Tribal ‘Healers’ Increasingly Powerful in South African Politics

ALL THE SCHOOLING at two South African village schools has been disrupted for a week — after five tribal seers, ‘sangomas’, placed a spell on the school with traditional ‘medicine’ or muti. All the residents in the village of Sefikile near Mogwase in North West Province were immediately gripped by fear and anger and withdrew their kids from school.

The parents now demand that a ‘cleansing ritual’ must be carried out by these five traditional healers — which could take as long as a week.

North West province’s education department spokesman Charles Raseala said the irate parents withdrew their children from both schools when five sangomas showed up, chanting in the local Venda language, and planted spells. It’s not known what this muti (traditional medicine) spell consisted of.

Growing Political Power of the SA Witch Doctors

This incident is only one of a great many recent examples which illustrates the growing political power of the witch doctor, the ‘traditional healer’, the ‘sangoma’, the ‘traditional seer’ in South African politics. And they are growing equally powerful in the medical world.

The South African tribal seers’ power has grown ever since September 2004, when a law was passed to register the estimated 200,000 ‘traditional healers and seers’, giving them equal status as medical health-practitioners in South Africa.

This Act has given the traditional healers a strong political power-base — backed by law. There are many incidents now in which local ‘traditional leaders’, aided by the witch-doctors, have been taking over political hegemony of entire rural regions in South Africa.

And this is the tactics they use: showing up at schools, community halls and even police stations to plant muti-spells — which then forces terrified communities to carry out ‘cleansing rituals’. This serves to establish their local power base — and these traditional healers usually work under the direct orders from a local tribal leader or councillor.

There are about 200,000 traditional healers registered under this Act — which was enacted with only one opposing parliamentary vote during the reign of the AIDS-denialist, former health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang in the previous Mbeki-cabinet.

Reports are published daily in the SA news media now about incidents where local and even national politicians use witchcraft — ‘traditional African seers and healers’ — to establish their power base.

South African Leaders all Raised in Witchcraft Culture

And this should really not be such a surprise: the South African leaders of today were raised in a tradition of witchcraft when they were still in exile. As can be seen on this picture of a torched, tortured so-called ‘sellout’ at Camp Quadro in Angola — the exile camp for ANC and Umkhonte We Sizwe ‘freedom fighters’ — they often used such traditional African ‘witch-hunting methods’ in their military training camps to teach youths how to terrorise resistent township residents into submission to ANC-hegemony. And these youths now are running South Africa.

All these young men — who became the leadership of present-day South Africa — were taught all the traditional African witch doctor’s skills, such as the purgative powers of fire which became necklacing: placing a burning tyre around a victim’s neck — and also often used is decapitation.

Organised Rape as a Political Power Tool

Also widely used in the exile camps in Angola was organised rape to terrorise and kill so-called ‘cockroaches’, or sellouts — also referred to as ipimpi in South Africa. Whenever the word ‘cockroach’ is used by any witch doctor or any tribal leader anywhere in Africa, it’s a terrible curse, a kiss of death.

Accusations of consulting traditional seers have even been leveled against both the deposed ex-president Thabo Mbeki and the president of the African National Congress, Jacob Zuma recently. A Caribbean voodoo spiritualist had apparently calmed down a restless President Thabo Mbeki soon after he was toppled as ANC leader last year.

And the night before ANC-president Jacob Zuma first appeared in court as an accused in the arms-deal fraud trial, there were strong rumours that he had consulted a traditional seer.

South Africa’s traditional seers practising this campaign of terror against the country’s citizens, are apparently above the law: they have been given equal legal status to the Western medical practitioners in South Africa and even are allowed to administer to their patients even in public state hospitals and AIDS-TB clinics.

Ordinary citizens also are seen to use more and more witchcraft. For instance street vendor Mavis Makobeb was arrested by terrified cops while she was gathering dirt from the court-yard of a local police station. The Sowetan newspaper reported that when questioned she readily admitted that she was making muti from the dirt in the yard to stop the cops from arresting her son.

