KHAYELITSHA, South Africa -- Albert Khandekana is relishing all the attention his calling is getting under black majority rule here.
He hopes that the government will fund an ambitious training center in this impoverished township and that a major corporation will come knocking on his door.
Khandekana is a traditional healer, one of an estimated 350,000 in the country who treat their millions of patients with a mixture of natural remedy, counseling and spiritualism.
For decades they were forced underground by the minority white supremacist regime, which scoffed at traditional healing as primitive, despite its use by the masses.
Now they are the focus of intense political, academic and industrial interest, benefiting both from the advent of majority rule and the growing global interest in alternative medicine.
The governing African National Congress says traditional healers should be given their "rightful place" in the national health care system.
For a government strapped for cash, they offer an affordable, accessible alternative source of care that is acceptable to the majority of residents.
It is estimated that 80 percent of South Africans consult traditional healers, even if many also get a first or second opinion from a doctor.
Priscilla Adonis, 47, is a typical patient. She has brought her 15-month-old baby to Khandekana's consulting room, a hut in the back yard of his tiny, two-room home here.
The room is crammed with bottles of ground herbs and shaved roots, cases of ceremonial clothes, the beaded fur hat and belt that testify to Khandekana's healer status, certificates showing the AIDS prevention courses he has attended, and a portrait painted in 1976 when he became a "professor of herbs."
In the yard are cardboard boxes of roots and plants Khandekana has harvested from the forest, usually, he says, under the spiritual guidance of his ancestors.
"Once you focus on something, the ancestors are there," he says. "They give you the strength and the energy to survey what is happening to the patient."
Khandekana, a stocky man with short, curly hair and an amiable look, examines baby Christopher briefly without removing him from his mother's arms, anoints his curly head with an unction, and wraps a couple of tablespoons of herbal compound in aluminum wrap for the mother to use later.
"He's a good doctor," says the mother, who eschews conventional medicine but has consulted Khandekana for the past five years. "He always cures me the traditional way. It helps me a lot."
Khandekana, 46, says he was called to be a traditional healer in what is regarded as the normal way -- by his ancestors during a dream. He was trained by his father, also a traditional healer, and other elders.
Although he has never attended school, he can, he says, cure all diseases, from stomach upsets to cancer, from epilepsy to infertility, from anemia to AIDS.
"The way we treat HIV-AIDS is to clean the blood and the body fluids. Once we clean all that, the patient becomes healthy," he says.
Four plant-based medicines can be used against AIDS, he adds, declining to disclose any of the ingredients without "financial assistance" from a corporation to produce, bottle and label them.
"The people want to get information from us, but we don't allow that," he says. "But if you recognize us in the correct way you will contribute toward our needs as traditional healers."
Protecting the public
Legislation to establish an interim council to register, train and monitor traditional healers -- and winnow out perceived charlatans -- is proceeding through Parliament. It would place them under the equivalent of the Medical and Dental Councils for orthodox medical practitioners.
The public needs all the protection it can get from traditional healers, according to Dr. Nthato Motlana, one of this country's leading physicians.
Born in a rural village and treated as a boy by traditional healers, he says: "I know the traditional healers play an important role in the medical care of the people, but I also know that their idea of diagnosis, of circulation, of infection, of microbes is nil.
"My traditional healers, when they treated me, wouldn't even wash their hands. The traditional healer would look to the heavens to make a diagnosis, or throw the dried-up bones of a monkey's ankle to make a diagnosis.
"Now people out there want to push my people into the 10th century A.D. while others move into the 21st century with all its sophisticated diagnosis procedures. I get absolutely mad."
Motlana sees an Africanist political dynamic behind the move to recognize traditional healers.
"As the movement for independence, nationalism, Africanism grew over the continent, it seems to me that black Africans wanted to show they also had something to contribute to the development of mankind's civilization.
"They found, therefore, something they could hold forth as genuinely African -- traditional healers and their wisdom, as imagined over the past."
As founder-chairman of the nation's only black-owned health insurance company, he says: "We don't recognize such rubbish."
Welcomed by some
But the Representative Association of Medical Schemes, representing 170 of the nation's medical insurers, has welcomed the proposal to form a regulatory council for traditional healers.
Faced with increasing demands for coverage of alternative forms of medical treatment, the association is eager to have a formal body with which to negotiate standards of training, practice and ethics before it decides whether to recommend including traditional healing.
Colleen Hendricks, chairwoman of the Cape Lobby for Health Freedom, also welcomes the proposal for an oversight council, but hopes it will not be too restrictive.
"We are really concerned the government is trying to over-regulate all these medicines in the same way the pharmaceutical medicines are regulated," she says. "We are just trying to make medicine affordable, not over-regulated, available and hygienic.
"I see healing as an orange, with all the segments as different facets of universal healing. The scientific model is one segment of the orange, which up to now has oppressed all the other segments and has been related to money, power and the marketplace.
"You can't through scientific eyes see everything. Traditional healing has a lot to do with the unseen world and that makes it much more difficult. The fact we don't understand these unseen roles does not mean they don't work."
The science of nature
In a laboratory on the campus of the University of the Western Cape, Jill Scott, a botanist and pharmacologist, is trying to establish which forms of traditional medicine have a scientific basis for working.
In a glass bowl she is using dune sage to make the sort of herbal tea that many Africans use to relieve chest infections.
The experiment is being funded by the Medical Research Council, part of a program of checking the curative powers of plants and herbs used by traditional leaders.
The outcome will be the first South African pharmacopoeia, or encyclopedia of the chemical and medical properties of the country's plants.
The immediate focus is on the 30 plants most commonly used in traditional healing. Already, two plants commonly prescribed by traditional doctors as painkillers -- salvia Africanus and eriocephalus Africanus -- have been found to be more powerful analgesics than Paracetamol.
Scott noted that many plant-based cures originated among the Khoi-San people who have lived in the flora-rich Cape for 20,000 years.
"They were extremely good, economic botanists," she said. "They relied entirely on what they found around them for food, medicine and so on.
"Their ability to distinguish varieties and subspecies is the sort of knowledge most contemporary botanists would be quite envious of."
Peter Eagles, the professor of pharmacology who heads the program, said: "There has always been this traditional healing system. Most of the drugs we have in the orthodox world came from plant medicine.
"I have the approach that whatever works to heal people, that for me is good enough."
Noting that only 30 percent of plants have been researched, he said: "If 70 percent of the plants have not been looked at and 30 percent have yielded such great cures, there must be something tremendous out there.
"If we find something like that it is dramatic, not for us, but for humanity."
Pharmacological 'free-for-all'
For the pharmaceutical industry here, research into traditional healing offers a source of new drugs to compete with the refined natural medicines being imported from the United States and Europe.
"At the moment it's a free-for-all. Everybody wants to make a fast buck," says Stewart Thompson, an advocate of holistic healing. "In homeopathic medicine, there haven't been any novel, commercial breakthroughs for the last 15 or 20 years.
"They are really looking seriously at the natural kingdom once again, where recently they literally went through an arsenal of synthetic substances."
Sindepe Spogter, secretary of the coordinating committee of traditional healers, knows of at least one cure the industry might like to get hold of -- a anti-impotence remedy "more powerful than Viagra."
"I am using it myself," he says almost boastfully, but refuses to name the natural ingredients lest Western pharmaceutical firms obtain the formula.
His committee, he said, supported regulation of traditional healers as a way of getting them "into the mainstream."
"We are health providers," he said. "We have our own standards. We have our own codes of conduct and discipline. Before any Western doctor arrived on the shores of this country, we were here."
Pub Date: 10/19/98