A RECIPE FOR DISPELLING NIGHTMARES

by Martin Walsh

Mhamadi Khamis Makame

My last post, ‘Burning the Golden weaver’s nest’, was about an unusual ingredient in the treatment of possession-related  illness in Makunduchi, in the south-east of Unguja island. Fumigation and steaming are common components in traditional medical practice in Zanzibar. They are also essential in the invocation of possessory spirits, as Hassan Gora Haji describes in his recent PhD dissertation on the songs that accompany spirit possession rituals on Tumbatu island and elsewhere in northern Unguja.

Here is part of his description of kupigwa nyungu, ‘to be given a vapour-bath’:

“Nyungu [literally ‘clay pot’] is a mixture of medicinal plants which are boiled together and used to fumigate oneself […]. But according to waganga, traditional doctors, nyungu is a kind of medicine for steaming which is made with a mix of the leaves of seven different plants. These plants vary from mganga to mganga or from one kind of spirit possession treatment to another. […] The nyungu medicine is used to attract the spirit so that it comes as soon as it is called.” (Haji 2018: 54; my translation).

Crouching under a mat

On 18 October 2007, when working on the Gray Brothers’ documentary The Nightmare (Para Docs Productions, 2008), I took the crew to film a series of interviews about a recent Popobawa panic in Potoa. Afterwards, one of my in-laws demonstrated the use of nyungu medicine for the camera. His patient was a young boy who had been sent to him for treatment, and had been staying there for some time. As both of them crouched under a mat, Mzee Mhamadi held a bunch of steaming leaves under the boy’s nose and encouraged him to inhale the vapour.
 

After this demonstration, Mzee Mhamadi listed the seven plants that he would have used if he had been doing this for real. He described this as a nyungu mix for treating treating jinamizi, which is loosely translated as ‘nightmare’, but often refers to more specific phenomena, such as the frightening hallucinations that can accompany sleep paralysis and manifest as incubi or succubi.

Inhaling the vapour

Here are the seven ingredients, listed in the order in which he gave them and identified with the help of available botanical glossaries of Swahili plant names in Zanzibar:

1. muwakikali, Horsewood, Clausena anisata (Willd.) Hook.f. ex Benth. (family Rutaceae).
2. mnanuzi, Orange Climber, Toddalia asiatica (L.) Lam. (family Rutaceae).
3. mchakuzi, Uvaria acuminata Oliv. (family Annonaceae).
4. mbaazi, Pigeon Pea, Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp. (family Leguminosae).
5. kivumbazi, Ocimum spp. including Basil, Ocimum basilicum L. (family Lamiaceae).
6. mpera, Guava, Psidium guajava L. (family Myrtaceae).
7. mchakati, Mallotus oppositifolius (Geiseler) Müll.Arg. (family Euphorbiaceae).

The last of these botanical identifications is the least certain: Heine and Legère (1995: 107) also record mchakati as Leucas sp. (family Lamiaceae) and Acalypha ornata Hochst. ex A.Rich. (family Euphorbiaceae).

The nyungu medicine

Most of these plants, including the cultigens, are used in a variety of medicinal and ritual preparations in Zanzibar, and some are well known as traditional medicines more widely. According to Heine and Legère, waganga consider Horsewood to be “one of their most useful plants” (1995: 244), while they and other authors give different examples of its use.

Ingrams describes the use of Orange Climber roots in a “Hadimu” (south and east Unguja) ritual for “Calling a devil for possession” that is somewhat different from the northern Unguja (Tumbatu) practices already described:

“Take a piece of mnanuzi root, and three of muiza jini [mwizajini, Coffee senna, Senna occidentalis] […] and boil together in a new pot. When it boils, place a pad on the patient’s head (to stop burning) and place the pot on top of it. The patient will then shake her head, but the pot will not fall down. The medicine man then gives the patient some of the mixture to drink. The devil will now come, and though he may go away for short periods, will always come back. After this the medicine man will drop the muiza jini down a ruined well, so that it is out of the way of mischief-makers, and the other root will be fastened to the leg of the possessed person, where it will stay for seven days.” (1931: 453)

Listing the ingredients

Elsewhere Ingrams discusses the magical significance of the numbers 3, 4, and 7 in Zanzibar, and parallels further afield (1931: 478).

