The healer is embedded in the southern African landscape and his or her world is not confined to the human, but is multi-species and trans-ethnic. The material logic of magic in healing uses parts of plants and animals and minerals such as ochre as intrinsically active agents. The sangoma feels – dreams (-phupha [isiZulu], -toro [Sesotho-Setswana]), senses, or ‘hears’, (-zwa [isiZulu], -kwa [Sesotho-Setswana]) – that things like animals, plants, stones and other parts of nature, including the landscape, have agency: they act and can be guided, but they are not inert ‘ingredients’ or tools. By contrast, in the popular imagination muti herbs and animal parts are inert substances, or materials, that healers use as a medical doctor uses pharmacological chemicals or prosthetic devices. Instead, in bungoma, these items speak directly to the healers and their patients, not through a biological or physiological process, but as an intangible presence. This is what connects the healer, the patient and nature and leads them to the therapeutic process.

A world beyond the human: The multi-species trans-ethnic world of the healer

A healer's use of a large beetle (Brachycerus ornatus, Red-spotted Lily Weevil) and the beetle's food plant, the poisonous bulb known as ‘Bushman's poison bulb’ (Boophone disticha or Ammocharis coranica) illustrates this transcendence of ethnic and even human boundaries. These cultural practices link a species of beetle, a plant and specialised healing practices that transcend the ethnic, political, racial, and linguistic boundaries of San (|Xam, among others), Khoe (‘Koranna’, ‘Hottentot’), Bantu-speaking peoples and even southern Africans of European ancestry (see Watt and Breyer-Brandwijk 1962 for the variety of plants used across all ethnic groups). These relationships extend over considerable historical time and are embedded in a landscape that they help to shape and which, in turn, presents possibilities and constraints for human dwelling (Ingold 2011, 2012).