Introduction

These two quotations, both from commercial farmers from North West Province reflected contrasting viewpoints on the aetiology of diseases. Morule was president of North West Province Farmers Union — an organisation he believed could be an instrument for agricultural education and rural development. He described himself as a progressive farmer and believed that all Tswana stockowners held a modernist view of the world, in which superstitions and supernatural explanations derived from pre-colonial beliefs and traditions had disappeared. These beliefs included witchcraft and what ethnographers have termed ‘ritual pollution’ — the idea that people, most often women, could undermine human and animal health, and even kill, by being in an ‘impure’ condition. Motsisi, by contrast, was an elderly man in his 80s, who had worked for the government and accumulated savings to invest in livestock. In 2010 he had a herd of 75 cattle and rented a government farm. He used some biomedical drugs but also prepared medicinal herbs. He thought that many diseases arose from the environment, but women were responsible for a commonplace problem — the failure of animals to reproduce and their propensity to experience frequent miscarriags.