Travel-Blogue Day 20: The Witch Doctor’s Dilemma

Posted by: Steve Hamm on August 05

If there are a million NGOs in India, there must be another million in Africa. Manka’s (see previous posting) mom, Dr.Lucy Nkya, started one called Faraja Trust Fund in 1981. While Faraja (comfort, in Swahili) isn’t very large, with just 20 employees and 70 volunteers, Nkya rose to prominence. She now serves on the Tanzanian Parliament and is the cabinet minister for social development, gender, and children. Nkya was busy in the Capitol when I passed through Morogoro, her home town, but I got to speak to Victor Mulimila, the deputy director of Faraja. He told me about the witch doctors.

These are the traditional healers in Tanzania. A villager will go to them for anything from casting a spell to make his wife’s boyfriend’s private parts fall off to curing HIV/AIDS. The AIDS part is what Victor told me about.

Here’s Victor in front of the New Acropol Hotel in Morogoro:

From its start, Faraja has focused on the victims of HIV/AIDS—helping victims get treatment for the disease and addressing the underlying causes, which, in Africa, is primarily poverty.

A few years ago, Faraja’s staff learned that many of the witch doctors in villages around Morogoro were claiming to be able to cure AIDS. This alarmed them, since somebody who thought they were being cured by the local witch doctor (waganga, in Swahili) would probably not seek modern medical help. But when the staff confronted some of the witch doctors, these folks stuck to their claims. And, on closer inspection, it seemed that there was something to them. Some of their victims seemed to recover from some of the opportunistic infections brought on by AIDS. The cause, it seemed, was that they used traditional medicinal herbs in their potions. So the staff worked with the witch doctors to try to identify which herbs had what effects.

By the way, Victor’s grandmother was a waganga but he says she concentrated on the herbal part rather than casting spells.,

Modern medicine to treat HIV/AIDS is very expensive, and it’s not practical for villagers in remote places, so Faraja does what it can for victims by improving their nutrition and encouraging treatment with the traditional herbs. “We have a lot of people who have been surviving on traditional medicine and nutrition,” says Victor. Because Faraja is concerned about people degrading the environment by over-harvesting these plants, it has begun a program of cultivating them. It’s encouraging villagers to grow the herbs as cash crops and new sources of income. It has also set up a research project in collaboration with a local private hospital to document the healing effects of the herbs. The hope is that after their research is published a year or so from now, they’ll attract the interest of pharmaceutical companies who want to develop drugs based on their herbs.

Somebody else told me about another similar project. An American anthropologist has been coming to Morogoro-area villages to interview villagers about their medicinal herbs. She’s apparently funded by the Gates Foundation. There’s something to this.

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