Man’s tongue goes missing in mortuary

sangoma1Mpumalanga police will on Tuesday be conducting an autopsy on a body of a man whose tongue was allegedly cut out while he was kept at a privately-run mortuary at KaMsogwaba near Nelspruit.

According to police, when the family went to fetch the body for burial, they realised that his tongue had been cut out.

Mpumalanga police spokesperson, Leonard Hlathi, says an investigation is underway to verify the allegations by the family.

“Postmortem is going to be conducted where we are going to check on the body again to see for ourselves and to confirm the allegation by the family,” says Hlathi.

The family says it is not yet clear when would be the next date for the burial.

They have called on the police to ensure that those responsible face the full might of the law.

6 people killed, burnt alive in Khutsong but no arrests

Scene from a previous burning during South African riots
Scene from a previous burning during South African riots

No arrests have been made following the killing of six people in Khutsong near Carletonville, Gauteng police said on Wednesday.

“No arrest has been made. Investigations are continuing,” said Captain Jabulani Kundethe.

He said no violence was reported since Monday.

“The situation is calm, no incident has been reported.”

The six were killed after about 400 men, believed to be Khutsong residents, held a meeting to discuss gangsterism on Sunday.

The men separated into different groups.

One group attacked a 61-year-old traditional healer, and set him and his house alight. The man died on the scene.

Other groups from the meeting targeted two young men, allegedly members of a gang, who were assaulted and set alight. They also died at the scene.

Two other alleged gang members were stoned. One died on the scene and the other died in hospital.

The body of a sixth man was found on Sunday night. He had been set alight. – Sapa

Black township Khutsong explodes, 5 killed

A previous riot in Khutsong
A previous riot in Khutsong

Five people, including a sangoma, were killed allegedly by community members in Khutsong near Carletonville on the West Rand on Sunday, Gauteng police said.

 About 400 men, believed to be Khutsong residents, held a meeting to discuss gangsterism earlier in the day, Brigadier Neville Malila said.

Shortly after the meeting started, the crowd split up into smaller groups. One of the groups went to a house in Khutsong Extension Three, where they attacked a 61-year-old traditional healer, setting him and his house alight. The man died on the scene.

Other splinter groups from the meeting went to Extension Four Phase Two, where two young men, allegedly members of the Casanova gang, were assaulted and set alight. They also died at the scene.

Malila said that in Extension Five, Carletonville, the groups assaulted a number of people they accused of being gangsters.

“Two alleged gang members were stoned, one died on the scene and the other at the Carltonville Hospital.”  No one had been arrested by early Sunday evening.

“Police vehicles who responded to the calls were stoned and damaged.”

No police were injured, and one resident who was assaulted by the group was in hospital in a stable condition.

Malila said the area remained volatile and there was increased police visibility and Public Order Policing Unit members were also called in to stabilise the area.

Acting provincial police commissioner Lt Gen Lesetja Mothiba urged anyone with information to come forward as such acts of violence could not be condoned.

Earlier, Constable Thembi Masango said that the sangoma was accused of working with gangsters in the area,.

She said the situation was “chaotic” just before 3pm.

Paul Ncwane, the chairman of the SA National Civic Organisation in the area said there were helicopters and police “Nyala” armoured vehicles, as well as police officers on foot in the area.

Angry people were moving around in groups and were splitting up to avoid the police and confuse them.

He said the community had had enough of young boys “terrorising them”.

“We are trying to stop gangsters. Women and children are living in fear because of these boys,” he said.

He said groups were also blocking the Potchefstroom road and throwing rocks at cars. – Sapa

Deconstructing the Boerehaat outburst

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by Dan Roodt

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We have a unique English population in South Africa. On the one hand, they are the most politically radical. On the other, some are partially Afrikanerised and bilingual. Just today I was listening to one of them speaking fluent Afrikaans on RadioSonderGrense, just about perfect, with a soupçon of an English accent. At least fifty percent of English-speakers in South Africa have a knowledge of Afrikaans, the highest figure for any anglophone population in the world. A much smaller percentage of them speak French in bilingual Canada and a much smaller proportion of Britons speak any of the other languages of the European Union to which they belong.