As Hassan Gora Haji makes clear in his dissertation, the herbal steam bath is only one part of a spirit possession or healing ritual, which may also involve specific incantations. Ingrams also records a sample of these. I didn’t get another opportunity to ask Mzee Mhamadi more about this, and alas he is no longer with us, though I’m told that at least some of his medicinal knowledge has been passed on.

Acknowledgements
In memory of Mhamadi Khamis Makame, and with thanks to Adam Gray for sending me unused footage from the filming of The Nightmare. All of the images in this post are taken from that footage.

References

Haji, Hassan Gora 2018. Uchambuzi wa Nyimbo za Uganga wa Pepo Zanzibar: Mtindo na Dhima Zake. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Chui Kikuu cha Taifa cha Zanzibar (SUZA).

During filming

Heine, Bernd and Karsten Legère 1995. Swahili Plants: An Ethnobotanical Survey. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

Ingrams, W.H. 1931. Zanzibar: Its History and People. London: H.F. & G. Witherby.

Kombo, Yussuf H. 2017. Jozani Natural Forest: Zanzibar Treasures in Wild (2nd edition). Zanzibar.

Legère, Karsten 2003. Plant names from north Zanzibar. Africa & Asia (Göteborg) 3: 123-146.

Williams, R.O. 1949. The Useful and Ornamental Plants in Zanzibar and Pemba. Zanzibar: Zanzibar: Protectorate.

WHERE THE DOCTOR IS IGNORANT

by Martin Walsh

A page from the Cambridge Expeditions Medical Handbook

Flat on my back, beneath the Galaxy, I fear

This burning in my groin is gonorrhoea.

-- Tony Harrison, Manica

When I first went to Tanzania in 1980 my portable medical library comprised the Ross Institute's Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates and the Cambridge Expeditions Medical Handbook. The former, aka the Little Red Book, betrayed its origin in a milieu in which the nervous disposition of one's wife and the behaviour of one's servants were common concerns -- more, certainly, than they were to a 22 year-old explorer of the nether regions of Ujamaa (later in life, though, I could have done with an update). The Cambridge Handbook was much more useful, though its diagnostic tables tended to induce hypochondria. Instead of reading possible diagnoses from the combination of symptoms, it was much easier to pick on the worst disease and imagine the symptoms that were listed under it. And so every crick in the neck mirrored meningitis and every instance of colic conjured up appendicitis. Although this is a hazard associated with all self-help health guides, the Handbook's crude diagrams and simple matrices seemed designed to maximise the inflation of illness and a category of anxiety that the Little Red Book didn't cover.

The cover of the 1979 edition

I first heard about the virtues of Where There Is No Doctor, the English version of David Werner's Donde no hay doctor, from my ethnographic guide Alison Redmayne. I didn't buy a copy until sometime later when I was living in Mombasa. I was persuaded of its efficacy when a sister-in-law living with us in Kibokoni fell ill with shingles, and her head ballooned in an alarming way, and began to resemble a cross between a football and a scaly pufferfish. None of us knew what the cause of this was, and she resorted to a variety of local remedies, including smearing her head with a concoction of herbs. However, after a quick read of Where There Is No Doctor, I was able to confidently declare that she had no need to waste any more money on waganga ("traditional" doctors), because the swelling would go down of its own accord, and the scaliness disappear. As you might expect, no one took any notice of me, but she did indeed get better as I had smugly predicted she would. I've lost count of the number of times I've made use of the book, and for some years I've kept a second copy in Zanzibar so that I don't have to carry it back and forth. One day in Dar es Salaam I found a dog-eared copy of the Swahili translation, Mahali Pasipo Na Daktari, and mama watoto (the missus) has been using it ever since.

The Swahili version, c.1984

Never mind where there really is no doctor, the state of medical training in East Africa is such that you need all the help you can get even in places where there is someone with that distinguished title. I'll save the story of my imaginary blood clot -- imagined by some of the finest doctors in Kenya -- for another occasion. I'll also refrain from detailing all the horrors suffered by loved ones, far too many of whom haven't survived to tell the tale themselves. But you get the drift. Over the years Alison Redmayne has performed heroics in ministering to the sick in and around Iringa and Mufindi, and has been an indefatigable campaigner against bad practice in the hospitals and clinics of this particular corner of Tanzania. Talking about this with her one day around the turn of the millennium, I quipped that Where The Doctor Is Ignorant would be a more accurate title for our favourite medical guidebook, at least in the local context. This is not to denigrate the good work that many doctors and medical agencies do in East Africa, or to downplay the difficult conditions in which they strive, often with rudimentary facilities and inadequate medical supplies. But lack of adequate medical knowledge is a serious and widespread problem, and can't be denied.

