 AIDS as Witchcraft in Post-Apartheid South Africa Adam Ashforth “He died of AIDS, obviously,” Moleboheng told her mother after the cousin left. (She was far too polite and sensible to say this in front of the relative, for then the relative would have reported to others that her family was starting rumors.) Mama Khanyile conceded the possibility of AIDS, although that did not necessarily rule out isidliso. Her view was that the AIDS, if indeed it were AIDS, must have been sent by someone. Someone had wanted to see the young man dead and had used witchcraft to send AIDS or isidliso to kill him. Moleboheng still insisted that the idea was nonsense, as she did whenever her mother started to talk of witchcraft. In this, as in most things pertaining to witchcraft, the daughter and her family agree to disagree. She knows that among “Africans” in South Africa, her way of looking at things is in a distinct minority. As the AIDS epidemic sweeps through this part of Africa, suspicions of witchcraft fan out among those in the epidemic’s wake. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS is also an epidemic of witchcraft. But the implications of a witchcraft epidemic are quite different from those of a “public health” crisis, at least as such things are conventionally conceived in established discourses of social and political management. For when suspicions of witchcraft are in play in a community, problems of illness and death transform matters of public health from questions of appropriate policies into questions concerning the fundamental character and legitimacy of public power in general—questions relating to the security, safety, and integrity of the community, the fundamental purposes for which public power is supposed to exist. Of course, not everyone will be persuaded that witchcraft is in play when people fall sick and die from HIV/AIDS. Many, like Moleboheng, will resist the invocation of witchcraft as an explanation. But virtually everyone here who identifies as “African” will find him- or herself forced to confront the possibility of witchcraft, as Moleboheng was. The question this chapter considers is, How might the fear of AIDS as witchcraft influence the character of the post-apartheid state? In post-apartheid South Africa, the primary problem of public power can be summarized as the task of creating, through the transformation of a racist and oppressive state, a system of institutions and procedures not only represented on paper (in the preamble to the constitution ) as the expression of “democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights” but also resonating with a popular sense of ADAM ASHFORTH 142 trust in law and government as effective instruments of service to the public and justice. Despite the “small miracle” (Mandela’s phrase) of democratic transformation to date, the South African state still has a long way to go before the legitimacy of governance can be taken for granted as a cultural foundation of political power. And with the HIV/AIDS epidemic following so closely on the heels of democracy, the government’s response to the crisis will surely affect the long-term health of the political system. Yet if even a signi...