Somewhere in 2000 Régis Débray, the French essayist and philosopher and one-time chronicler of Ché Guevara visited South Africa. We immediately hit it off and he was absolutely fascinated by some of my theories on Africanism, the return to the origin, as well as a short introduction to Afrikaner thinking. I remember the local French Institute getting irritated as he was falling behind schedule as a result of our lengthy discussion.

One of the things he said I remember to this day: that no “Anglo-Saxon society” had ever succumbed to totalitarian ideas. Unlike Germany, Italy, Russia and much of Eastern Europe of course. He ascribed it to something that Orwell also wrote about: the common sense of the Englishman, his disdain for complex philosophical or ideological systems. In Orwell’s words:

Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound up with this.

However, I think I must write to Débray that he and Orwell were wrong, at least in some respects. The Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of the local English-speaking population divides into both a good-natured, polite, hospitable, outdoorsy type (like Afrikaners) and a more sinister, scheming, obsessive, greedy bunch oozing bad faith and hatred. I have experience of both kinds. Suffice it to say that the Mr. Hyde-style English person has caused us untold suffering; he or she is usually in the forefront of inciting hatreds of all kinds, advocating war or terrorism, social engineering on a vast scale, collective punishment and, last but not least, Boerehaat.

Ironically, while abjuring ethnicity, race and any form of patriotism, considered “fascist”, the leftist kind of Englishman reacts ethnically, viscerally to any form of “other” on the horizon. I have seen it many times, including over the past week with a motley collection of silly scribes and armchair activists lashing out at the Red October protest and campaign.

It bears repeating: the South African anti-racist is the biggest racist of them all! Their compulsive rejection of the (white) other is so fanatical, so obsessive, so pathological even that it borders on the insane. Not only do they hate Afrikaners, but also Southern Americans, Scots, French (the “Frogs”), Germans (the “Krauts”), the Dutch who are by definition “dumb”, Italians, Greeks, etc. While embracing political radicalism, Marxism (espcially the “vulgar” kind), egalitarian extremism, they still subscribe to nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon supremacism. Albert Brenner recently reminded us of Cecil John Rhodes’s famous statement:

I contend that we British are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence…

However, as an old Boer who participated in the first Anglo-Boer said: “I have seen the colour of the English flag and it is white.” The mythical victory of Wellington over Napoleon at Waterloo was largely won with German mercenaries. Hence the form of the ongoing low-intensity conflict between the English radical and the Afrikaner in this country: Besides placing bombs in public places or Wimpy restaurants, terrorism being the method of the coward, his main form of combat is in the propaganda department, a job which is also eminently suitable for women.

I could go into the vile history of the so-called “armed blacks” of the Anglo-Boer when the invading English army introduced interracial rape as a weapon of war into our pristine land, and you will get an understanding of English “warfare” which resembles the atrocities of a Charles Taylor or some Congolese warlord avenging himself on defenceless women and children. The point is that the English radical does the incitement and the “psy ops” but lets others do the fighting, or even the protesting.

A few months ago I observed this at close quarters outside the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. There were a few English radicals outside the court, speaking on cellphones, summoning their rented black crowd who duly arrived to toyi-toyi about “racism” in Afrikaans schools. A lone Afrikaner armed only with a camera, I confronted the black crowd and asked them why they weren’t singing “Dubula iBunu” (Shoot the Boer) because I was in attendance. But apparently that was not on the programme, to my great disappointment.

The Englishman and -woman, being cowards, would never confront us directly. They would always summon some or other rent-a-crowd or bused-in mob to protest or sometimes commit some horrible sadistic act, such as an intimidatory necklace murder. “Kill one, scare a thousand,” said Mao and of course the English radical has embraced this principle to the hilt.

Despite her surname, Gillian Schutte is as English and as radical as they come. Echoing the South African Communist Party, she has delivered the latest screaming denunciation of the Red October protest, aptly entitled Seeing Red. As confessions of Boerehaat go, it demonstrates a few things. The lack of culture and intellectualism that Orwell routinely ascribed to his countrymen, would be one of them. In fact, when the new, radical government took over in 1994, one of the first things that Kader Asmal, a miserable Indian and zombie warlord of the British Empire, did was to confiscate the classical-music instruments at Afrikaans schools. That vindictive, philistine act was surely not only his idea, but must have been decided by some English committee somewhere. No doubt the committee must have been consumed with envy and hatred at seeing our beautiful children singing in choirs and operettas, as naturally “musical as Italians or Germans” (see Orwell quote above) and playing their instruments with that quiet seriousness which is so characteristic of the Afrikaner child, as opposed to the ill-discipline, the boisterous and disrespectful, often drug-ridden anomie of the modern “English” child.

