Reconstructing Mchape '95: AIDS, Billy Chisupe, and the Politics of Persuasion

Abstract

This article re-examines the case of Billy Goodson Chisupe of Malawi, who in 1995 claimed to have discovered a cure for AIDS, and distributed the cure, at no charge, to nearly a million people. Existing interpretations of these events fail to recognize their significance; the mass movement to Chisupe reflected neither the ‘inevitable’ expression of a cultural pattern nor a public demand for ‘moral purity’, as Schoffeleers and Probst have theorized. It is argued here that the Chisupe affair can be explained not as ‘mass hysteria’ but as the product of rational fears (of AIDS), calculations (of the probability that someone like Chisupe might be ‘real’) and desires (for a chance to speak openly about inequality, politics, and the threat posed by disease). Chisupe's message – about inequality, and respect for African ‘tradition’ and science – is the crucial missing link in the existing portraits of the Chisupe affair, and that there are potential political and public health implications to the failure to understand the appeal of that message.

In the tense summer of 1994, an old man in the south of Malawi had a dream in which two men told him to boil the bark of a certain tree, and with its waters cure his nation of AIDS. It was mid-August, and Billy Goodson Chisupe did as he was told. People came by the truckload: from the north, and from the lake, and from Zambia and South Africa, and, some said, even from America. By February, his little village had become a city; on some days, fifteen thousand people came to drink their cupful. By late spring, some three hundred thousand, and perhaps as many as a million, had come to try Chisupe's cure.

Twelve years have passed, and we still understand almost nothing about why they came. We do not understand what they expected, or whether those expectations were met or disappointed; we do not know why it was this cure, among the many that are ‘discovered’ each year in Malawi, that attracted such a following. This article is an attempt to answer some of those questions.

Proportionate to its size, the Chisupe affair has not been widely documented. It is the subject of a mere five articles; of those, only two appear in academic journals, three are authored by affiliates of the same faculty, and one is less than six pages long. Nevertheless, those academic treatments that have appeared have been authored by figures of considerable prominence, and the subject has thus been the beneficiary of sophisticated theoretical attention.

Writing in 1999, the anthropologist Peter Probst explained the Chisupe affair as ‘the expression of a distinct cultural pattern’.1 Chisupe's cure came spontaneously to be referred to as mchape, the generic name in Malawi for a purgative, but also one that suggested, Probst argues, a link in the public imagination, if not in substance than at least in form, with a long record of witchfinding movements. These movements, often originating in present-day Malawi and spreading across southern Africa, were first documented in the 1930s by Audrey Richards.2 Richards noted that the witchfinders at issue ‘appealed because they presented a dogma that satisfied native belief, while their ritual contained many superficial features of the white civilization’:

The witch-finders came as well dressed young men, not as wrinkled old native doctors (nganga) in greasy bark-cloth. They worked in the open and lined up the natives after the manner of an official taking a census. They sold the medicine in stoppered chemist's bottles rather than in dirty old horns pulled from a skin bag … . Phrases reminiscent of Christian teaching were also used. The witch-finders addressed the villagers with a preliminary sermon, a technique quite foreign to the native nganga, and stressed such ideas as the washing of sins. Kamwende (the mythical leader and founder of the movement) descended into the grave and rose again, and was expected to reappear at a second coming.3

It is Richards’ description of this ‘clever blend of old and new’ – of ‘white civilization’ and ‘native belief’ – that provides the most useful analogue to the Chisupe affair, in which ‘foreign’ concepts (scientific ‘dosing’ of medicines, for instance, which is not typical of Malawian traditional healers; pre- and post-testing to demonstrate the effectiveness of a drug, and an understanding of AIDS that incorporates the concept of the ‘viral load’4) are displayed alongside home-grown ideas, like the belief in disease as punishment for moral or spiritual pollution.5 Thus an understanding of ‘mchape '95’ as emblematic of a particular cultural and historical pattern is undeniably useful: it helps us to understand, at least in part, why the public perceived Chisupe's cure as legitimate.

And yet the witchfinding link, helpful though it is, provides only a partial explanation of the events of 1995. A fuller portrait would reject the suggestion that those events were the ‘inevitable’ expression of a cultural pattern, and require answers to three crucial questions: why it was this mchape, of the many ‘cures’ proposed each year across Malawi, that people sought; why the mass movement to Chisupe happened when it did; and why it was that the cure captured the public imagination so widely and so steadily for as long as it did?

The Dutch anthropologist Matthew Schoffeleers has made the most significant attempt to provide a comprehensive theoretical framework within which to understand the Chisupe affair. Building on the work of J. C. Chakanza and drawing heavily from frameworks proposed by Joe DeGabriele, both affiliates of the theology faculty at Zomba, Schoffeleers argued that AIDS represented, in the public imagination, the ‘moral decay of the nation’, and mchape ‘had come to symbolize and initiate a state of moral purity’.6

But the argument that the Chisupe affair was about a search for ‘moral purity’ becomes problematic in light of the available historical evidence. We can make this case on three levels. First, the original message was not consistently about morality, though that claim has formed the basis for the academic consensus on Chisupe. Moral and behavioural directives were added to Chisupe's narrative at a later date by the government, and that revised narrative was reinforced by a succession of Christian authors.7 In the words of one relative distributing mchape at the village, Chisupe

signed [a pamphlet containing moral directives] because the government said‘don't say that, that, that, but add another story, because if you say that, peoplewill be going without a condom, and [sharing] razor blades and injections’.Really, though, the old man doesn't believe it.8

In the initial vision, the medicine could both cure and prevent AIDS; condoms would have been superfluous. Moreover, for Chisupe, disaster was the inevitable result of disobedience to the ancestors; condoms, in this case, would have been no antidote.9

Second, not only did the morality message play little part in the original claims, it played little part in the public discussion that followed. The message Malawians embraced was not that suggested by the revised narrative (mchape as cure, but only if patients were faithful). Rather, public understanding of the promise changed over time, from mchape as one unexpected, God-given ‘get out of jail free’ card to mchape as cure plus freedom for life (and permission to pass the cure on through intercourse).10 Further to the second point, historical memory of the Chisupe affair suggests that morality was not a significant part of the discussion: respondents remembered, with remarkable consistency, a particular narrative of Chisupe's dream (black ancestors, tree, medicine, rules) and a particular narrative of the experience (long lines, plastic cups, subsidized transport). In neither memory does there appear any reference to the morality message that ‘pilgrims’ supposedly craved.11