The full text of Where There Is No Doctor can now be downloaded for free from the website of Hesperian Health Guides, together with other community health guides, including Where Women Have No Doctor and Helping Health Workers Learn. These and other resources are also available in a variety of languages, which can be seen at a glance on Hesperian's Resources by Language page. Unfortunately Mahali Pasipo na Daktari, the Swahili version of Where There Is No Doctor, is no longer in print: indeed there are no Swahili resources on the Hesperian site. That's a pity. An updated translation of this and other books, especially if well distributed and accompanied by relevant training, would go at least some way towards filling the medical knowledge gap in Tanzania and other parts of the region where Swahili is widely spoken.

References

Davies, T. W. Undated [c.1979]. Cambridge Expeditions Medical Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge Expeditions Medical Scheme.

Harrison, Tony 1987. Manica. In Selected Poems (2nd edition). London and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 31-34.

Ross Institute 1978. Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates. London: Ross Institute of Tropical Hygiene. [first published in 1951]

Werner, David Undated [c.1984, 2nd printing]. Mahali Pasipo Na Daktari... Kitabu cha Mafunzo ya Afya Vijijini. Dar es Salaam: Rotary Club of Dar es Salaam.

A PILOT WHALE IN PONGWE

Posing on the Pongwe whale

Just over a week ago (on Sunday 15th January) I went to stay at Pongwe on the east coast of Zanzibar (Unguja island) for the second time in three months. The tide wasn't in until the late afternoon, and not long after I'd had a quick swim -- or rather a float in the shallows -- I was told that there was a dolphin in the water just along from the beach bar that I'd repaired to. I grabbed my camera and walked down to the beach where a number of villagers had already gathered. The consensus of opinion was that the dead animal being drawn towards the shore was a small whale; when it had first been spotted in the bay local fishermen thought that it was a floating log. I began taking photographs of it from a distance as a group of youths posed with it for the cameras on their mobile phones. When it was close to the shore a number of children waded into to take a closer look, and they were only momentarily repelled when it was cut open and the stench of its guts filled the air (putting the pong into Pongwe, as one friend has suggested). A young man on the beach told me that its blubber would be used to caulk their boats. As the light faded so did the usefulness of my relatively simple camera, and I asked a Russian tourist if I could later have copies of his superior shots, including close-ups of the whale's dismemberment.

Spectators on the beach at Pongwe

The next day there was nothing of the whale left on the beach. Its identification as a small whale (nyangumi mdogo) was confirmed by hotel staff: it definitely wasn't a dolphin (pomboo), but was more like a nyamrani. The only examples of this name I can find define it as a kind of shark, in one case the much-feared Tiger Shark, Galeocerdo cuvier. My Unguja dialect-speaking better half recognises nyamrani as a colloquial term used to describe an unmarried man, leaving it open whether the analogy being made is with a shark or a small (and by implication immature) whale. The creature that we actually saw in the bay at Pongwe was most likely a Short-finned Pilot Whale, Globicephala macrorhynchus, a pan-tropical cetacean that is usually seen travelling in pods. It's a member of the family Delphinidae, the oceanic dolphins, and in that respect it's initial description as a dolphin wasn't that far out.

Whale vertebra from Matemwe at Santa Maria Coral Park

Pakenham's checklist of The Mammals of Zanzibar and Pemba Islands (1984) includes an old black and white photograph (facing page 60) of a mass stranding in Zanzibar harbour; and although "Pax" himself seems to have been unsure of their identification, these look quite like the Pongwe specimen. On the beach I was told that the last beaching of a small whale in Pongwe bay had occurred two or three years ago. The hotel bar is decorated with vertebrae from a much larger whale, stranded at Matemwe in 1994 or thereabouts, and purchased much later by the hotel's owner. In the natural history section of the Zanzibar Museum there's a photograph of a 61 foot whale washed up at Chake Chake in Pemba in 1932. Following a similar stranding at Mkumbuu in the early 1990s fisherman came from far and wide to take home pieces of the large whale, which in this case was described as a chongowe -- another name that is variously identified in the literature (this incident is described in Popobawa narratives, cf. Walsh 2009: 27).