Many English bands build a career on about three guitar chords, as opposed to our famous pianists who perform Chopin or Beethoven the world over. The annual Unisa international piano competition is the highlight of the Afrikaner social calendar in Pretoria. However, English music, like English food, is loud and repetitive. Gillian Schutte does not have three chords. She only has one, strident, false note: “racism”. Karl Marx turned Hegel “on his head” in order to give us the class struggle, but even that simple idea is too complex for our local Rooinek Reds. (“Aanstap Rooies, die pad is lank en swaar…” goes the Afrikaans folk song, the existence of folk songs being another sign of our innate “fascism”.) Their natural inclination is to a kind of Spanish-Inquisition denunciation of the heretic. I think I have already pointed out the resemblance between the primitive and literal South African witch-hunt during which the offending man or usually woman is “sniffed out” by a sangoma and current attempts to identify and isolate dissidents or “racists” in order to publicly pillory or perhaps even physically harm them.

Gillian Schutte is the sangoma of the Johannesburg Left. According to her, the “Red October (campaign is).. becoming their own worst enemies as they buy into the construct of an imaginary genocide and declare a hate-filled discursive war against the entire black population”.

In essence, Schutte is calling for a black mob or impi to come and “sort out” the white, Afrikaner racists.

“But where is the outrage?” she laments. She claims that someone had called President Jacob Zuma (whose strongly Zulu identity most Afrikaners actually approve of, as being in keeping with their own ideas about acceding to modernity through one’s own culture and not a foreign one) a “Kaffer dog”. It is obvious that hordes of English “cyber warriors” in the form of agents provocateurs will try to frame Afrikaner dissidents by posting “racist” statements all over Facebook in the next few weeks, so that Schutte and her fellow racial cheerleaders may appeal to black racial identity which they keep in a wounded, rancorous state through endlessly harping on “apartheid”, “our dark past” and similar Gothic tales that are mostly fiction, interspersed with a few half-truths here and there.

To the “progressive English white”, blacks are but dogs to do his bidding, in taking the fight to the enemy: the patriotic Afrikaner who refuses to leave or disappear, or to wither away and die. At the end of the Anglo-Boer war, the British high command was flooded with letters from irate Natalians and Capetonians who did not want Britain to stop but to “cleanse the country for England” and proceed to a complete genocide of the Boer population, man, woman and child. In the concentration camps there was a concerted attempt to stamp out the Afrikaans language and identity. As E.B. Sargent wrote to Lord Milner in 1903:

We must appeal to England and the brothers and sisters of those who have fought for the Empire, asking them to come over to carry out that part of the work which their kinsmen were not able to complete. Our military operations have resulted in the greater part of the boys now remaining in the camps, and I am convinced that we have no better opportunity than now to make them all English-speaking next year … What we now require here are women, highly capable teachers with strong patriotism who would be willing to come hither and face the hardships of the camp life, in order to teach the children of the burghers our language and our ideals. Gradually these children should also be taught our great Imperial ideals.

Chris Louw overheard Alistair Sparks on an aeroplane, saying something similar, that Britain had made a singular mistake in not killing all Afrikaners when she had had the opportunity. Underlying the anti-racist discourse of the anglophone Left are the most archaic prejudices against the “European”, the non-English, as well as the Afrikaner – speaking his “guttural tongue” as it has been dubbed in so many trashy English novels written in this country.

In South Africa the colonial genocide of the nineteenth century meets the “progressive” genocides of the twentieth and they intermingle, eclectically, syncretistically. The British camp commander and rapist of Boer girls in their early teens meets Winnie Mandela with her box of matches and together they dance around the bonfire screaming their Rwandan chant from La Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines: “Kill the cockroaches!” Is it pure coincidence that Natal, source of all those genocidal letters, also has a “Valley of a Thousand Hills”? Cue in Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao’s Red Guards and you have the picture. I have always maintained that South Africa is a dumping ground for worn-out but dangerous ideologies from the rest of the world, such as communism or, in this case, American race ideology with its anti-white bias.