A third problem likewise casts doubt on the validity of the claim that the Chisupe affair was about a search for ‘morality’. Schoffeleers builds the argument on the basis of a claim that the colour ‘red’ is typically employed in African religions as a means of ‘mediat[ing] between opposed categories, the latter being represented by the colours black and white’. Drawing from the work of Victor Turner and Anita Jakobson-Widding, Schoffeleers argues that the ‘red’ mchape thus represented a ‘third truth value’ that allowed pilgrims to ‘annul the distinction between true and false, and thus negate rationality’.12 Yet the ‘sacramental statement’ argument becomes particularly problematic in light of information suggesting that the medicine was not definitively understood to be ‘red’. A social anthropologist working in the north of Malawi conducted a survey of 179 mchape drinkers, and found that ‘Most did not agree as to exactly what mchape was – two-thirds placing it on the dark spectrum in terms of its color, while the other called it “white” or “pink”.’13 Schoffeleers seems to have been unaware of the anthropologist's work, though it appeared in print a full two years before Probst's article, which Schoffeleers did consult. Thus not only were mchape drinkers not principally ‘pilgrims seeking salvation in a moral sense’, as Schoffeleers argued, the medicine they drank did not play the kind of sacramental role that it was said to have played.

To explain the Chisupe affair as a national quest for ‘moral purity’ is, in light of the evidence presented above, highly problematic. Moreover, the very need to lean on religious frameworks derives from an unsteady idea: that the ‘moral crusade’ concept was critical, as Schoffeleers argued, because ‘the phenomenon of Chisupe is not easily understood, certainly not when looked at from a purely rational viewpoint’.14 The pages to follow vigorously disagree with that contention, and argue that failing to see the Chisupe affair as the product of rational action is not only dismissive, but creates a barrier to understanding what happened. As will be argued in the postscript, the consequences of miscategorizing mass movements such as this transcend the academic, and can be, in the context of AIDS, particularly dangerous.

The argument presented here rejects the idea that the mass movement to Chikamana village was the ‘inevitable’ expression of a cultural pattern, as Probst would have it, or a public demand for ‘moral purity’, as Schoffeleers has written. Rather, the Chisupe affair can be explained as the product of rational fears (of AIDS), calculations (of the probability that someone like Chisupe might be ‘real’) and desires (for a chance to speak openly about inequality, politics, and the threat posed by disease). Mchape '95 was not, as one National AIDS Control Programme official labeled it, ‘mass hysteria’. Chisupe was no bystander to religious passions, no peasant swept up in a moment of crisis. He conscientiously constructed mchape '95, and deliberately politicized it. Mchape '95 became what it became for three reasons: because people were afraid, because people believed it might work (in the biomedical sense, not merely in the cathartic sense), and because Chisupe gave voice to popular frustration with the conglomeration of Western and government agencies and individuals at the head of the national response to AIDS.

To make the case, the pages that follow draw on a range of new information, including some twenty-three interviews conducted with informants from eight critical groups of actors, from government officials to public health scientists to young Malawians who drove their relatives to Chisupe. The argument builds on a comprehensive survey of the academic literature pertaining not only to Chisupe, and draws upon archival sources from Chancellor College at Zomba and on a comprehensive collection of journalistic accounts from newspaper archives in Malawi and abroad.15 Building on that information, I first present the story of the Chisupe affair: the dream, the mass movement, the religious reaction, the government response, and, finally, the demise. Next, I examine the Chisupe message – about inequality, and respect for African ‘tradition’ and science: this is the crucial missing link in the existing portraits of the Chisupe affair. The conclusion argues that there are potential political and public health implications to the failure to understand the appeal of that message.

The Story

The dreams had been coming for a year. Coming and going, going and coming. Until August, when the biggest of big dreams came to Billy Chisupe, the Big Dream (malota wamkulu) that would change everything. Two men, one of whom Chisupe recognized as his maternal uncle (malume), appeared in the night, dressed in black, and asked Chisupe if there was ‘a sickness for which there is no medicine’. Chisupe told them about AIDS. But the spirits told him it was a ‘lie’: ‘in the whole world’, they said, ‘there is no disease without a cure’.16 The spirits led Chisupe to a tree in the forest, and told him to cut the bark from the four cardinal directions. They brought Chisupe home, and showed him how to prepare the cure by soaking it in water. When Chisupe drank the medicine, he felt ‘a sensation throughout [his] whole body’, he said, ‘just like drinking a cup of cold water on coming back from the fields’.

Chisupe awoke the next morning and went in search of the tree from the dream, which he found, though the marks from the previous night's journey had vanished. Returning home, Chisupe poured a libation of flour, and asked the spirits for further guidance. They returned in a second dream, and told Chisupe that the medicine was to be distributed free of charge, in specific dosages, and only on his property. If Chisupe adhered to the spirits’ rules, the medicine would, they told him, both cure and prevent AIDS. 17 Send your patients for testing before and after they drink the medicine, the spirits said, and you will see that the cure has worked.18

The spirits directed Chisupe to ‘help people’. Chisupe took the responsibility seriously, and offered his cure to any who wished to try it. Word of the cure travelled quickly, the slow trickle of villagers shortly became a rush of thousands. In all, between three hundred thousand and one million people are estimated to have visited Chisupe; in some weeks, between three and ten thousand people came each day, and for several months, daily crowds of one thousand were common.19

If it was a dream that delivered the cure, it was the press that delivered the crowds. The Malawi Broadcast Corporation interviewed Chisupe on 28 February on a show called the Morning Basket, propelling him from anonymity to instant fame.20 The influential South African radio station ‘Channel Africa’ broadcast Chisupe's vision across southern Africa. And even the international news media picked up the story. Widespread belief in the possibilities of the cure was nourished by the press. Reports of miracle cures appeared on the pages of every major newspaper in Malawi: patients who had been ‘too weak to walk’ now claimed to be healed, and several ‘reported feeling better after taking the medicine for two days’.21 The Daily Monitor gave prominent place to the story of one Margaret Chisuse: ‘people say the herb doesn't work’, her ‘elated’ mother said, ‘but I am here to testify that it cures. She can now walk, [and] cook nsima, a thing I never expected to happen.’22 And distributors at Chisupe's compound told of ‘a gaunt man from Zambia who had taken the medicine two months before, and who returned to inform Chisupe that he now tested negative’; there were, they said, ‘many’ like him.23 ‘Though we have no proof,’ said one bystander, ‘what we are seeing with our own eyes is that people who are taking this drug, they are being healed.’24

