Research Projects

Mountain Doctors who refer to themselves as Rastas, Khoi and San, Sakmanne and other names wear mostly brown hessian sacks. They walk barefoot and grow their hair long as an indication of their African pride. Resident in the entirety of South Africa, they are most visible in the Western Cape where my study was located. Their brown hessian sack earned them “the Sackcloth people” label, a term that comes from Rastafarianism. They are African healers who harvest different herbs from natural spaces all over the country and beyond and sell them in city centres like Cape Town, George, Stellenbosch and many other areas the study interacted with. The study tracked the Sackcloth people’s philosophy and way of life, including healing methods and their relationship with the environment – through participant observation and in-depth interviews with members of the community. The sample consisted of mostly young men between the age of 18 and 30 and a smaller pool of women and men who were over 40 years old. 

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This study of Mountain Doctors had to explore the previous work of anthropologists and other social scientists on identity and culture, juxtaposing it with the Mountain Doctors’ projection of ubuntu, a social discourse that has also been theorised by social scientists. Ubuntu and I-n-I, a pluralistic understanding of the self, are discussed comparatively as grounded philosophies that Mountain Doctors pull from to construct their particular African identity.  The Mountain Doctors’ notion of self as a version of the African ontology of ubuntu, includes resistance to modernism. Thus, from Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ (1983), to caution on ‘culture as invented’ as argued by South African anthropologists (for example, Robert Thornton 1988) on the one hand; and on another hand the articulations of ubuntuby Mogobe Ramose (2005) and others, to how Mountain Doctors invent their cultural identity through ubuntu – my study provides a rich tapestry of etic and emic views on African identity. As my fieldwork shows, there is a tendency to restore ‘the right to have identities’ as a snowballing of creolisation that is in constant flux in search for essentialisation, even if temporary and era-specific. This means that Mountain Doctors pull from different indigenous groups to construct their identity. 

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This study demonstrates how the ideological aspects of making sense of identity influence the existential and cosmological view of life with specific reference to the Mountain Doctors. In an attempt to make sense of lived experiences the Mountain Doctors and I shared a crisis of ‘appropriate’ theorising. This crisis occurred in part because notions of resilience were intricately enmeshed with existential issues for both the researcher and researched, and I found myself wedged between potential representation of a power imbalance between researcher and participants. This is a situation of a researcher doing a study where the community has a strong opinion about my background in the context of resilience which is part of the identity ideology of the community. This ‘acute mutual judgement’ was further exacerbated by doing fieldwork during the Covid-19 pandemic where there was a blur between ‘participation’ and ‘observation’ in a general environment of fear over health, government regulations relating to travel, as well as general despair for regaining control over socio-economic life. 

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Assuming a mixed methodology approach, a combination of ethnography, grounded theory, engaged heritage institutions and archives, and ‘thick descriptive’ approaches were used. While these methods were useful, there are challenges that come with using only western approaches to explore sometimes contradictory African contexts. Decolonial methods, rooted in African thought are important for remedying this challenge. The study makes an original contribution to methodology by exploring ukuthunywa methodology, an approach found in African households and which the Mountain Doctors used to teach me their way of life in similar ways to how they teach each other. Ukuthunywa also helped ease some research challenges. This approach strips the researcher of their ‘elevated status’ and centers power in the hands of the participants. Ukuthunywa draws from ubuntu and requires that the researcher be in-service to the participants. Ukuthunywa experiences sent me on an unanticipated journey to disrupt and dismantle the representation of groups like the Mountain Doctors, western ontology and epistemology itself. 

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In addition to wrestling with constructions of the Mountains Doctors’ identity/ies and resilience in the thesis, I further explore their aesthetics, focusing on the significance of long, hair and hessian sack. The symbolism of their aesthetic varies from biblical, colonial and neoliberal resistance and influence and a desire to revitalise and reconnect with lost African practices. The discussion also extended to exploring the revitalisation of Khoi and San languages as dying indigenous African languages. Their symbolism and worldview incorporate their view of land as more than just a resource. For the Mountain Doctors land is a sacred reference point that anchors humanity materially and spiritually. The neoliberal valuation of land as a resource is perceived/interpreted as harmful to ecology and African spirituality. Their focus on African spiritual understandings of land challenges the proposed first African Amazon development in Cape Town. The development rubs up against a colonial wound, as the development is set to be erected around the Two Rivers Urban Park, the first site of colonialism in 1652. Mountain Doctors’ integration of symbolism, spirituality and resilience extends to the manner in which they guard flora and fauna for purposes of healing humans and repairing the environment as a source of healing. 

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Much of the Mountain Doctors’ knowledge is scrutinised or overlooked by people, institutions and by a colonial history that sees the contributions and experiences of indigenous people as inferior. This study tables afresh the questions of who has a right to theorise, create and share knowledge. It does this by showing important knowledge embedded in African rituals and beliefs, some even offer Mountain Doctors solutions to modern day struggles like poverty, unemployment and general deprivations of resources and opportunities. 

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In essence, this thesis wrestles with the complexities of identities, like how Mountain Doctors project their identity and meaning around being an 'African', 'Khoi' and 'San'. It also looks at how they construct resistance identities around critiquing of western hegemony, colonialism, capitalism and modernity. Through grounded theorisation the thesis acknowledges the social actor consciousness and critique of the world around them while critically examining the basis of the identities that they project as deserving recognition with conviction.

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The target audience for this research is scholars, students and communities interested in indigenous knowledge and decoloniality. Click here to read the full research report.