Watching the whale's disembowelling

The Pongwe whale wasn't considered edible because it had died perhaps two or three days before it was found. But, as already noted, it would provide oil for caulking boats, known as sifa, a term apparently deriving from the Portuguese term for similar preparations (cifa, cf. Johnson 1939: 429, where the Swahili product is described as shark oil). Our barman, a man from Uroa, also suggested that its blubber might be used medicinally, whale fat being a favourite in local concoctions used to treat pumu, asthma. On Pemba my research assistant Jamila wrote that people thought that whale fat was a good medicine for mishipa, blood vessels and other internal organs and the pain associated with them; for example just two or three drops might be stirred into porridge and given to someone as a cure for the pain caused by a hernia. I should have taken the time to find out exactly what had happened to the blubber and other parts of the Pongwe whale, if they hadn't just been left to wash back out to sea. But my thoughts were with other research, and I didn't pursue these questions any further. I did, however, get the much better photos and video clips that my Russian friend, Yaroslav Alexandrov, had taken, and some of his images are shown at the end of this post.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Helle Goldman and through her, Kit Kovacs, at the Norwegian Polar Institute for help with the identification of the Pongwe whale; to Juma Ali Salehe and others at Santa Maria Coral Park for their good company and local knowledge; and to Yaroslav Alexandrov for his generosity in sharing his excellent photographs and video clips, which I've edited and downsized for posting on this blog.

References

Johnson, Frederick (ed.) 1939. A Standard Swahili-English Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press.

Pakenham, R. H. W. 1984. The Mammals of Zanzibar and Pemba Islands. Harpenden: privately printed.

Richmond, Matthew D. (ed.) 2002. A Field Guide to the Seashores of Eastern Africa and the Western Indian Ocean Islands (2nd edition). Sida/SAREC -- UDSM.

Walsh, Martin 2009. The politicisation of Popobawa: changing explanations of a collective panic in Zanzibar. Journal of Humanities (Dodoma) 1 (1): 23-33.

The pilot whale in Pongwe bay (photo by Yarolsav Alexandrov)

Men and women inspecting the dead pilot whale (photo by Yaroslav Alexandrov)

Cutting the whale open (photo by Yarolsav Alexandrov)

The whale's intestines spilling into the sea (photo by Yaroslav Alexandrov)

ELEPHANT DUNG AND EXPELLING SPIRITS

Postcard from the Humphrey Winterton Collection

I've just added a visual postscript - the postcard picture of a pet rhino - to last September's post on the 'Imaginary Animals of Zanzibar'. I came across this while looking for photographs to illustrate a seminar on 'Images and counter-images of the Zanzibar Revolution' that I'm giving in Edinburgh next month. In preparation for this I've also been rereading one of my favourite books about the islands, Esmond Bradley Martin's Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution (1978). This is unrivalled as a description of the foibles and follies of the Revolutionary Government at a time when there wasn't always a lot to laugh about. It includes the following vignette about the presence of another exotic beast in Zanzibar, or to be precise a pair of them: 

1992 reprint (Nairobi: Book Corner Ltd.)

 "On holidays such as Idd, those who remain in Zanzibar town dress up in their finest clothes and there is dancing and singing in the streets. The two Indian elephants at the Bwawani Hotel then receive great attention from the populace, and children even bring nuts and bread to them. The history of these elephants is an amusing tale. In 1974, the Indian government gave them to the government of Zanzibar as a present. They arrived on the Mapinduzi's maiden voyage. When this ship anchored in the harbour, the elephant handlers cermoniously presented them to the Africans who were supposed to take care of them. But there was one major problem: the elephants would only respond to commands in Hindi, and resolutely refused to learn Swahili. Rather embarrassed, the government decided that the Bwawani Hotel should provide for these two gentle but obstinate pachyderms, named Indirani and Govindon. The Bwawani now gives elephant rides for fifteen shillings, but there are few Zanzibaris prepared to pay the price. They like watching them, though; and these are the only Indian elephants in all East Africa. In the mornings, they are walked from their enclosure near the Marahubi Palace by a couple of attendants to the kitchen area of the Bwawani Hotel, where the hotel's staff feed them left-over food and lots of bread. They stand idly around the hotel until around 11 a.m., when their attendants walk them back to their enclosure, and their hard day's work is completed. Karume would not have approved of their example." (1978: 107)