Newspapers fixated on the sheer volume of traffic, and on the strange convergence of rich and poor at Chikamana village, noting the presence of ‘expensive limousines’ and ‘ministerial Mercedes’ alongside the array of tractors and minibuses, oxcarts and pushbikes, government vehicles and ‘lorries loaded to the breaking-point’ (Figures 1 and 2). The national railway sent an extra train carrying a thousand people to the cure. And someone, to the great amusement of a reporter on duty, called The Nation bureau in Lilongwe from the United States asking about ‘connecting flights’ to Chisupe's region.25 The line of cars and trucks headed for Chisupe's compound stretched for miles; some estimated a twelve-hour wait, and this after, for some, more than twenty hours in the back of a pick-up. Once they arrived, patients waited for hours, and sometimes days, in lines that deracinated all of the surrounding fields. Seventeen oil drums replaced the original bucketful of liquid, and Chisupe enlisted the help of a dozen or so young male relatives to serve the crowds.26

The constant flow of traffic created what one New York Times reporter called a ‘boom-town atmosphere’ in Chisupe's once unnoticed village. Carpetbagging vendors set up stalls to sell fish and nsima, drinking water, and plastic cups for drinking the medicine, all at vastly inflated prices (as much as five times the local average). Children set up road blocks and demanded a few kwacha in payment from passing cars; locals jumped at the chance to push stuck vehicles out of the mud, demanding a standard five kwacha apiece for their services (and returning nightly to water the road).27

Prospective patients travelled to Chisupe's compound from every region of the country, and indeed from every country in the region. They came from every sector of society: among their ranks, journalists found clergymen and politicians, prostitutes and businessmen, students and villagers, children and the elderly. Most were men, and most were urban; some 15 per cent of the total urban population of Malawi is estimated to have made the trip, an indicator not only of the relative distribution of wealth, but also of the relative prevalence of HIV amongst the urban middle class.28 It was a long and expensive journey, and people soon began demanding, often under threat of strike or riot, transport from their employers. Many employers, among them The Nation newspaper and Chancellor College, acceded to their workers’ demands. Entire schools and offices shut down, often for several days, as thousands of teachers and civil servants travelled south in large groups to drink Chisupe's medicine.29

Although several major churches refrained from public comment, reflecting a general reluctance to question the values of ‘African culture’, evangelical communities were forthright in their criticism of Chisupe and his followers. 30 A regular religious feature in the Daily Times carried thinly veiled references to Chisupe across two weeks in March, imploring readers to ‘keep [them]selves safe from false gods’, and begging them ‘not to play with immorality’ – as, for instance, through an AIDS ‘vaccine’ – ‘but to avoid it’.31 An editorial in a major Malawian daily declared that Chisupe was ‘not speaking according to God's word’:

There is a conflict here between God and Satan. Our heavenly father says ‘Do not communicate with the dead. The dead know nothing and they have no part in what happens under the sun.’ The enemy of God, the devil says, ‘The dead know something, they still have love for you and can inform about the cure of the world's most terrible disease – AIDS.’ If you subscribe to the devil's school of thought and go for ‘Mchape’ you will surely be believing the devil's lies and thus worshipping the devil instead of God who says, ‘The dead know nothing.’32

Religious leaders couched their opposition to Chisupe in similar language, arguing that the Bible prohibited ancestor-worship, witchcraft, and communion with the dead.33 Several evangelical denominations issued official condemnations. Among these, the Nkhoma Synod of the Central Church of Africa-Presbyterian (CCAP) resolved to excommunicate mchape drinkers at its annual meeting in mid-April. Members of some Seventh Day Adventist churches remember explicit admonitions from the pulpit against going to Chisupe. And the Assemblies of God, among others, declared that the ‘only healing is from the word of God’. 34

Despite this criticism, people – including members and officials of all of the aforementioned churches – continued to go to Chisupe, and employers continued to subsidize their transport. Two groups of employers were, in this regard, particularly conspicuous. The presence of medical professionals, first, signalled to crowds that Chisupe's claims to medical efficacy were still in play. Truckloads of health workers – and, more notably, health officials – went to try the medicine, among them fully half of the staff of one northern hospital; large groups of nurses from Zomba and Machinga; the head of a northern district AIDS office; and ‘one Western aid agency's entire AIDS staff – counsellors included’. Most conspicuously, official trucks from the Ministry of Health and the National AIDS Control Programme brought employees and ministers to drink Chisupe's medicine.35 Next to this first group, the presence of government officials and bodies signalled that the medicine would at least ‘not harm’.36 The government never said definitively that the cure was ineffective.37 Ministers and other officials drank the water openly in public, and their appearances, widely reported in the press, were understood to reflect tacit support for Chisupe at the highest levels. Local government offices sent their staffs, often in official cars; in one northern town far from Chisupe, the local Admark (agriculture), Escom (electricity), Forestry and Water bureaus all sent patients. Government ministries, among them the Malawian Army, the Police, the Reserve Bank, the City Council of Lilongwe, the Parliament and others, used public funds to provide transport for their employees to drink mchape.38 Moreover, by mid-spring, government-provided latrines, wells, and security – justified as responses to security and health threats posed by the large crowds – seemed to legitimate the medicine and the man.39

The tacit endorsement of Chisupe's cure by health agencies and government officials, broadcast through images of the ‘ministerial Mercedes’ and the clinic truck, wrapped subsequent efforts at AIDS prevention in a layer of resounding contradiction. That symbolic contradiction was symptomatic of a generalized plague of ‘mixed messaging’ around the Chisupe affair. This was most striking in the period surrounding the creation, and subsequent destruction, of the first major effort to intervene in the Chisupe affair. By mid-winter, as the crowds at Chisupe's village swelled, public health experts feared that widespread belief in immunity from HIV would yield a ‘super-peak’ in the AIDS epidemic; one expatriate district health officer called the affair a ‘complete nightmare’.40 In response to those concerns, a group of health officials approached Chisupe in late February about compiling an information sheet for public distribution, in which Chisupe could explain his vision and its promises. Chisupe consented, and by mid-March, the German development agency GTZ had printed ten thousand copies and delivered them to the village; the text also appeared in the pages of several national newspapers. 41