No-one in the petty-minded phalanx of the South African Left understands what the term “deconstruction” actually means, yet it has become one of those buzz-words circulating like a rumour or a piece of gossip. Let me not enlighten the benighted necklacists of Wits or UCT in their postcolonial trance.

Except, perhaps, for pointing out or performing one small piece of Abbau. Haha, it almost sounds like the Khoi loanword in Afrikaans and the name of Swedish pop group, “abba”.

Race, we are told by the leftist mob, is a social construct. Yet in their response to Afrikaner dissidence and protest in being led to the slaughterhouse – no longer are we lambs – the Left appeals very strongly to race and racial identity.

“Where is the outrage?” screams Gillian Schutte, meaning the outrage of blacks who should respond to her clarion call of race and a deep, biological identity. Jonathan Jansen, whom I call the clown of Bloemfontein, has published a collection of clichés called “Knowledge in the blood”. Yet, the Left, with its internationalist-Marxist, globalist, deculturated, we-are-all-the-same bombast, is actually appealing to the most basic of instincts: blood and racial rage.

Will the black hordes assemble for the witches’ sabbath of the white feminists? Are the Bantu that stupid?

That anyone should risk the future of South Africa in proving a point to a few Afrikaner protestors with red balloons is, of course, another indication of just how certifiably insane Ms. Hyde has become. Are we on our way to a Rwanda, a Katyn Wood, a Khmer Rouge Cambodia, a Maoist Cultural Revolution?

The sinister South African Left has always craved corpses in the streets, which it had after the Church Street bomb, as well as its ill-fated march on Bisho. The cold-blooded murder of the three AWB men in Bophutatswana by a black policeman is still relished as the crowning glory of its achievement.

To see a white man begging for his life before an armed black (or a mob), represents the ultimate English-leftist fantasy. Farm murders, as well as the shooting of Afrikaner children like Kayla Rawsthorne, Danielle Esterhuizen, Willemien Potgieter, Alyssa Botha and others by roaming young black “freedom fighters” sates, at least for a few moments, the bloodlust of the colonial “Reds” in this part of the world.

Afrikaners (and moderate whites generally) should keep cool heads, but also be aware that even the continued existence of Afrikaans government schools inspires an ethnic reaction which can become dangerous if left unchecked. We have already seen at Heidelberg, Fochville and other places how seemingly placid communities may be swept up through racial and ethnic rhetoric, disguised as “anti-racism”.

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Traditional garb costs sangoma initiate a job

healerAn Eastern Cape sangoma initiate was asked to leave his work premises, apparently because he was wearing traditional beads and white paint on his face, the Daily Dispatch reported on Monday.

Zolile Jali, a general worker at Auto Tyres in Cambridge, claimed he was dismissed last Monday for wearing traditional beads, white head gear and white paint on his face, but this was denied by his employer.

“I took leave from work after I became very sick. I could not walk and I suffered numerous asthma attacks. My elders advised me that I was suffering because I was ignoring my calling as a sangoma,” said Jali. He soon recovered fully.

“Last Monday I reported back to work wearing my beads and my bosses dismissed me,” he said.

Auto Tyres branch manager Ivor Richter said Jali had not been fired, but given time off to sort out his image.

“The employee said he would not change his image without getting permission from his superiors and we said he must go and do that…

“We are a company that operates on strict guidelines when it comes to our employees. Customers have raised some concerns with regard to our employees’ dress code,” said Richter.

Jali has lodged a grievance with the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA). – Sapa

Nursing sisters send baby to sangoma

African medicine
African medicine

Two nursing sisters at a rural health clinic in KwaZulu-Natal allegedly referred a sick 5-month-old baby to a sangoma, a health official said on Friday.

The two nurses at the clinic near Dundee were being investigated, said Dundee provincial hospital spokespersonn Mbali Ntshingila.

She confirmed that a complaint had been received from a local white commercial farmer, but declined to elaborate.

“We are still investigating and cannot disclose anything. The investigation is at an early stage.”

The two sisters were still working, and it was not standard procedure to refer patients to sangomas, she said.

It was not known whether both nursing sisters had been involved in the referral.

The farmer, Paul Theunissen, said one of his employees last week told him of the baby being referred to a sangoma.

