On home remedies and black widows

By Phakamisa Mayaba

Few things will rattle a man into pondering his own mortality as effectively as a wary peer ambling through the gate to plead for ‘i-raad’. Potion, snake oil, quick fix – whatever term you give it is a footling concern compared to the reason why – let’s call him Ghost – is practically ramming down my door, stricken with worry in the frost-laden dawn of a winter Karoo morning.

In our younger years, I would have found a glaze-eyed, speech-slurring comrade probably bearing four or five quarts of beer – two under the armpits, one in his left and two in the stronger right hand. And, if the gods were uncharacteristically biased in our sorry favour, who knows, perhaps two giggling lady friends to make believers of us yet. Today, though, a raad is the thing he needs.

The partner he’s with has, of late, grown particularly moody, prone to shrieking outbursts or sitting cross-legged in a corner sulking. Standing at the kitchen sink, she casts lynching stares in his general direction, which could be ignored were it not for the utensils lying before her. A spoon, a glass, a fork – formidable weapons in the hands of anyone, let alone an angry woman.

Meanwhile, no point in beating about the bush, so Ghost plays open cards. In a Howard Cossell-esque confession, he confesses that has not been quite the man he was a few years ago when he and his partner first met: he in his mid-thirties; spontaneous, always game, always ready to – in the lyrics of Marvin Gaye – ‘get it on.’ She: a rather loud, assertive woman whom he immediately liked because nobody else could scold him into line like her threatening ‘voetsek’ could. Unlike his exes, she also didn’t burn any of his pots – instead, she cooked palatable meals and made the almost-scrounge takings from his piecemeal ‘tenders’ go a long way.

There’d been only one sure way he could get her to take it easy, but years of smoking, drinking and no exercise mean he’s no longer quite as reliable in that department either – thus the deteriorating domestic situation. At the clinic, he says, libido-enhancing ‘boosters’ are dispensed to chronic diabetes patients and others with legit medical conditions — not alcies who’ve brought the said deficiencies upon themselves.

So could I please recommend a raad? The normal translation of this Afrikaans word is ‘advice’, but in this context it’s more of a remedy, often acquired from a traditional healer. If you knew your way around the veld, you’d pluck it from the ground. Also, it comes imbued with cultural connotations; the natural medicine of the forebears long before the pharmacists and the over-the-counter pills and cough syrup. Popular examples include umhlonyane (African Wormwood), precisely the fortification that the ancestors supposedly prescribed against anything from headaches to flu, depending, of course, on how you choose to take it.

Ikhala, bitteraalwyn, is a good detoxicant, but in the Karoo, the vastness of these fields of succulents will have you poring through a labyrinth of species. There’s the universally known Aloe ferox, which fetches good money in foreign markets. The wild stuff that resiliently grows among the cliffs, goats and rocks is the pinnacle, even protected under the nation’s laws. This green gold would be inaccessible weren’t it for it’s more accommodating domesticated cousins. But, as I soon learnt in a recent exchange, the uses are not always a one-size-fits-all and depend on the species in question.

Intelezi, a type of aloe growing in a yard in Colesberg. Image: eParkeni.

Me: Yes, said you wanted aloe? Here it is. Take as much of it as you need.

My client: Nha, this is intelezi, used to bath, perfect to wash away the bad mojo.

Some of these remedies are growing in my yard, a legacy of my late mother. Having grown up in a village in the former Transkei, she was pretty au fait with their uses. She would boil kankerbos (Sutherlandia frutescens) — nearly as tall as the devil’s fork fencing – to maintain good gastrointestinal health. Umfino, wild spinach, went well with the pap.

Wild garlic, I heard at the SA Museums Association conference in Bloemfontein last year, may also come in handy for Ghost’s manly woes. You know, to keep the better half happy, cooking dinner and not having her eyes alternating between him and the contents of the kitchen sink. There was also green marog, Amaranthus cruentas or simply utyutu, an edible, nutritious spinach-like plant which I often dismissed as just another weed until writing this article. And in my uneducated view, exercise was the gold standard to stave off the curses of debauchery and getting old.

Other than that, I couldn’t be of much help. Lulamile Banjwa could. Bra Feti – because you’re nobody without a sobriquet here – was a freelancer for The Advertiser (before the ‘Graaff-Reinet’ prefix), a protégé of the late Peter Westoby, a maverick newshound and photographer in the days of Toverberg Indaba. They often worked together, with bra Feti sometimes doing some freelance gigs for the national broadcaster, providing a ‘black perspecive’ on radio.

He has yet to excavate and digitize the reels of video footage that are still somewhere in his garage. He also needs to get around to some sort of documentary on the life and times of a man known in Colesberg and surrounding towns as Tat’ uGcomfo, the colossal traditional surgeon who’s made generations of Xhosa boys into men. This, Bra Feti says, is something he needs to hop on fast before time has run out for us all. The bush surgeon’s long history is a trove, and he will never be able to forgive himself if he, Banjwa, does not do something to preserve those decades of institutional knowledge.

Former freelance reporter Lulamile Banjwa. Image: eParkeni.

For now, though, his time is spent researching and growing organic medicines. At one point, they’d got some funding to grow Moringa on a plot of land near the N1. Considered a versatile health medicine, the plant is widely incorporated in everything from skin care products to weight-loss diets.

That N1 project finally fell through, leaving Banjwa to pack it in and do his thing at a smaller scale from home. In his garden, he says, you’ll find eucalyptus, all of the aforementioned plants, some black pepper vines and a small machine which he uses to grind up his harvest and compress the contents into tablets.

He says there’s a little money to be made from this. Initially, I didn’t really buy it until I discovered that the green marog, which I’d sometimes dismissed as a troublesome weed, fetches more than a haul of regular spinach or Swiss chard. Now ain’t that something the local folk can think about as a side hustle?

FEATURED IMAGE: Kankerbossies growing in the author’s yard — a legacy of his late mother. 

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Phakamisa’s website, eParkeni. Used with permission.