But the public saw through the leaflet. The internal inconsistencies of the message ‘raised some eyebrows’, as one national paper put it: readers immediately noticed the incongruity of at once claiming to have discovered a ‘vaccine’ and suggesting that people ‘never indulge in promiscuity again’. The morality messages tagged onto Chisupe's initial vision reeked of government involvement, editorials wrote, and their readers seemed to agree: lines at Chikamana were as long as ever, and the public seemed to embrace Chisupe's more appealing initial message. 42 Despite the government's obvious hand in producing the text, no sooner had the leaflets been delivered than the government returned to confiscate them. No public explanation was offered, but an observer wrote that

it was made clear that the emphasis on Chisupe's medicine being a cure only for AIDS and for no other disease was meant to embarrass anyone taking it, as they could no longer hide the fact that they were afraid they were infected, nor could they pretend they were taking it for some other disease.43

As the leaflet episode illustrates, the government, though making claims to reliance on science and evidence, was either unsure of its own commitments, or too disorganized to project commitments sincerely held to the public.

In the context of such contradiction, attempts by the government to subject Chisupe's medicine to scientific testing were widely dismissed as irrelevant, at best, and destructive, at worst. What use was scientific proof or disproof, people asked, if already the biggest of Big Men believe in the power of mchape? And given the obvious faith of some ministerial officials in the medicine, who was the government to destroy the one bit of hope being offered to Malawians affected by AIDS?44 One believer wrote to the government in the pages of The Democrat:

So look here guys, for several years you have failed not only to provide us with an AIDS drug but even [to] give us any hope … . Well, our herbalist is giving us some hope … . You have failed to give us even a false [hope] because you think it is dangerous. Well, we choose to differ.45

Chisupe had agreed, in early April, to allow his medicine to be tested; the public now rallied behind him as he revoked his consent, arguing that the government was at best disrespecting his medicine, and at worst trying to steal his formula to make millions by marketing it to the developed world. Moreover, he said, even if scientific tests revealed that the substance had curative properties, the government would never acknowledge the results, for fear that their jobs in AIDS bureaucracies would disappear.46 The rumour mill swung further to Chisupe's side, and the belief that ‘Science’ was out to steal an ‘African’ solution became pervasive.47

Further government efforts to work with Chisupe came to naught. Conflict between the parties came to a head in mid-May, when Chisupe issued a highly publicized refusal to appear at a ministry-sponsored press conference, arguing that the ancestors who gave him the cure prohibited him from attending.48 The government would close its response to Chisupe at the end of the month, publishing a final press statement on the professed cure, and attempting once more to counter the claim that the government was not ‘respecting’ Chisupe's medicine:

The donor community and indeed the whole world community is looking for a cure for AIDS, so that there would be no material benefit for the Malawian government to play down news about a genuine AIDS epidemic in the country. The same is true of an individual, including a herbalist, who discovers the cure for this global problem. Such claimed cure must however stand scientific scrutiny.49

But even this last document was emblematic of the curious duality that characterized the government's approach to Chisupe. The final passage read as follows:

The Ministry of Health and Population wishes, once again, to state its willingness to work with traditional healers and herbalists in Malawi who claim to have a cure for any of the common disease conditions affecting the population, including HIV infection and AIDS. These claims need to be evaluated scientifically for the benefit and protection of the people of Malawi and indeed mankind globally. To this end the ministry extends its gratitude to the few volunteers who have come forward to be retested for HIV infection before and after taking mchape. The results of these tests will be released as soon as testing has been completed and discussed with the volunteers.

The government thus aligned itself with the principles of scientific objectivity, articulating its ‘willingness to work’ with traditional healers whose cures could be proven scientifically, and committing to disclose the results of trials involving Chisupe's medicine. But no test results were ever released. Mixed messaging once again, and in the end, the sort of duality that undercut public trust in the government and in the alternative public health messaging that they were ostensibly – if inconsistently – trying to project.

The official drama of the Chisupe affair ended thus in May of 1995, but large crowds would flood the village for months; foreign journalists visiting a year after the government's final press statement reported ‘still a steady stream of visitors’. But as word spread of the deaths from AIDS of even those patients who had made the trip to drink mchape, crowds of thousands slowly became crowds of dozens, though even this diminution left Chisupe with vastly more patients than the average traditional healer. In all, Chisupe distributed his cure for nearly ten years, receiving a steady stream of visitors until his death in 2004. In one of the greater ironies of the story, Chisupe's own son, who took over distribution of the medicine after his father's death in 2004, would later die of cryptococcal meningitis, strongly indicative of HIV.50

Explaining the Chisupe Affair

We now turn to the task of explaining the events of 1995, by returning to the simple but critical questions posed in the opening pages of this essay: why it was this cure, at this particular historical moment, that captured the public imagination? The pages that follow argue that the Chisupe affair is best explained not, as has been argued, as a national quest for moral and spiritual healing, but as the composite of a desperate search for a biomedical cure, on the one hand, and national frustration with the various officials, foreign and domestic, organizing the national response to AIDS.

First and foremost, the Chisupe affair was about fear. By 1995, Malawi had overtaken Uganda as the second hardest hit nation in Africa. AIDS was affecting society's most productive elements: HIV prevalence was estimated at 11 per cent nationwide, and one in three urban adults was infected. Life expectancy at birth was expected to fall as low as the mid-twenties. Most Malawians had no access to HIV testing, let alone life-prolonging drugs; a diagnosis of AIDS was a death sentence. In this context, people were desperate to try anything. And Chisupe had something to offer.51

A collusion of historical circumstances provided the opening for a mass movement. For the first time in a decade, it was permissible to speak openly about AIDS. In Banda's Malawi, public discussion of sexuality was forbidden, and AIDS was met with what one scholar has called a ‘conspiracy of silence’.52 Mchape '95 grew out of the (relative) political openness of the post-Banda era, signalled by the new president's ‘Big Walk’ to promote AIDS awareness in August of 1994, a mere two weeks before Chisupe's dream.53 Moreover, Chisupe provided hope when no one else seemed even to be trying. The only Western intervention at the time was the condom, which was widely detested and the subject of considerable cynicism: how convenient, people said, that the only ‘solution’ to a disease created to control the population of Africa (as AIDS was widely considered to have been) should also control population.54 Chisupe's alternative was painless. Thus in the broad context of political liberalization and pervasive fear, and in the immediate context of a condom campaign and a targeted statement about AIDS, it became possible for someone like Chisupe to publicize a claim to have found a cure for the disease.

