I found myself in Durban, South Africa not long ago with time on my hands and nowhere to go. This is a rare moment for a travel writer on a press trip. Usually time is spent waddling on and off busses that take us in tight groups to places like cow farms in the middle of nowhere that happens to be owned by a tourism minister’s brother or a grove of trees lovingly planted by some power official’s wife.
So when the chance comes for a writer to get off the bus and simply keep going, you take it and don’t look back. In this case, the place was Durban, a city of 3.5 million people that is bordered by a clean and comely beachwalk that goes on for miles. The path is peopled with mothers in colorful scarves that look like Aunt Jemima ads. They were laughing freely and joking as they collected plastic bottles and took inpromptu showers under the nozzles installed to wash off the sand.
And there are buskers on this route but they come in the form on groups of young boys who dressed as Zulu warriors and jumped about in threatening stances to the infectious beats of drummers. Cafes and ice cream parlors lined this path as well and I could have been in Coney Island if they sold hot dogs and those Zulu boys were gesturing hip hop numbers instead.
But this was Africa, not Brighton or Blackpool, and I wanted to get my full Africa’s worth for my day without handlers. The moment called for magic.
In South Africa, black magic is big. The arts are under the trained hands of “sangomas,” who inherit these skills and are held in high regard for what their magic can do. It requires knowledge of “muti,” the powers of herbs, bones, carcasses, shells, rocks, dirt and tiny dead creatures with magic that comes together in potions dictated by the ancestors.
Finding a worthy sangoma is not easy. You cannot just ask for this at a street pharmacy. So off I went to a spot I managed to find only on one map: the muti market.
Out on the edge of the city in an industrial section marked by the confluence of parkways, the muti market was far and forbidding. You had to cross rivers of freeways to get to it and my search for it came with warnings like, “you do not want to go there alone! Be careful! Watch your things or they will disappear!”
Perfect, I thought. It’s a real muti market. The only other one I have been able to visit is in the bowels of downtown Johannesburg, but well worth braving the caveats for the photos alone. And then there was that powder I bought …
I found the muti market near an underpass on a squalid acre of dirt marked by stall upon stall of muddy mushy slime in jars, piles of sticks, mounds of stones, strings of dead rodents hanging from eaves of tin, goat heads rotting in the sun. Women worked in odd rhythms, beating rocks and sticks into powder. Cameras were forbidden here, although I managed to get in a few shots on the sly. There were few shoppers on the path. And I clearly stood out as not of the muti culture.
I stopped at a stall and asked a few questions. The muti man did not speak English but an associate tried to translate. I asked for something that would bring luck or money, and the muti man laughed. He could not help me, despite the wolverine like creatures with teeth hanging from his roof.
But his assistant told me of a true sangoma whom I could talk to and volunteered to take me there. Her “office” was a few blocks away, near the Victoria Market that sells souvenirs. I followed him into a building that had one crowded elevator that took forever to show up and would take a little luck to not break down along the ten floors up.
I passed ramshackle rooms of workers, sewing mostly. Africa sweatshops. Surprisingly, this sangoma spoke some English and welcomed me into her bright, windowed, clean quarters lined with lit candles but no furniture. She led me into a padded room behind a curtain, had me remove my shoes, then picked up what looked like a Colobus monkey’s tail and a box of jax.
She asked me what I wanted. I told her and she proceeded to put pepper in her nose. A few snorts later the ancestors started talking to her. She threw the jax – bone fragments, small cockle shells, a rock with a red string around it.
Your ancestors are with you all the time, she said. Do you feel the weight on your shoulders? They are sitting on you. This one, it means you are lucky and successful, don’t you see it is smiling? She pointed to a small spotted conch-like shell that seemed to be smiling at me. And this one – she pointed to the red stringed rock – this one is no good and you are trying to run from it.
Yes, perhaps that is true, I told her. She seemed pleased. And then asked me for 100 rand – the equivalent of about $12. She told me that her potions cost up to 5000 rand but I could pay her what I wanted to pay. She told me she would make me a cream that I would have to wear on my face day and night but it would ensure good luck and make me attract good things. But I would have to come back tomorrow. Big mistake in muti land. Something told me that as much as I would like to wear magic attraction cream on my face and watch the luck materialize all around me, I would not be coming back tomorrow.
Still, that shell was clearly smiling at me. Sometimes just a little magic is enough.