Tolerance: that’s my resolution

With the benefit of himdsight, I see that I should not have threatened the local sangoma for slaughtering goats in Melville

 

Neighbourhood watch may be the best suburban crime deterrent in the face of South Africa’s policing failures but looking over the wall can be an alarming experience. Not literally shocking, as in the electric fence deal, but in terms of what you might discover going on in secret next door.
For example, a plumber repairing a burst geyser was on a corrugated iron roof in Melville recently when he spied a dozen black, lacey suspender belts hanging on the neighbour’s washline. Though he almost fell down laughing at the sight, others in the hood complained non-stop until police raided a Chinese brothel in the drab house displaying the sexy laundry. “It was, of course, all happening at number 10”, said a serious man of Chinese extraction who lives in the same street, adding that numerals really matter symbolically in his culture. (So maybe there were ten black suspenders hanging on the line, okay?).
My guest house in the same culturally robust suburb is wedged between properties I hardly ever look into, never mind scan from the roof. The untoward events around my place have tended to involve animals more than humans lately. A couple of dogs that whine pitifully every Saturday in a bordering homestead seem to be baying at the moon in broad daylight, according to a concerned guest, and I recently had to track down a Polish-born cat catcher via the SPCA with a little help from the Johannesburg Zoo in order to set a trap for an abandoned and apparently heart-broken cat that sat bolt upright on our verandah in the middle of the night, screaming inconsolably. The guest who complained most about the din, a Colombian doctor working in human rights, watched the discarded pet being caught by the efficient and expensive cat-catcher but then, presumeably stricken by guilt, insisted it be treated with the utmost kindness. Although the cat was quite obviously destined for the pound, the good doctor decreed that, if not guaranteed a loving home, Ginerboy, as he had suddenly taken to calling it, should be released immediately and left to continue its nocturnal cacophony (he being due to check out that morning, ha).
But these were mundane, if confusing, matters compared to the goings-on in the silent home of my westside neighbour. Surprise turned rapidly to indignation when I discovered - while clinging from a wrought-iron stairway so as to peer into the next door yard in search of the source of strange and obnoxious smells - not only an old deck chair and a cracked pot of geraniums beside the shimmering pool but a severed goat’s head, eyes staring straight at The Melville House. Dangling on the washline nearby was the dead creature’s hide, covered in flies and held aloft by pink clothes pegs.
Less shocked than I might have been had I not written a book about Africa’s traditional belief system, I described what I had seen to my scandalised staff, urging them not to breathe a word to the visiting foreigners when they arrived for breakfast. Grabbing a copy of African Magic and brushing aside the manager’s wide-eyed warning of possible esoteric reprisals, I strode outside and down the street to confront my sangoma neighbour. The queue of people standing patiently in bowed misery a discreet distance from his door didn’t seem to mind me barging ahead of them and demanding to talk to the “doctor”.
Inside, stretched across the sitting room floor, lay the sleekest of python skins. It may not have been just the thought of so vast and deadly a snake that left me shivering in the October heat, but perhaps a frisson of fear at the arrival of a strange religion right there in my suburb.
A beautiful leopard complete with original head, tongue and once-deadly teeth covered the small sofa, its dappled splendour gleaming under a bare light bulb. The curtains were closed. A man in a dark suit entered, initially looking less than pleased to see me but shaking my hand and inviting me to sit on the leopard. Handing over a printed list of his cures while crouching on a low stool himself, the traditional healer waited for me to speak. I glanced at the list - which promised an end to impotence of various kinds, long-lasting happiness, business success against the odds, love potions to restore failing marriages, remission from terminal illness, and indeed “the answer for every problem” - before explaining that, after years of research, I understood his sangoma business a little.
He received the book with a loud clap, clearly delighted that the unexpected visitor respected his sacred calling. His smile faltered only briefly when I announced that severed goats’ heads were, however, unacceptable in a suburban garden and would have to be reported to health authorities if the killing did not cease forthwith.
Too cowardly to admit to being his next door neighbour, I pretended the local residents’ association had sent me on behalf of unnamed complainants.  (To be honest, despite atheist pretensions, I half-shared my staff’s fear of the supernatural repercussions that might arise from a confrontation). Absolutely no problem, the sangoma said: it would stop immediately. And it did. He called me almost daily for a few weeks afterwards to plead for 15 more copies of the book. But one day when I drove past I noticed To Let signs outside his house and realized he had gone. An estate agent told me he had been unable to pay the rent.
Suddenly as remorseful as the Colombian doctor who thought an ensnared cat could be silenced yet nevertheless enjoy a long and happy life, I regretted that I may have stopped the healer’s ritual slaughter but perhaps destroyed his practice in the process. What sort of sangoma can even claim the name without spilling blood? Why hadn’t I suggested the severed head go in his fridge; then supported him by encouraging my international and culturally-curious guests to visit his practice? They would have enjoyed his python skin, potions and magical convictions. They wouldn’t have blamed him for trying to heal the psychic pain of poor people who had zero chance of benefitting from Western psychology or mood enhancing prescription drugs. I had squandered a tourism treasure right on my doorstep – what a waste.
Thinking of the missing sangoma and the many undisclosed secrets of my hood, I’ve added “tolerance” with a capital T to my New Year’s resolutions, alongside “appreciate tradition in tourism opportunities” - and “spend more time on the roof”.