printIt is one thing to have voodoo for values, but what about a sense of propriety?
The N2 is a major highway in South Africa that starts in my hometown of Cape Town. A repulsed reporter at The Daily Voice snapped images of a traditional “healer” administering a treatment for bewitchment alongside the road, in full view of motorists careening down the highways. The shameless sangoma (witch doctor), whose fees are probably reimbursed by the medical scheme (in the New South Africa), elaborated on his methods. Prepare to be repulsed (if you click on the image).
“Liberals labor under the romantic delusion that the effects of millennia of development-resistant, self-defeating, fatalistic, atavistic, superstition-infused, unfathomably cruel cultures can be cured by an infusion of foreign aid, and by the removal of tyrants. … the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair. … (From Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.)
UPDATED I (Sept. 5): Gray Falcon, AKA historian Nebojsa Malic—one of the top authorities in the US on the Balkans (if you want the truth)—has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot on Amazon. Do read Mr. Malic’s insights, titled “A cautionary tale beyond black and white.”
UPDATE II: The common, communal and irrational practice described above should help explain to the perpetually perplexed West why the spread of AIDS/HIV is so hard to curtail in Africa. You know that the bum “doctor” does not use disposable equipment. Nor does he have an autoclave with which to sterilize his home-made enema.
Perforations are bound to happen. Infection likely to follow.
I don’t know what to say anymore.
“A laugh, if purchased at the expense of propriety, costs too much.”
Marcus Fabius Quintilian (made head of the ‘first public school of Rome’ – 88 AD)
Butt [pun and misspelling intended] sometimes you have to laugh – you just have to. I will not consider ourselves to be fully diversified until I I’ve seen (well… been told of) public enemas in lower (upper-crust) Manhattan.
Ugh! And yet there are people who openly bitch about WESTERN MEDICINE. Well, one gets what one pays for…
The nitwits who are products of modern education have been and still are brainwashed into believing that all non caucasian cultures are some sorts of noble savages who only need to be given large amounts of our money to become doubles for Ozzie and Harriet. The afore mentioned nitwits can’t even understand the obvious instances of jungle savagery in our own countries, much less those in the real jungles. much less
Africa is truly the “Dark Continent”. And it’s got nothing to do with the predominant color of the natives.
Yup “traditional African healers” received recognition as “legal medical practitioners” some years ago, which coincidently was coupled with a rapid rise in muti-murders – body part harvesting (victims preferably conscious). Now it’s becomming ever more common for body parts to be found missing off murdered children and elderly. As a child in SA I had an erratic fear of my fingers and toes ending up in a witchdoctor’s preserves bottle… but now that’s not such a silly fear anymore, and irrate natives are demanding for whites to ‘submit to traditional tribal customs’.