On Oct 31 2008 in KwaMakhutha, KwaZulu-Natal, classes were also suspended at the KwaMakhutha Comprehensive High School, south of Durban, after some pupils started behaving strangely. School principal Mdu Ngidi said the trouble at the school started when a female pupil began crying ‘for no apparent reason’. “We are puzzled by what is happening at the school,” Ngidi said. “It all started with one pupil breaking down and bursting into tears.” When asked why she was crying she explained she had attended her sibling’s funeral the previous day and now needed prayers because she was seeing strange things. “We asked one of our staff members to pray for her. She got better but then the pupils helping her also ‘became possessed’”. He first contact church leaders to come and pray for the pupils — who were preparing for final year exams. However during the prayer, some people started speaking in tongues, and said they ‘wanted to drink blood’. The hysterical prayers carried on from 7am until midday. “Some pupils just don’t write exams because they are too sick,” he said. “…Some of our teachers are also affected by what seems to be demons.”

Witchcraft Often Also is Deadly

The organisation Doctors For Life — representing a large number of medical doctors, dentists, veterinaries and other professionals — started warning from 2004 that this Act legalising African witchcraft was very dangerous.

Traditional Medicines Often are Harmful

“Traditional healers should be kept out of South Africa’s health care system because traditional medicines were potentially harmful to patients,” they warned.

DFL also predicted that the Bill would provoke more so-called “muti” murders — made to provide human body parts for traditional healers from people who were alive while the body parts were harvested. Many healers share the belief that “human tissue can make powerful medicine,” the doctors’ organisation warned.

Human Sacrifice

The Doctors for Life campaigners were correct: ever since the new Act, a gruesome, thriving trade has grown up in South Africa in the trade of human body parts, such as this child’s head which was retrieved from a witchcraft shop in Johannesburg in 2006 by a police team.

A large variety of body parts are being harvested: penises, eyes, noses, vaginas, breasts, heads and limbs — with the hapless victims preferably screaming and fully aware. The ‘traditional healers’ who order these body parts are almost never prosecuted, even though some victims survive the mutilation.

The live harvesting is necessary, they say, because the victims’ pain and fear ‘increases the power of the muti.’

Raping Virgins Cures AIDs

And ‘traditional healers’ also carry out other, even more horrifying rituals, the ritual of ‘opening up the virgin’ — usually a toddler or baby girl — so that grown men can rape these children, in the terrifying belief that this would cure them of AIDS.

This has in large part, contributed to the country’s terrifying child-rape epidemic — see and here , also here and here.

This terror which is destroying the female children of South Africa also is not expected to abate because South Africa has about 6.1-million people who are infected with the AIDS virus.

Biological Warfare-Strength ‘Traditional Medicine’

Indeed these traditional healers make some very powerful medicine — so effective that the military’s biological warfare labs would just love to get their hands on this stuff:

On Sept 22 last year, thirteen members of the 15-member Mazubane family of Dingleton township in Paddock near Port Shepstone, KwaZulu-Natal — which held weekly cleansing rituals of taking a herbal medicine concoction, were found dead, coated in blood. Their horrified neighbour found the family when he’d stopped by to borrow a Bible. Dead were, a two-week-old baby, four boys aged between two and seven, a 17-year-old boy, a 21-year-old man, four women in their 30s and two 55-year-olds. It was believed that the 17-year-old boy, a trainee ‘traditional healer’, (sangoma) had administered the deadly concoction just a few minutes earlier because the blood was still flowing. Police superintendent Zandra Wiid said only two male members of the extended tribal family survived — because they weren’t at home at the time.

Fears are also growing among white South Africans that they will increasingly be forced to submit to the local-level political rule of the traditional leaders and their witch doctors. This worry was first raised last year — in the following debate between a Boer and a black resident who asked why whites shouldn’t submit to ‘traditional tribal customs.’

The ‘traditional healers’ who order these body parts are almost never prosecuted even though sometimes the victims survive the mutilation; they are far too terrified to ever testify against such powerful men and women.

Appendix

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/265593

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/264259

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/264771

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/264956

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Source: Censorbugbear Reports