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Dr Edward C. Green

Senior Research Scientist in the School of Public Health, Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard University

A Death in Swaziland

Ted Green One day in February 2000, I was walking down the main street in Mbabane, Swaziland, with my best friend in all of Africa, who I will call Sam. We encountered a friend of Sam’s, a fellow journalist named Knowledge (his real name). Knowledge put his hands up to Sam’s neck and asked him, “How are your glands? Is that stuff helping?”

Sam looked embarrassed and said something like, sure, fine. I asked Sam if he was sick. He said it was just a little something and it was under control, then he changed the subject.

I never saw him again. Sam died of AIDS around Christmas of that year. I was living in Washington then, and he never wrote or phoned to tell me he had AIDS, or was even seriously ill. Had he told me, I would have found a way to get him antiretroviral drugs, as he must have known, and Sam would be alive today. Such is the magnitude of shame and stigma associated with AIDS in most of southern Africa, even today.

Swaziland now has the highest HIV infection rates in the world, edging out Botswana this year. Sam’s friend Knowledge died of AIDS in 2001.

But this is not about doom or gloom. This is about a man I shared some of my great anthropological adventures with. I met Sam in 1981, the year I was hired as an anthropologist to advise the Swaziland Ministry of Health. Right away we shared a fascination with witchdoctors and the possibility that people might acquire supernatural powers (maybe even us).

Amazingly, I was actually being paid by the US government that year to study the role of “traditional healers,” to find better ways to prevent and treat cholera and schistosomiasis. Sam quickly became my translator, key informant, “culture broker,” and co-investigator. As a journalist, he was already skilled in interviewing techniques. He also had a talent for putting interviewees at ease and getting them to open up and spill the beans. Swaziland is a traditional African monarchy—one of the last in Africa—and princes there do not necessarily open up to commoners.

Looking back over my field notes from 15-20 years ago, many warm memories return. There was the time Sam and I got up at 4 am to try to get a glimpse of tinzunzu water spirits, alleged to rise from the foam of the rapids of the Mbuluzi river to greet the newly initiated spirit mediums. The spirits are said to be translucent beings—you can see them, but also through them. They are only visible for a few minutes just before dawn, and you had to be invited to the spot by a ritual specialist (“gobela”) who initiates spirit mediums. Alas, the spirits didn’t appear that day, because, we were told, a fragment of a ritual had been overlooked, or improperly executed.

There was the time I got to serve as an assistant to a ritual specialist in an elaborate ceremony to rid a homestead of zombies. Speaking of which, one night we found ourselves driving through zombie country, Sam and me and our wives, listening to a Don Williams tape. We were heading home after a trip to Durban, South Africa and passing through the area around Lavumisa. This happens to be an area of unusually high agricultural output, due, it is said, to the great number of unsalaried zombies who slave away in the fields of evil, wealthy landowners who have raised men from their graves to till the soil in the dead of night. Since zombies are under the complete control of the sorcerer who raised them from the dead, they never complain, no matter how hard you work them. And since they are dead, they don’t sweat. This is how you can tell them from regular farmers. That and working only at night.

It occurred to Sam that we might veer off down one of the many little side dirt roads and maybe witness some nocturnal zombie labor ourselves, perhaps even take a picture with a flash. Of course, there was no way of anticipating how a zombie might react to a flash of light. As we were pondering this, Sam’s wife let us know from the backseat that she had been upset by all this talk from the start. She wasn’t sure these tales of the undead were mere superstition, and she didn’t want to find out. She informed her husband that their marriage would end the moment we turned off the main road. So we never got any closer to that particular story.

Sam and I shared a number of interests. In one bit of evaluation research I was asked to do, with Sam assisting as usual, we found ourselves assessing the impact of a cadre of female agriculture extension workers called Rural Health Motivators. RHMs were supposed to visit rural homesteads to teach women the rudiments of home economics and motivate them to keep tidy homesteads and breastfeed their babies for at least 18 months. We immediately uncovered trouble in the initial RHM selection process. Somehow many of these women came from towns, and they were more concerned with maintaining their fragile hairdos and not breaking their high-heels than with rural visits. When the slightest problem arose with transportation or weather, they would stay in the office and not venture out.

All, that is, except for one RHM we kept hearing about whose name was Gladness. Everywhere we went, rural women told us about Gladness. Neither rain, hailstones nor cyclones apparently kept this one RHM from visiting and motivating women. When there was no Ministry of Agriculture transport, she hitchhiked in cars, trucks, helicopters, motorcycles and bicycles. They said she hiked or “footed” (“kuhamba ngetinyawo”) for miles, traversing mountains and leaping across swollen creeks in the rainy season. She never failed to appear, and she regularly reached at least twice the number of homesteads expected of RHMs.

Sam and I had to find this woman. But she was never to be found in a regional or district office, and we kept missing her whenever we drove to homesteads where she was expected. We needed to know: what made this woman tick? Was there some way we could identify, and perhaps tap into, whatever motivated this woman and then somehow inoculate others with this Life Force of hers, thereby transforming our little Swazi kingdom into fully industrialized nation in a matter of months? In fact, we admitted to each other, we were hoping that a bit of her élan vital, or Life Force, might rub off on us, leading to a . . . spiritual transformation! Or at the very least, enhancement of our own élan vital.

We finally caught up with Gladness one hot afternoon in a remote corner of the country, near Mozambique, where tinzuzu water spirits are said to abound. Gladness agreed to talk with us, but since she was a busy woman, she’d only do this if we drove her to another remote area that she needed to visit. Getting a lift there would save her hiking over a mountain, thereby allowing her more time for rural motivation.

So we had a half hour drive during which to discover what made Gladness climb mountains in hailstorms. We interrogated her thoroughly. But we didn’t find out what we were looking for, at least there was nothing like a moment of divine revelation. Gladness just said things like, “These women expect me to visit. They need me. I can’t let them down.” How these simple convictions led to complex, super-RHM work we never figured out.

I left Swaziland in 1985 but I kept getting research assignments that brought me back there for a few weeks at a time. Sam always dropped whatever he was engaged in to help me in my research. Once we interviewed chiefs and princes. Another time we interviewed upper management of several leading businesses in the industrial park area. Sam was sure one general manager was a zombie. The guy kept very late hours.

I was invited back to Swaziland a couple months ago by the US Embassy. I was asked to talk about how Uganda managed to reduce its HIV infection rate by 66%. The authorities in Swaziland are now committed to replicating a Uganda-like AIDS prevention program, and it looks like I will be involved. I only wish Sam were here to help me try to save the next generation of Swazis.

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