He said he had been told that the woman was informed by one of the nursing sisters that she had to take the baby to a sangoma because “the ancestors were cross with her”.

“We went out to collect the baby – who was covered in some kind of muti and was sicker than before – but the sangoma was reluctant to let her go,” he said.

“Eventually we managed to take the baby to a private doctor, who diagnosed bronchitis,” said Theunissen.

Theunissen said he lodged a complaint with the hospital. – Sapa

Initiate caught with muti to kill

traditionalhealer
Sangoma

A young initiate admitted that he had been promised R5 000 by four sangomas should he succeed in killing the other initiates in an attempt to close the initiation school by ruining its reputation.

 An alleged dubious and bizarre attempt to kill all the young men at a Mamelodi initiation school by means of witchcraft was thwarted when a 16-year-old initiate was caught urinating on the shoes of his co-initiates.

After questioning, the young initiate admitted that he had been promised R5 000 by four sangomas should he succeed in killing the other initiates in an attempt to close the initiation school by ruining its reputation.

The boy seemed confused and was acting strange, Looklocal was told.

The principal of the initiation school, Ndando Tshivhula, said that he caught the youngster urinating on the shoes of other initiates.

“When first questioned about why he had urinated on the shoes, the teenager tried to put the blame on other initiates. But he finally came out with the truth after a long interrogation by the principal of the initiation school and admitted that he had been sent to destroy the school by killing other initiates,” said Tshivhula.

“By killing all the initiates, he would cause the initiation school to be closed forever.”

According to Tshivhula, the teenager claimed that he was going to be rewarded with R5 000 if he did the job well.

Tshivhula said that the youngster told him that it all started in April when Tshivhula announced to the public that on 10 May he was going to open a new initiation school and that all young boys who wanted to become men, were welcome to apply to his school for the initiation programme.

“Shortly after my announcement, the four sangomas and a senior citizen called the boy to a meeting, asking him if he also wanted to become a man,” the teenager admitted to Tshivhula.

“One sangoma performed a ritual on me and gave me rope to tie to my left hand and leg,” said the teenager, adding that the sangoma had said that the ropes would ensure that principal Tshivhula would be blamed for the death of the initiates.

The rope on the leg was covered with different types of muti and had to be hung on a tree to make the young initiates lose hope and go home or go to another school,” the teenager allegedly claimed.

The second rope – tied to his arm – was supposed to chase away those who were at the initiation school teaching the initiates poems.

The teenager confessed that the sangomas had also given him other muti, wrapped in bundles of cloth, that was supposed to kill the initiates when the teenager stabbed the muti bundles with a special pin while saying the name of the initiate.

This, the young man claimed, would have killed the initiate whose name he spoke.

Tshivhula said that the muti bundles that had been found equalled the exact number of initiates at the school.

They boy however refused to disclose who had sent him to commit such an evil deed at the school.

Tshivhula said he believed that those involved wanted to destroy him because this school had succeeded for the past four years with no deaths.

He was confident that the 11 initiates would graduate alive this Saturday.

Tshivhula has reported the matter to the Council of Traditional Leaders. – looklocal.co.za

Witchdoctors perform ritual for Mandela

Xhosa sangomas in Mgwali village, Eastern Cape of South Africa performing a cultural dance.
Xhosa sangomas in Mgwali village, Eastern Cape of South Africa performing a cultural dance.

A group of Gauteng traditional healers performed a ritual for former president Nelson Mandela on Wednesday, outside the Pretoria hospital where he has been treated for 47 days.

The healers burnt incense in a pot, knelt on the ground, sprinkled tobacco, sang and summoned the Madiba ancestors to heal Mandela.

Khubane Mashele, the chairwoman of the traditional healers’ interim council in Gauteng, asked the spirits of those who had passed during the struggle to help heal the anti-apartheid icon.

“We summon the great kings and soldiers of the struggle to help us in calling the ancestors of Mandela, and help him heal because we still need him,” Mashele said in xiTsonga during the ritual.

Earlier in the day, a group of traditional leaders from the North West arrived at the Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital to deliver messages of support and a bucket of flowers.

Kgosi Madoda Zibi, chairman of the house of North West traditional leaders, said they hoped to convey a message to the Mandela family.

