Mafufunyana Digression--and the Making of Dictionaries

We learned in the previous essay that the OED decided to expand its linguistic base, beginning with the letter "M" in 2000. As a result, it included Macoute (named after the Tonton Macoute, the feared guard of the Duvalier regime), maginnis (an already obsolete Australian term for a wrestling hold), and mafufunyana. The word appears much more frequently as amafufunyana in Internet searches; but the OED was on the "m's" and this was a good candidate to allow the dictionary makers to expand their horizons. After all, it is a Zulu term, the dictionary says, and therefore it originates in South Africa. That land went through remarkable changes in the 1990s. One way to affirm those changes, I suppose, was to select a word from one of the native cultures that had a meaning in their traditional practices and then say it is an English word. So, the confluence of these factors led them to mafufunyana.

By searching out mafufunyana we not only are brought into the tiny world suggested by the OED, but we begin to enter into African traditional practices of religion in several states, from the Eastern Cape to the Limpopo Province, of South Africa. But then you have to learn something about South Africa, the languages of the country (there are now 11 official languages of that nation), the provinces (nine of them, some with rather new names) and the places where this traditional African religion flourishes. Thus, the OED, basic and somewhat unhelpful as it is, encourages us to open a door to a most amazing world.

The Limitations of the OED

But the OED screams out its limitations even as we begin to learn about a new word. In two of the quotations illustrating the use of mafufunyana, for example, other terms from this traditional Southern African practice are introduced, but neither of them has an entry in the OED. From 1963: "It is the igqira--the diviner. There are mafufunyana--evil spirits--in this house!" Or, from 1978: "A herbalist..said the guardian 'amakhosi' spirits had used Mr Nkohla T...as an agent to assault the evil 'mafufunyane' spirits which had possessed XXX..." So, I longed to find out about the igqira and the amakhosi, but the OED couldn't help. [Here is a treatment of amakhosi; I look at igqira in the next essay].

First, however, I realized the difficulty facing English-language dictionary makers today. Contemporary English is made up of the languages of the world, and just as the "American Empire" is stretching over the globe, the subjects of that Empire are "striking back" through their food, practices and other things which we want to use in our culture, and we want to use the "native" name for the thing as we use it. But then you run into the problem of where to stop. Once you have said that hara-kiri, for example, is an acceptable English word, though borrowed from Japan, what other Japanese words become "English" words? How about tokonoma? Well, we could just go down a list of hundreds of words. The same holds true for Yiddish words in English or, in fact, words derived from most other languages.

The OED's entry, then, into the vast spaces of African traditional culture and religion through the word mafufunyana may be more dangerous than the editors believed, because mafufunyana will not be content with just letting itself be brought into the language; it wants to bring along all its relatives. But once you let one in, by giving it a separate dictionary entry, how do you draw the line? Ultimately the English dictionary becomes a Zulu or Xhosa or Sepedi dictionary, for example, and we could lose ourselves in those worlds before we know it.

Opening the World of Mafufunyana

We can slightly pry open this world first by summarizing what the OED teaches us about mafufunyana and then looking at an article that uses the term, among many others, in describing religious practices in Limpopo Province (by the way, it used to be called Northern Province, but got its current name in Feb. 2002). From the OED we see that mafufunyana is both a disorder/mental affliction and the spirits that are supposed to be causing the affliction. Thus, we get the impression that it as a sort of generic term to capture the entire universe of the mentally afflicted person.

With that in mind, I would like to refer to an article by Karl Peltzer, "Faith Healing for Mental and Social Disorders in the Northern Province (South Africa)," Journal of Religion in Africa 29 (1999), 387-402. I do so not because the article is earth-shattering, but simply because it begins to identify mafufunyana with its pals. This article distills the results of interviews with about 190 faith healers, identified by two churches, in the Northern (now Limpopo) Province of South Africa. Basically Peltzer asked them what they did and how they spent their time. They were Christian faith healers, but, as with many things Christian in many parts of the world, Christianity is often a rather thin veneer placed over a swirling and gurgling traditional practice. Peltzer gives us a chart regarding the most common illnesses or problems treated by the faith healers. Among them were the following: 1. Witchcraft/sorcery. He introduces the terms sejeso (poisoning; sorcery); sefolane (poisoning; magic...what is the difference between sorcery and magic?).
2. Substance abuse and chronic diseases. No African equivalent terms, perhaps because cannabis abuse or smoking cigarettes, for example, might be something introduced recently by outsiders.
3. Children's diseases. Here he lists Lekoni/Themo (litt. little head); or Hlogwana (affliction of pulsating fontanelle)
4. Mental disorcers. Finally we get to the gold. He lists bogafi (madness), bolwetsi bja boroko (sleep disorder) and amafufunyane (spirit illness; caused by an ancestral spirit who wishes to possess the medium), p. 390. He lists several other afflictions and terms, but this suffices to illustrate my point.

Well, the symptoms of amafufunyana are irritability, self-isolation, "loss of mind" and inappropriate laughter. The causes listed? Demons and witchcraft. Well, what treatments are recommended by the faith healers? Peltzer lists four: "bathing with holy water, strong coffee, tea, and prayer," page 394. An interesting tableau indeed. This illuminating article, excerpted from a psychology text for Southern Africa readers, talks about mafufunyana as both an individual and a group phenomenon, with a different kind of treatment recommended...

Well, now that we have entered into the world of the mafufunyana and have seen it with some other afflictions, let's look at the world which creates and recognizes this disorder, in the next essay.

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