Not only was it possible, in this context, for people to talk about AIDS, a number of cues suggested to people that they might want to listen. Those cues – scientific, traditional, and Christian – served to legitimate Chisupe in the public eye, and to suggest to a wide range of people that Chisupe's cure might actually work. For one, Chisupe claimed a place in a long line of healers whose medicines had been given to them by ancestors in dreams.55 References to David and Moses, the pastor's robe from the dream, and Chisupe's claim to have been ‘visited by the word of God’ signalled to Christian hopefuls that Chisupe's cure was not entirely at odds with Christian practice, as some feared.56

Finally, Chisupe claimed scientific authority by recommending testing and prescribing specific and age-targeted doses of his medicine, such that many explained post-mchape deaths as a function of ‘overdose’ or its opposite.57 Chisupe's claims gained particular legitimacy for two additional reasons: first, because Chisupe was not an herbalist by training, and second, because he seemed to be respecting each of the ancestors’ demands – including the inconvenient condition that he not accept any payment for his services. The importance of this last idea cannot be overstated.58

We are thus part of the way towards an explanation of the events of 1995: people came to Chisupe and his cure first because they were desperate, and second because they thought the medicine might work. And yet, important as these preconditions were, they do not explain how it was that Chisupe came to capture the public imagination. Chisupe is often portrayed as an innocent, a subject of temporary fascination, a passive actor in an episode of ‘mass hysteria’.59 But that portrait, alluring as it may be, is inaccurate, and underestimates the agency of both the crowds and the man in the middle. Chisupe was no accidental tourist, but instead a particularly shrewd, if unlikely, political strategist, who used the media and the vehicle of AIDS to deliberately and conscientiously articulate a pointed critique of colonialism and neocolonialism. The articulation of that critique, in turn, facilitated a national airing of frustrations with the government, with the hospitals, with the development aid agencies, and with the generalized disparaging of African science and tradition by foreigners: with, in short, the conglomeration of institutions and individuals at the head of the national response to AIDS. It was this twofold process – the critique and the national conversation it spawned – that made the Chisupe affair ‘big’, not only in size (it was, after all, the message, and not just the masses, that first captivated the media, whose coverage delivered the crowds), but also in significance. And yet neither Chisupe's arguments nor the public's ensuing fascination with those arguments has been granted the attention it deserves. The next section aims to present Chisupe's critique, and the discussion it launched, in detail, and argues that without this critical piece – without understanding what Chisupe was saying, and why it was so alluring – no explanation of the affair is whole.

Figure 1.  The cartoon suggests that the famous (as depicted by the man on the left, understood to be either the owner of the politically important Yanu Yanu bus company or a well-known mayor) and the wealthy (as depicted by the large woman on the right) all went to Chisupe. Malawi News, 8–14 July 1995, 9.

Figure 2.  One of a series of political cartoons depicting the scene at Chikamana Village. ‘Kamadyaapa’. Daily Monitor, 3 April 1995, 11.

Figure 3.  ‘It can cure everything: headaches, backaches, gout, AIDS and even unemployment. And if you kick this bucket, it also makes sure you end up in paradise! (If only we could export the stuff … then all our economic problems would vanish at one go!!)’ The Nation, 29 March 1995, 8.

(i) The Critique

Chisupe's critique moved chronologically: injustices had been, and continued to be, propagated against Africans, he argued, and AIDS was the latest in a long line of injustices. But Africans had fought those injustices successfully in the past, and they could – indeed, they must – again. Chisupe called on history to suggest that resistance was possible, and on God to suggest that it was right:

The whites disturbed and confused things (anasokoneza zinthu) in Malawi and destroyed a lot of things, because they treat us blacks like slaves or like wild beasts, even like monkeys. At one time they just shot people who just happened to be in a garden. But when Chilembwe [leader of an anticolonial uprising in 1915, the year before Chisupe was born] went to America to learn, he realised that Africans were being enslaved and imprisoned, and that it was better to get rid of the white man. [ … ]

The fight between the Africans and the Europeans was like that between David and Goliath, and Goliath ended with his head off. The same thing happened with John at the request of Herod's daughter. The fear and trembling (manjenje) of the Africans ended that year in 1915, with the beheading of Livingstone.60 Before that a white would tell a black to shut up. It was Jesus who wanted us to be free (omasuka).61

As colonial Malawians had fought against Livingstone, so contemporary Malawians should fight against AIDS, the latest attempt by whites to oppress blacks:

I don't know the origin of AIDS, whether it came from Europe, Asia, or Africa. And I don't know the cause of it, whether it is from God, Satan, whether its from people, or whether its from animals. Whites are different from us, I don't know them, and I don't know what they do, and who they sleep with. I have heard that some white men sleep with other men, and some even sleep with animals. In the past we did not have this disease, it must have been the whites who brought it here.

It is not true that AIDS originated from Africa. White people say this because they want to defeat (kugonjetsa) the black man and grind him into the ground.62

But even here, Chisupe emphasized the agency of the African. The ‘black man’ was no passive victim of white oppression, he argued; blacks had chosen rapprochement with the whites, adopting their mores and envying their physical features, and it was for that decision that they were being punished:

We are no longer following the traditions of our ancestors and that is why there are so many diseases and so much misfortune. In the past, long ago, a man had only one woman, and no more. If his woman was pregnant he did not go with a woman until his child was born. And when a child reached a certain size, then special rites were carried out. In those days people never got sick, they never had any misfortune. Today men are going off with many women and coming back with syphilis, gonorrhoea, and AIDS. Because of promiscuity people are giving each other bad blood.