“We have been mandated by the North West traditional leaders to come and express our well-wishes,” Zibi said.

“We just want to thank him for his contribution to the liberation of his country.”

Zibi and his delegation were told to place the flowers and a card at the wall outside the facility’s Celliers Street entrance, where messages of support had been left since Mandela was hospitalised on June 8 with a recurring lung infection. – Sapa

Witchdoctor who cooked farmer’s testicles declared a mental patient

The ceiling of a sangoma's hut
The ceiling of a sangoma’s hut

A Lesotho sangoma who was found cooking the genitals of a farmer he had murdered, has been declared a State President’s patient by the Free State High Court, Beeld reported on Thursday.

Under the Mental Health Act, he could be committed either to a prison or to a mental institution, the newspaper reported.

Beeld reported that, according to a psychiatric report, Hopolong Moeketsi, 34, could not differentiate right from wrong when he murdered Basie Venter, 65, on the evening of March 30, 2009, and Jan van Wyk, 82, the next day.

Witness John Engelbrecht reportedly told the court he saw a man sweeping outside the house when he arrived on the farm on March 31.

The man, whose legs were covered in blood, ran inside and locked the door, but Engelbrecht kicked it down.

The man attacked him with a pair of scissors and an axe, but he overpowered him and tied him up.

He found Van Wyk’s naked, mutilated body under a blanket in the bloodstained lounge, and found his genitals cooking in a pot. – Sapa

Read also: Butchered for muti while still alive

‘Mandela needs ancestors’ help’

A sangoma's bones
A sangoma’s bones

Traditional healers in Limpopo held a ceremony at the ANC’s offices in Polokwane on Thursday to pray for former president Nelson Mandela who is critically ill in a Pretoria hospital.

African National Congress Limpopo task team chairman Falaza Mdaka said the traditional healers had asked to perform a ritual at the offices, as it was Mandela’s “home”.

Mdaka said Mandela was a special person and the world still needed him.

“We are pleading for him to continue to be with us. We understand that he is old,” he said.

Tradition healers sang struggle songs and burnt incense, calling on the ancestors to heal the country’s beloved statesman.

“Mandela needs ancestors’ help,” said one of the healers, Sylvester Hlathi.

Mandela, 94, was admitted to the Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital in Pretoria on June 8 for treatment of a recurring lung infection.

The presidency has said that his condition remains critical. – Sapa

Sick note from witchdocter is valid, South African Labour Court finds

Xhosa sangomas in Mgwali village, Eastern Cape of South Africa performing a cultural dance.

A woman who was “badly tormented by her ancestors” had to be reinstated in her post, even if she took a month’s leave without her employer’s permission, the Labour Appeal Court has ruled.

 

Three judges from the Labour Appeals Court delivered their verdict, saying the judgment was “something new”, Beeld reported.

 

Johannah Mmelodi, who had already worked for the Kievitskroon Country Estate for eight years, attended in her own free time a course to become a traditional healer.

 

After completing the course, she asked for a month’s unpaid leave to attend another course, to become a sangoma.

Her employers turned down her request, and she attended the course regardless, but not before dropping off a sick note from a traditional healer at her employer’s office.

The sick note stated that she was being “badly tormented by her ancestors”.

After she returned to work, she was subjected to a disciplinary hearing for absenteeism and fired.

The CCMA found that Mmelodi’s dismissal was unfair, and they reinstated her in her post.

The company appealed, and the Labour Appeals Court ruled in Mmelodi’s favour, saying South Africa was a land of many cultures and that traditional Western culture could not be allowed to dominate the African culture of many of the country’s inhabitants. – Sapa

Man arrested with genitals in his wallet

An Eastern Cape man caught with his teenage nephew’s private parts in his wallet has been arrested, police say.

The 18-year-old went missing in Thebe Locality, Nqobo, on Sunday, said Colonel Mzukisi Fatyela.

“… On Wednesday the community found his private parts in his uncle’s wallet. Police were then called,” he said.

Fatyela said the 42-year-old man took the police to Malande Forest where they found the youth’s mutilated body.

His head, arms and legs had been chopped off and were found not far from his torso.

The man would appear on a murder charge in the Nqobo Magistrate’s Court on Thursday, said Fatyela. – Sapa

My witchdoctor raped me

Generic witchdoctor/sangoma

A sangoma from Soweto was arrested on Tuesday morning for allegedly raping a woman who had gone to him for healing, Gauteng police said.

