Hard lives and evil winds: Illness aetiology and the search for healing amongst Ciskeian villagers

This paper examines the explanations for illness used by Ciskeian villagers to account for conditions ranging from diarrhoea and tuberculosis to anxiety and hypertension. Explanations recognise the links between illness and hard physical labour, poor working conditions and poverty whilst also acknowledging supernatural grounds for affliction. The healing resources available to villagers, which are outlined here, include state-run health facilities, a large number of private biomedical practitioners, a variety of indigenous therapists—including religious healers—and a store of common knowledge. In keeping with recent developments within critical medical anthropology, this paper seeks to analyse illness aetiology and health seeking behaviour within the broad social and economic context of individual lives. In Ciskei, one of South Africaʹs former nominally independent homelands, that context includes high levels of unemployment, dependence on migrant labour earnings and on welfare payments, lack of infrastructure such as water supply and transportation and a significant degree of economic differentiation between households. Against this backdrop, individual case studies will be examined which will illustrate how degrees of powerlessness and lack of disposable income affect both explanations of illness causation and health seeking behaviour among Ciskeian villagers.