Yes, people have left their traditions to take on the traditions of the whites, and so we are lost. Even women have left their traditions to become something they are not, straightening their hair and wearing wigs. If God gave us frizzy hair we should leave it like that and not pretend to be whites. God made us blacks to be Africans.63

Schoffeleers has noted that movements lauding ‘old’ morality, like the Church of the Black Ancestors (Mpingo wa Makolo Achikuda) in the early 1940s, were common in Malawi, and tended, as in the 1970s, to correspond to periods of increased venereal disease.64 In framing AIDS as a ‘foreign’ import and the product of immoral and ‘un-African’ behaviour, therefore, Chisupe's arguments take their place in a long line of return-to-tradition rhetoric.

Further, Chisupe's understandings of illness fall squarely into a second pattern common across Malawian history: that of ascribing the rise of disease to the arrival of foreigners. The Nyanja and Yao, for instance, ascribed the spirit affliction Nantongwe to the arrival of the Alomwe. The Alomwe themselves drew their concept of mbendera from the Zambian affliction cult bindele, meaning ‘white people or people dressed in white’. And the Tumbuka, similarly, thought vyanusi to have been introduced by invading Ngoni; the logic of intrusion, moreover, was embedded within the understanding of the disease, as the vimbuza spirits were those of strangers, rather than ancestors. In more recent history, DeGabriele notes, tuberculosis, venereal disease, and other ‘suspiciously colonial and contagious diseases’ were understood to have been introduced by migrant workers employed by whites.65

Embracing a third common rhetorical pattern, Chisupe argued that if the scourge of AIDS had come from without, so its antidote could come from within. Chisupe took pains to emphasize that the healers appearing in his dream were black men, dressed in black:

Two men appeared in this dream, not white men, or men dressed in white, but black men, who were wearing black robes and black shoes. Not traditional robes, but the European type of robes that pastors wear, you know, well made one … . I never once said that they were wearing white robes.66

Furthermore, not only were black Africans capable of responding to AIDS, they were the most able to respond, even more so than the whites:

An English woman came to me, very sick with AIDS. She said that they failed to cure her in England and in Germany, but a white doctor told her to go to Africa; she came to Africa and was healed. The power of the medicine comes from God, and it was the God in Africa who healed her. 67

In both statements is embedded a curious insecurity: the need to legitimate a black solution by pointing to its endorsement by whites, conveyed here through mention of the English woman and the European robes, ostensibly worn only after Western training. The same insecurity spawned public attempts to legitimate Chisupe's ‘African’ cure by demonstrating that outsiders had endorsed it; as part of this process, by the end of the affair, Michael Jackson, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, ‘Asians’, and ‘Europeans’ were all variously rumoured to have tried the drug.68 But that insecurity, such as it was, was matched by indelible pride in the possibility of an African solution. Wouldn't it be wonderful, one middle-class Chitipan remarked, if mchape did work! It would put Malawi on the world map, she said; it would show Westerners that Malawi had something to offer, that Malawian traditional medicine wasn't so stupid. And neither, she implied, were the Malawians who chose to try it.69 A cartoon in The Nation echoed the sentiment, albeit with a bit of irony: ‘If only we could export the stuff’, it said. ‘Then all our economic problems would vanish at one go!!’ (Figure 3)70

(ii) The Conversation

This, in the end, may have been the crux of the matter: Chisupe gave people not only the possibility of hope, but the possibility of pride. The affair presented an opportunity for people to declare their own self-worth, on an individual and a national level, by articulating a critique of the government and its Western backers. Theology students, medical doctors, letter writers and editorialists picked up where Chisupe left off, articulating their concerns with both foreigners and the government, which seemed more concerned with enriching themselves than with protecting Africans. Public discussion was characterized by three ideas. Perhaps most common was the understanding that Chisupe's cure was being dismissed not because it was ineffective but because it was African. ‘The experts on AIDS will not tolerate anyone claiming a breakthrough in AIDS cure’, wrote The Democrat, ‘ – not if that someone is not working in the Medical Research Laboratories of the US and Europe.’71 The editors of The Independent embraced similar logic:

African science continues to be despised in the world. The situation could have been different if the cure was discovered in America or Europe … . Seeing that AIDS was scientifically invented, Americans and Europeans will do everything to counter any claims that an African Herbalist knows the cure.72

The argument infused academic discourse: at least two theology students at Zomba wrote that Chisupe was being kept down by azungu who didn't believe that God could give the cure to an African.73 By mid-spring, Western-trained Malawian doctors were standing up at meetings to demand respect for African medicine: the Malawian head of the National AIDS Control Programme told European detractors at one such meeting that ‘AIDS was such a scourge that for Westerners to deny African medicine its chance to cure was not only wrong, but showed prejudice.’74 And Chisupe himself regularly made the claim that if the ‘miracle’ had come to the whites, the world would have responded differently, ‘but because it is me, a black, they can't do anything’.75

Not only were officials giving preferential treatment to white doctors and Western science, critics argued, they were failing to use that science for the benefit of Africans. Even worse, they were obstructing the efforts of the only person who seemed to be trying to help. A letter-writer from Blantyre mocked the government's impotence in the face of AIDS: they would rather, she said, wait for a European cure than acknowledge the African cure sitting in front of them:

This guy [from the Ministry of Health] sits phwii [powerless] waiting for a white doctor from USA/Britain to say now a drug to cure AIDS has been found. I am sure some whiteman has got a formula for it; but he is hiding it from the poor African.76

The government's supposed ‘caution’ was knocked as obstruction. The government had no right, editors argued, to restrict access to a cure that might work – or that at least had not been proven ineffective:

It is nice our government seems to be cautious about the whole [Chisupe] issue … . [but] can you [international health bodies] prove what you don't know [?]. … Liwonde ancestors have not made any mention of having their drugs tested, so keep your distance before you annoy them.77

Further, readers called the government to task for hypocrisy: the government was arguing that Chisupe's claims were not scientifically sound, yet they had not, to the public knowledge, conducted scientific tests.78 A headline in The Nation summed up the general sentiment: ‘Ministry of Health, Please, Shut Up’.79

Conclusions

Thus what emerges is a critique, from a variety of sectors, of the conglomeration of institutions – government, Western bureaucrats, aid agencies, public health workers – at the centre of the response to AIDS, whose time and money had produced nothing save ‘nice shiny cars and patronising press statements’.80 In many ways, the Chisupe affair represented an attempt to articulate a home-grown critique of the government and its intimate partner, the development aid industry, whose presence on the continent was, by 1995, hugely conspicuous, and whose dual image – giving to the poor, yet taking enormous riches, in the form of security-guarded houses and white jeeps – was a stark and troubling reminder to Malawians of the ever widening chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Somewhere along the way, the critique went, the government had fallen under the sway of the West, trusting their science over African science, their values over African values, and abandoning the responsibility to help Africans in favour of the job of lining their own pockets.

