Zambia: The African Country Where STDs, HIV Are Seemingly Cured With Witchcraft And Herbs

 Belief in satanism is one reason. Witchcraft is behind it – visitors might be false prophets bearing false information.”

With three wives and an open manner, one chieftain says he is both a modern leader and a man of convention.

“We need traditional and modern methods then we could maybe reach the extremities we are not currently curing,” he said.

An academic study published last year by the University of Namibia found that up to 80 percent of Zambians used traditional medicine for their primary healthcare, using trees, shrubs and climbers to treat a range of diseases.

It said most healers were men and 90 percent had inherited their remedies from older family members, while the rest said they came from dreams and visions.

AIDS, though, said the chieftain, was a foreign import that for now lies beyond the reach of herbal remedies.

“We don’t know how or where it came from. We don’t know who brought it. Zambia was a clean country,” he said.

“Gonorrhea and syphilis – they are simple diseases that are treatable in traditional ways by drinking the roots of trees.

“With gonorrhea – it’s gone. With syphilis – it’s gone. This HIV-AIDS, even if you look for the roots, even if somebody says they can treat it, it’s a lie.”

He said chieftains like him had modernised their ways, and no longer practiced “cleansing”, a tradition whereby a man inherits and has sex with his brother’s widow.

“That’s all been stopped,” he said.

Sex with children was also in his sights.

Headmasters must report to the chief each December with a precise tally of pregnancies at their schools in a drive to cut under-age sex and mother-to-child HIV transmission.

“We want a girl child to be in school, not with a baby,” he said. “We had some bad practices and we are still frightened, we are still afraid – but we are very serious when it comes to our children.”

Patricia is one such child.

Three months old, she was born to an HIV positive mother, in a family of two wives, one husband and four children.

Her HIV status is not yet known so a local NGO, DAPP Zambia, has put the baby on precautionary anti-retroviral treatment to stave off possible infection. Her mother Matilda is on the same drugs.

Matilda, 38, is the only HIV positive person in her village, a handful of thatched huts with a dust track rutted by ox carts.

How did the first wife, 53-year-old Muleya, react to the second wife’s diagnosis?

“There is no division … In fact it united my wives even more,” said Spector Sialukowa, 55, gathered with his family outside their hut in the village of Zubadenda.

“Look at her,” said Sialukowa, smiling at his younger wife. “She’s beautiful and looking really quite well now. There is no fear here.”