[img] ?imgmax=800[/img]

Ernest Mabuda instructed his wife to turn over a handbag to the village chief. [Chief] Raphalalane looked in. The bag contained the torso of [Mabuda’s son] 21-month-old Theophillus Mabuda. The toddler’s severed head, arms, legs and genitals were found in Mabuda’s hut, neatly packaged separately, in plastic shopping bags (Maykuth, 1998).

Muti murder refers to killing with the purpose of harvesting body parts for use as traditional medicine or ‘muti’. Medicine murder is seen in several countries across Africa with ethnographic evidence going back to the early nineteenth century documenting the existence of the practice in southern Africa.

But some commentators suggest that South Africa is currently witnessing what is described as an ‘epidemic’ of occult related violent crime. It is believed that more than 300 people have been murdered for their body parts in the last decade in South Africa although some accounts put the figure far higher with one investigation reporting that there were 250 muti killings in the country’s Limpopo Province alone in a single year.

The actual frequency of muti murder is difficult to gauge because in a country with an exceptionally high murder rate – currently estimated at about 43 murders per 100 000 people, one of the highest in the world – it is likely that not every muti-related murder is recognised and recorded as such.

While predominantly a phenomenon of the country’s more rural provinces, police records indicate that several muti-related killings take place each year also for instance in urban Soweto (Nicodemus, 1999). In 2000 a commission of inquiry into witchcraft, violence and ritual murders was set up by the government after a spate of deaths in Soweto in which young boys aged between one and six had been kidnapped and murdered. ‘According to post mortem examination results, the boys were left to bleed to death after having their genitalsand thumbs cut off and their eyes gouged out’ (Flanagan, 2002).

An estimated 80 per cent of South Africans regularly use traditional herbs and medicines or muti (derived from umu thi meaning tree).

Of course not all sangomas (traditional healers) make use of human body parts as one of the ingredients in their medicines but those that do will place an ‘order’ with a person hired for this specialist purpose.
Sangomas seldom do the killing themselves.

The order will include not only specifications as to which particular body part or parts are required – testicles for virility purposes, fat from the breasts or abdomen for luck, tongues to smooth the path to a lover’s heart – but the very specific manner in which they are to be collected. The use of human body parts for medicinal purposes is based in the belief that it is possible to appropriate the life force of one person through its literal consumption by another. For this reason a victim is often carefully chosen – not just any person’s penis as a cure for male infertility, for instance, but that of a man with several healthy children.

Strangers or enemies are seldom the target of muti murders (Scholtz et al., 1997). On the contrary, victims are often blood relatives of those involved in their murder; it is not unusual for the victim to be the child of one member of a group involved in planning the murder. In a 2001 case in which a 20-year old mother, Nombovumo Mvinjana, had her facial skin removed with a scalpel and her genitalia, breasts, hands and feet cut off, probably while still alive, among the eight accused were her husband and her uncle (East Cape News, 2001).

It is believed that certain murder gangs specialise in muti killings. Unlike human sacrifice where death is the express purpose of the act, in muti-related killings, death is an anticipated and accepted by-product of the garnering of human organs but it is not the main aim. Indeed it is often preferred that the victim remain alive during the process.

When body parts, including internal organs, are removed while the victim is still alive it is believed that the power of the resultant medicine will be greatly enhanced. Harvested body parts are usually mixed with other medicinal plant matter and cooked. The product is sometimes consumed, but may also be carried about the person who aims to benefit from its powers or secretly smeared onto the body, clothing or included in the food of the person who is its target, such as a reluctant or abusive lover.

Prized body parts can command up to R10 000 ($1000) reportedly the current going rate for a human heart. Killers themselves, though, often find themselves at the bottom of the muti trade’s profit hierarchy.