That critical conversation – about inequality, about respect, about the responsibilities of governments and donors – was catalysed by the discovery of a ‘cure’ at Chikamana village in the summer of 1994. Chisupe stepped consciously into the fray, identifying for himself the political role of national healer, protector, uniter. Let the point not go unstated: that role was one Chisupe chose, not one thrust upon him, and he spoke openly of his mission:

They think we are dogs; they let us die. But I have come to unite my people and build a wall around them to separate the sufferers from the rest who are corrupt. The Malawi Congress Party and the present government have plenty of money, but the poor have nothing.81

Taken together, and in light of evidence pointing to Chisupe's unlikely political savvy and deliberate political aims, the historical record suggests that the prevailing interpretations of the events of 1995 are misguided. The mass movement to Chisupe was not then the ‘inevitable’ expression of the cultural pattern of witchfinding, as Probst argued, and nor was it, as Schoffeleers has written, a societal quest for moral purification.

Recognizing the shortcomings of the interpretations offered by Probst and Schoffeleers, it has been shown that widespread fear and desperation were the essential prerequisites for Mchape '95. Mchape happened when it did in broad terms because of the presence of these prerequisites, and in pointed terms because political liberalization provided a forum for critical speech. From there, we moved to a second part of the picture: that it was this particular cure, of the many that might have attracted a mass following, that rose to fame, because this one had the appearance of scientific, traditional, and religious legitimacy. But neither of these two points is sufficient to explain the character of the Chisupe affair. For the crucial element is the third one: that the Chisupe affair was as ‘big’ as it was, in terms not only of size but of social and political significance, because it provided an opportunity for Malawians to speak openly about inequality, politics, and the threat posed by disease. It was the message, not simply the masses, that fueled media and public interest in the affair, and that elevated the affair from a simply physical phenomenon to an intellectual event. What made the Chisupe affair what it was, in other words, was the message behind mchape.

A more complete understanding of the events of 1995 is critical for two reasons. First, from a public health perspective, the imperative is to learn how to prevent or counter a figure like Chisupe in the future. But it is only possible to draw useful lessons from mchape if the affair is understood completely and correctly, and not dismissed, as is so tempting, as ‘witchfinding’ or ‘mass hysteria’ or ‘desperation’. Moreover, categorizing the Chisupe affair as a quest for either religious healing or a biomedical cure misses perhaps the most important point of all: that in going to and talking about Chisupe, Malawians were expressing a series of frustrations that deserve attention. Opportunities to question and challenge the development powerhouse are limited in such a stratified setting as Malawi, but this was one, and Malawians used it to produce a critique – fragmented, yes, and perhaps of only limited staying power, but pointed and sure nonetheless. The demands they made were real, articulate, and widely resonant: demands for more to be done, for fears to be assuaged, for reforms in the behaviour and approach of Western aid officials, and for the respect of African science and tradition. In an age in which we recognize that development and public health projects depend on the endorsement and participation of those they aim to serve, the message behind mchape is precisely the sort of expression to which attention should be paid.

Acknowledgements

The preparation of this article would not have been possible without the generosity of friends and strangers on three continents. Special thanks go to Denise Grady and Celia Dugger of The New York Times, Diana Cammack of the Overseas Development Institute, and Kebba Jobarteh, Lisa Hyde, Nader Kim el-Mallawany, Eric McCollum, and Peter Kazembe of the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative in Lilongwe. I am also greatly indebted to the following for their help: members of the Friends of Malawi/Peace Corps, in particular Elizabeth McGovern and Rusty Klinger; Pushba and Rob Jamieson of The Chronicle, Lilongwe; Femi Abodunrin and Albert Harawa of Chancellor College, Zomba; Jordan Goldwarg; Stephen Sneed of Williams College; Scott Geibel of the Population Council in Nairobi; Terence Ranger; and my supervisor at Oxford, Sloan Mahone. The African Studies Management Committee at Oxford University generously provided a travel bursary for a second field visit to Malawi. I am ever greateful to the Rhodes Trust for funding my studies at Oxford, and to Sir Colin Lucas, Mary Eaton, Catherine King, Sheila Partridge, Bob Wyllie, Colin Page, and John Gee at Rhodes House for all their efforts on my behalf.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marissa C. M. Doran

Marissa C.M. Doran has recently completed the MSc in African Studies at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar

Notes

1. Probst, ‘Mchape '95’, 133–134.

2. Marwick, ‘Another Modern Anti-witchcraft Movement’; Ranger, ‘Mcape’; Richards, ‘Modern Movement’; Willis, ‘Kamcape’. For other writings on the theory of witchfinding movements, see Wendroff, ‘Trouble-shooters and Trouble-makers’ and Willis, ‘Instant Millennium.’

3. Richards, ‘Modern Movement’, 452.

4. See Probst's discussion of kachirombo, ‘Mchape '95’, 118.

5. For a discussion of ‘contamination’ beliefs, see, among others, Green, ‘Purity, Pollution and the Invisible Snake’, and Farmer, ‘AIDS and Anthropologists’.

6. Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’, 418.

7. For more on government involvement, see DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 7. The sole mention of morality appearing before publication of the government pamphlet was in mid-February, and has been widely quoted. But it is curious that the only person to hear this religious/moral message was an interviewer from the Theology Department at Zomba, someone whose Christian bias would have been obvious to Chisupe, the interviewee. The text of that quotation (initially cited by Chakanza, ‘The Mchape Affair at Liwonde’, 3) is as follows:

Why do you all come here? Are you all AIDS victims? Let me remind you what the Bible says. You should not commit adultery. Some of you are just coming here for fun. You want to drink mchape and then go back to your old ways. If you are not going to change your ways, do not expect to be healed.

 For other enquires by Chakanza, see Chakanza, ‘Kunadza Mchape "95"’, and Chakanza, ‘The Mchape Affair at Liwonde’.

