Retail isn’t for sissies. If you aren’t being robbed blind by shoplifters, then the shop assistants are. And if the wage earners aren’t supplementing their income through your stock, watch out for other income supplements like credit card “skimming” machines.
Among our less successful entrepreneurial ventures was owning a health shop. Apart from shrinkage, the other challenge we struggled to overcome was regulation, or rather, the lack of it. When we were in business, South Africa’s reputable health product manufacturers were fighting a losing battle against a flood of modern day equivalent snake oil salesmen.
Healthcare in SA is where modernity meets tradition. Now that long-overdue regulation is looming, friction is growing. My Biznews colleague Chris Bateman shares how highly-contested proposed regulation governing 250,000 traditional health practitioners reminded him of his own experiences of odd cultural beliefs.
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Chris predicts significant delays before anything gets passed into law. He writes: “The fast-organising, predominantly Nguni group of sangomas acting as herbalists, midwives, and traditional faith healers are pushing back, among them outright charlatans and con-artists who besmirch an ancient and sacred calling. My narrative is informed by having spent my early years among rural Zulu people and more recently, news-editing the South African Medical Journal. These random experiences illustrate the difficulties of integration, rendering me both sceptical and hopeful.
Take the Zulu mother who told a seasoned paediatric oncologist at the sprawling Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital in the heart of Soweto that the cancer spot in the retina of her child’s eye was a sign of imminent good fortune. She’d consulted both the elders and a traditional healer who told her the sparkle was actually gold and a portent of riches. Seen at a certain angle, the spot did indeed glint. But try as the oncologist might, her pleading came to nought. Much later, epitomising, one of the thorniest healthcare issues in third world countries – late presentation – the child was brought in, the eye completely diseased.
Again, the mother was against surgery, now a last resort, saying that if the child died she could not bury her without an eye. Impasse.
Surgeons at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town made history in December 2014 when they successfully transplanted a penis onto a young Xhosa man whose ritual circumcision had gone horribly wrong. But as further hopefuls began queuing up, the team encountered a donor problem – finding another black family willing to sign over their dead son or father’s penis. In Xhosa tradition, you don’t bury a man without his penis. So, resorting to another, perhaps less-ancient African tradition (‘n Boer maak ‘n plan) they constructed a look-alike organ on the donor cadaver, using flaps from the forearm, (with next-of-kin permission).
They expect a smoother path to addressing what is a cultural scourge – genital mutilation via unhygienic ritual circumcision. Counterpoint this with a workshop I took part in where traditional healers agreed with AIDS clinicians to counsel patients along Western lines and routinely refer them onwards. There are many more hard yards to be won.”
Some fascinating insights of Africa’s “Belindia” – a country which is like a merger between First World Belgium and developing India. And having lived in both sides, Chris Bateman possesses insights afforded to few other South Africans.