In May 2006, Sipho Dube told the Johannesburg High Court that he was paid R50 for strangling a 5-year old boy and cutting off his ears, R100 for killing another boy and R150 for killing a boy whose blood he drew (The Star, 2006).
By styling himself as a traditional healer and supplying his own ingredients, Mabuda was effectively making a very common profit-oriented choice: cutting out the middle man.

Mashudu Mundzelele of Limpopo Province managed to escape from five people who sprayed him with pepper spray, dragged him into the bushes and discussed which parts of his body to remove. ‘The old woman started throwing bones on the floor and speaking in a strange language. She then instructed the men to start cutting off my right hand. As one of the men was busy cutting my hand, the other one said “lets cut off his tongue at once”. He took out pliers, put them in my mouth and attempted to pluck it out’ (Seale, 2006).

Nyelisani Sidimela was found with her lips sliced off. She survived but her boyfriend, with whom she was abducted, was found dead. His genitals had been removed. The body of Shonisani Thinandavha was found with the palm of her right hand, upper lip, left ear and both nipples removed.

While sex and sexuality are a recurrent theme in what the Jean and John Comaroffs (1998) have termed the ‘archaeology of the fantastic’, business and financial concerns feature equally strongly in. In one well-reported case a butcher obtained a severed ‘lucky’ human hand with which he would slap the meat in his butchery each day ‘as a way of invoking the spirits to beckon customers’ (Matshikiza, 2004).

It is said to be common for human skulls to be buried in the foundations of new buildings to ensure that business conducted there thrives, for body parts to be buried on farms to ensure good harvests and for severed hands to be built into shop entrances to beckon to prospective clients(Flanagan, 2006).

A human head is sometimes prescribed for a failing business: ‘If the business is not doing well, get a boy’s or a girl’s head – someone who has a future – and your business will have a future too’ (Dr Gordon Chavinduka, president of the Zimbabwean Traditional Healers Association cited in Nicodemus, 1999).

Headless bodies emerge from time to time – in shallow graves, hidden in bushes, floating in rivers. Jean and John Comaroff (1998) define occult economies as ‘the deployment, real or imagined of magical means for material ends’. They detail what we know, from historical and anthropological accounts, about the occult in Africa: it is not a form of primitive magicality or “animism”; it embodies a set of ‘normative convictions about moral order, social value and material equity’; it provides a ‘matter-of-fact repertoire of “first cause” explanations in the face of human misfortune or natural catastrophe’; it suggests a set of practical techniques that can be deployed by those with the necessary power and knowledge to do so (Jean and John Comaroff, 2004).

Muti murder is but one component of this interrelated belief system which underpins other magical phenomena also such as the appearance of ‘zombies’ and mythical dinosaur-like creatures, pyramid schemes and financial scams involving for instance the claimed ability to magically transform suitcases of paper into cash.

Allied to the conception of muti murder as a throwback to the past is the presentation of the phenomenon as part of an ‘African’ belief system which holds that the human person does not voluntarily choose to enter into human community, social relationships are not contingent but necessary and the person is consequently constituted by the social relationships in which they necessarily find themselves.

Individuals are not regarded as self-sufficient but as the products of the community. Therefore, ‘insofar as the cultural community constitutes the context or medium in which the individual person works out and chooses his/her goals and life plans, and, through these activities, ultimately becomes what he/she wants to be – the sort of status he/ she wants to acquire – the cultural community must be held as prior to the individual’ (Gyekye, 2002).

Within this context, some argue that muti murder is to be understood as propelled by the logic of sacrifice of a single human being for the greater good of the community.
What is particularly ‘African’ about this idea remains to be established – it is a logic which is universally compelling and is, after all, also the central driving narrative of Christianity.

Read More:
http://www.krepublishers.com/06-Special%20Volume-Journal/S-T%20&%20T-00-Special%20Volumes/T%20&%20T-SV-02-Hlth-Nut-Problems-Web/T%20&%20T-SV-02-043-08-05-Vincent-Louise/T%20&%20T-SV-02-043-08-05-Vincent-Louise-Tt.pdf