PHA-Exchange> SWAZILAND: Traditional healers, new partners against HIV/AIDS

[George(s) Lessard]

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From:           	IRIN <IRIN at irinnews.org>
Date sent:      	Tue, 25 Feb 2003 12:37:16 GMT
Subject:        	SWAZILAND: Traditional healers, new 
partners against HIV/AIDS

U N I T E D  N A T I O N S
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN)

SWAZILAND: Traditional healers, new partners against HIV/AIDS

MBABANE, 25 February (IRIN) - Swaziland's health ministry has 
begun enlisting traditional healers in efforts to contain HIV and assist 
patients with AIDS-related illnesses. The cooperation between 
modern and traditional medicine reverses decades of separation, 
and highlights the extent of the AIDS emergency in Swaziland.

"We are a little behind the curve in getting the 'tinyanga' (traditional 
medicine men and women) on board, but by now the medical 
establishment agrees that these healers can be enormously helpful 
because they have such close ties with the community," Dr John 
Kunene, principal secretary at the Ministry of Health, told IRIN.

The Swaziland branch of the Traditional Healers Association of 
South Africa estimates that about 3,000 traditional healers are at 
work in the country. Exact figures are hard to establish, because 
customarily healers work independently, and do not belong to any 
professional group.
  
"I trained under a healer in my community, and I never had any 
contact with the Western doctors until the health ministry held an 
AIDS seminar for us," Gogo Shongwe, a healer in Kwaluseni, in rural 
central Swaziland, told IRIN.

Organised by agencies like UNAIDS, the AIDS Support Centre of 
Manzini and the health ministry, the seminars seek to both enlist 
healers in anti-AIDS efforts, and inform them about the disease.

"We respect traditional healers because they are knowledgeable in 
their own way about medicine, and they have a great following in the 
communities," AIDS activist Pholile Dlamini said.

A World Health Organisation survey in the 1990s found that a 
majority of Swazis use traditional healers as their primary source of 
health care, despite a growing network of health clinics and private 
physicians.

"At the clinics there are long queues, and there is often no 
medicine," said Stella Magongo from Manzini, the country's 
commercial centre. The main hospital in Manzini faces bankruptcy 
due to mismanagement.  

Understaffed and lacking in resources and medicines, health clinics 
cannot devote the time to individual patients that traditional healers, 
working from home, can provide. Supplies of traditional medicines, 
which are used to lessen everything from labour pains to treating 
gout, seem inexhaustible, because they are made from roots and 
barks extracted from the fields and forests of this largely rural nation.

"My inyanga [healer] knows me and my family. Going for treatment is 
like a social visit," Magongo said.

Health officials aim to tap into those bonds of trust, to pass on 
HIV/AIDS information in a country in which 38.6 percent of the adult 
population are HIV-positive.

Health ministry field workers search urban townships and rural areas 
to locate healers, then arrange their transport to ministry seminars. 
The healers are taught how the HI virus infects and affects the body, 
and ways to prevent opportunistic infections.
  
But the medical establishment has also had to tackle the claims 
made by some healers that they have a treatment that cures AIDS.

Gladys Simelane, who conducts HIV/AIDS awareness workshops, 
explained: "We emphasise that there is no cure for AIDS, and it is 
cruel to give patients false hope. We see how desperate people try 
any new 'cure' that is proclaimed in the media. The healers are told 
that if they think they have a medicine that helps people with AIDS, 
they must bring it to us for testing."

In the past, traditional healers were accused of contributing to the 
spread of AIDS by using the same razor blade to draw blood from a 
number of patients while performing "kugata", the making of 
incisions into which medicines are rubbed.

"Traditional healers are poor, and we cannot afford a new razor 
blade for each patient," said healer Shongwe. "But we are returning 
to the traditional way of making punctures, using porcupine quills." 

The quills also have natural antiseptic chemicals that protect the cut 
from infection.

Health ministry education officers also take the AIDS message to 
traditional healers at their workplaces. They bring with them a supply 
of condoms to distribute to patients.

Ten years ago, a self-proclaimed head of Swaziland's traditional 
healers discouraged the use of condoms, which he said were 
opposed by Swazi custom. The healer was accused in the press of 
jeopardising lives, and traditional healers were blamed for furthering 
the spread of HIV.

"There is no resistance at all now to accepting and distributing 
condoms," Dlamini said of her trips to traditional healers. "They 
complain that there are not enough condoms."

Healers are told about clinics and AIDS prevention centres that 
conduct blood tests and counselling. Given Swaziland's high HIV-
infection rate, everyone is encouraged to know his or her HIV status.  

"Some healers have asked if they could get involved in the HIV tests, 
but because this is a technical procedure, we have had to disappoint 
them. But the healers can be instructed to do counselling services, 
because they are already natural counsellors to their patients," said 
Dlamini.

The enlistment of traditional healers in the AIDS containment effort 
has also helped local conservationists and educators to identify 
indigenous plants with medicinal properties. The need to catalogue 
these plants becomes more urgent as an expanding population 
reduces wilderness areas where traditional healers go for their 
herbs.

The bonds that are being made between traditional and Western 
medicine in the response to AIDS are also bringing together two 
world views on curing, that in the past were separated by prejudice. 
Healers complained that they were not respected, while the medical 
establishment dismissed the healers' credentials and folk remedies. 
Now the two groups are working together against a national medical 
emergency.

[ENDS]

IRIN-SA
Tel: +27 11 880-4633
Fax: +27 11 447-5472
Email: IRIN-SA at irin.org.za

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