Postcard showing Bwawani swimming pool

The reference here is to the first president of Zanzibar, Abeid Amani Karume, who planned the Bwawani Hotel before his assassination in 1972. The management of the hotel was handed over to an Indian hotel chain, Oberoi (Martin 1978: 4), and it was the Hindi-speaking staff who were later asked to look after the two monolingual elephants. These tuskers may have lived the life of Riley, but apart from providing entertainment and occasional rides, they had a more practical use to Zanzibaris at the time, unmentioned by my good friend Esmond (who is now an expert on the illegal ivory trade, but not quite as inactive as his Wikipedia article implies). It seems that their dung was in much demand as a fumigant (mafusho) for expelling (or perhaps merely calming down) spirits (mashetani), in particular those that caused certain kinds of illness in children. Boys and girls from the town collected the fresh elephant dung from Maruhubi (near the veterinary clinic, where the elephants were kept overnight), from outside the Bwawani (by the hotel's rubbish dump, where they were fed), and from the road between the two. My wife remembers doing this with others when she was in her early teens (around the time that Esmond Bradley Martin wrote his book): they used sticks to collect and bag the dung, took it home, and then left it out in the sun to dry. When the dung was dessicated one of the boys would take it and sell it to Saleh Madawa, Stone Town's principal supplier of traditional potions and charms, who would sell it on to his customers in turn -- presumably at a good profit.

Saleh Madawa's shop in July 2006

I don't know whether elephant dung can still be bought in Saleh Madawa's shop: if so then it must be sourced from the mainland, because the two Indian elephants are long gone. My guess is that recipes for elephant dung fumigant also originate on the nearby continent. It is widely used in eastern Tanzania to treat degedege (e.g. Makundi et al. 2006; Warsame et al. 2007; Foster and Vilendrer 2009), which is the Swahili name for the illness believed to cause infant convulsions, often identified as cerebral malaria. Mama J recalls that in Zanzibar town the dried elephant dung is mixed together with onion and garlic skins before being used to fumigate (kufukiza) a poorly child, and garlic is among a number of additional ingredients mentioned in the literature. The understanding and treatment of degedege is a subject all in itself, and I'll no doubt return to it in future posts. Given his antipathy to other machinations of the devil (Walsh and Goldman 2007: 1149), I like to think that Sheikh Karume would have approved of this particular use of the Revolutionary Government's elephants, and not just because it helped to keep the road to Maruhubi clean. 

References

Foster, Deshka and Stacie Vilendrer 2009. Two treatments, one disease: childhood malaria management in Tanga, Tanzania. Malaria Journal 8: 240 (online).

Makundi, Emmanuel, Hamisi Malebo, Paulo Mhame, Andrew Kitua and Marian Warsame 2006. Role of traditional healers in the management of severe malaria among children below five years of age: the case of Kilosa and Handeni Districts, Tanzania. Malaria Journal 5: 58 (online).

Martin, Esmond Bradley 1978. Zanzibar: Tradition and Revolution. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Walsh, Martin and Helle Goldman 2007. Killing the king: the demonization and extermination of the Zanzibar leopard. In Edmond Dounias, Elisabeth Motte-Florac and Margaret Dunham (eds.) Le symbolisme des animaux: l'animal, clef de voûte de la relation entre le homme et la nature? Paris: Éditions de l'IRD. 1133-1182.

Warsame, Marian, Omari Kimbute, Zena Machinda, Patricia Ruddy, Majaja Melkisedick, Thomas Peto, Isabela Ribeiro, Andrew Kitua, Goran Tomson and Melba Gomes 2007. Recognition, perceptions and treatment practices for severe malaria in rural Tanzania: implications for accessing rectal artesunate as a pre-referral. PLoS ONE 2 (1): e149 (online).