The 50-year-old man invited the woman to his residence to carry out a cleansing ritual on Monday night because she believed she was cursed with bad luck, spokesman Captain Kay Makhubela said.

“She was instructed to buy a white chicken and when she arrived with it… the chicken was killed and the blood was mixed with water and medication.”

The sangoma then ordered the 37-year-old to take a bath in another room and not wear clothes after she was done.

“Then he went into the room and told her she was healed. All of a sudden, he was on top of her and he raped her,” said Makhubela.

The man later threw the bath water out and said she was healed of the bad luck.

A case of rape was opened. – Sapa

Terror of the gay dwarfish African incubus

by Dan Roodt

To most people outside South Africa in developed countries, our life here must seem bizarre. After all, nowhere in Europe or the United States would you drive your children to school and see that the country’s largest newspaper, the Daily Sun, has got “Terror of the gay Tokoloshe” as its frontpage story for the day.

Probably you do not even know what a Tokoloshe is. Ever since I was a child I was intrigued to see that most black people in South Africa, especially women, place their beds on bricks. Apparently if one’s bed is high enough, the Tokoloshe cannot reach you while you are sleeping. So from my earliest years as I became aware of the peculiar differences between blacks and whites, I was brought under the impression that the Tokoloshe played an important role in the lives of blacks.

More black people in South Africa use so-called “traditional medicine” than the Western kind. The government has even institutionalised witchdoctors which are now called “traditional healers” or simply “healers”. At one point I read somewhere that one might also claim from health insurance for visiting a healer who will give you a concoction called “muti” that might contain all kinds of bizarre ingredients. In the northern parts of the country, there is even traffic in human body parts for making “strong muti”.

Being Africans of a slightly different kind, we Afrikaners jocularly refer to the more regular Eurocentric medicine that we take as “muti” too, especially to children. “Come on, drink your muti,” one would tell one’s son or daughter, referring to cough mixture or a tablet made by some branded pharmaceutical company.

Sometimes we Afrikaners call our children “Tokolos” as a term of endearment. Otherwise, we often joke about the Tokoloshe, saying things like: “The Tokoloshe is going to catch you.” But of course, unlike black Africans, we lack any real belief in his existence. To us he is merely a mythological creature like Zeus or Spiderman.

Wikipedia has a few lines on the Tokoloshe, but it mostly omits his sexual proclivities. From what I remember, the Tokoloshe especially preys on single women as they are more likely to be amenable to his advances, especially in dreams. It is also through one’s dreams that the ancestors communicate to the living. Normally, witchdoctors or sangomas or nyangas as they are also called, are “called” by an ancestor to their profession.

I once heard a story of an African investment banker in Johannesburg being called to become a witchdoctor. He went missing for six weeks and arrived back at the bank with an animal bladder on his head. Afterwards there was some discussion as to whether he could discuss corporate finance with clients while wearing the bladder, which he was not allowed to take off.

The Daily Sun’s story has a charm of its own and is in a way politically correct. No doubt it will speak to people for whom gay rights are a burning issue as even the little African incubus may be gay, it seems. Considering that there is currently a whole hullabaloo in the United States about the Republican senatorial candidate’s petite phrase about “legitimate rape”, “the terror of the gay tokoloshe” brings a whole new dimension to discussions of rape.

According to the Daily Sun’s report, Mr. Isaac Malope (51) has already spent R200 000 (about $25 000) on muti to defend himself against a gay Tokoloshe who comes to rape him every night while he is asleep next to his wife Constance Mazibuko (43).

Isaac Malope told the Daily Sun’s reporter, Alex Nkosi: “Every night he comes between me and my wife and rapes me over and over. When he leaves, I no longer have energy for my wife and even if I try to get an erection, nothing happens.

The only time when I manage to get an erection is if I fast for seven days and ask God for it. But it only lasts for a day and then it is back to hell. I have been to many different sangomas but they have failed to solve the problem.”

Mr. Malope has even travelled from South Africa to Nigeria to consult a well-known prophet there, to no avail.

The couple are now asking the Daily Sun’s readers for help, giving the following number in Pretoria to dial: 012 424 6251.