8. Both Chisupe and his wife corroborated that version on separate occasions. Cammack, ‘Surviving AIDS in Malawi’.

9. DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 4, 7.

10. Voysey and Gray, ‘Mchape Fever’; Elizabeth McGovern, correspondence with the author, 2007; Hill, ‘Hopkins Doctors’; Flint, ‘Dream Potion’; Cammack, ‘Surviving AIDS in Malawi’.

11. For more on ‘pilgrims’, see Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’.

12. For more on ‘pilgrims’, see Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’, 423.

13. Waldorf, ‘Mchape: A Wake-up Call’.

14. Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’, 416.

15. The eight groups: responders (health workers), officials, diplomats, tasters, observers (largely expatriate volunteers), scholars, (contemporary) commentators, and reporters. Two further categories are no longer living: the distributors and the dying.

16. Chisupe, in DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 3.

17. Note that this is the original version, influenced neither by religious authorities nor by the government. This version is corroborated by Cammack, ‘Surviving AIDS in Malawi’; Chisupe, quoted in DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, and Flint, ‘Dream Potion’.

18. Accounts of the dream appear in, among others, DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, and Daley, ‘In Malawi’.

19. DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 109; Hill, ‘Hopkins Doctors’; Ligomeka, ‘Fake Drugs Boom’; Finkel, ‘Few Drugs for the Needy’; Waldorf, ‘Mchape’; Daley, ‘In Malawi’; Simwaka and Tulua, ‘The Machinga Healer’; Flint, ‘Dream Potion’.

20. Tenthani, ‘“Mchape” Overdose’; DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’.

21. Cammack, ‘The Danger of Mchape’, 8.

22. Ntonya, ‘Chisupe’, 4.

23. Cammack, ‘Surviving AIDS in Malawi’.

24. Cammack, ‘Surviving AIDS in Malawi’.

25. Interview, Klaus Fiedler; Simwaka and Tikula, ‘The Machinga Healer’; Daley, ‘In Malawi’; Raphael Tenthani (journalist), correspondence with the author, 5 April 2007; Cammack, ‘Danger of Mchape’.

26. Finkel, ‘Few Drugs for the Needy’; Voysey and Gray, ‘Mchape Fever’; Chisupe, testimony in DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’; Cammack, ‘Danger of Mchape’, 8.

27. Hill, ‘Hopkins Doctors’; Probst, ‘Mchape '95’; Daley, ‘In Malawi’; Chakanza, ‘Kunadza Mchape '95’.

28. Finkel, ‘Few Drugs for the Needy’, 109; Cammack, ‘The Danger of Mchape’; Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’.

29. Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’, 415; Probst, ‘Mchape '95’; Flint, ‘Dream Potion’, 108–109.

30. Muslims were warned that the dreams of people who ‘appear[ed] from nowhere and claim[ed] to suddenly have visions’ should not be trusted, though religious leaders did not deny that dreams could have value, ‘if they are dreamt by a person of renowned moral standing in the community.’ Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’, 414.

31. ‘Anything or activity that is allowed to come between you and God becomes false god. The moment you find that some pursuit leaves you little or no time to follow Christ, you have succumbed to the wills of Satan.’ I John 5: 21 . Editorial, ‘False Gods’. See also Njawala, ‘Bodily Desires’.

32. Matemba, ‘Mchape Drinkers’.

33. Schoffeleers notes that Deuteronomy 13: 1–6 prohibits the veneration of ancestors, false prophesying, and false revelationary dreaming (414). See also Mpinganjira, ‘The Bible and “Mchape”’.

34. Editoral, ‘False Gods’; Interview, Noel Mbirimtengerenji; Somanje, ‘Religious Leaders’.

35. Interview, Martin Chiphwanya; Voysey and Gray, ‘Mchape Fever’; Waldorf, ‘Mchape’.

36. Somanje, ‘Religious Leaders’, 141.

37. Chakanza, ‘Kunadza Mchape '95’; Probst, ‘Mchape '95’.

38. My source for army and police participation was from an interview with Andrew Faria. Elizabeth McGovern provided an account of parliamentary participation in correspondence with the author. Cammack, ‘Mchape’, describes city council involvement, and Cammack, ‘Malawi at the Threshold’, discusses participation of workers from other ministries. Several newspapers reported government ministers coming to take the cure: see, for examples, news reports in Weekly Chronicle, 10–16 April 1995; Nation, 8 March 1995; Malawi News, 18–24 May 1996; Independent, 10–16 March 1995, The Democrat, 23 March 1995, Weekly News, 11–17 June 1996.

39. Flint, ‘Dream Potion’; Hill, ‘Hopkins Doctors’; Daley, ‘In Malawi’; Somanje, ‘Religious Leaders’.

40. Flint, ‘Dream Potion’.

41. GTZ (Gesellschaft fiir Technische Zusammenarbeit), the German development agency coordinating health services in the district, led the efforts. Probst, ‘Mchape '95’, 113.

42. ‘Chisupe's Do's and Don'ts’, Daily Monitor, 15 March 1995, cited by Probst. See also DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 7; Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’, 409.

43. Probst, ‘Mchape '95’, 113.

44. See, e.g., Kandiado, ‘Health for All’, Weekly Chronicle, 3–9 April 1995, 2.

45. The Democrat, 23 March 1995, cited by Cammack, ‘Mchape’.

46. Probst, ‘Mchape '95’, 114.

47. Interviews with Blackson Matatiyo, Albert Harawa, Andrew Faria, George Matthews, Chimwemwe Budah, Rachel NyaGondwe Fiedler, and others.

48. Probst, ‘Mchape '95’.

49. ‘Press Statement on Herbal Cure for AIDS and Scientific Research on Mchape in Machinga’, reprinted in The Focus, 25 May–2 June 1995, cited by Probst, ‘Mchape '95’, 116.

50. Chisupe's son died of cryptococcal meningitis, an opportunistic infection common in AIDS patients in Africa. Interview with Chimwemwe Mbasalankunda, lab technician at Zomba Hospital. With thanks to Michael April, Department of Public Health, Oxford.

51. For the most useful explanation of the culture of fear, see Waldorf, ‘Mchape’. See also Cammack, ‘Malawi at the Threshold’; Flint, ‘Dream Potion’; Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’, 407; Probst, ‘Mchape '95’, 127–129; Daley, ‘In Malawi’.

52. See Cammack, ‘Mchape’. The argument draws on the work of Anne-Marie Wangel, ‘AIDS in Malawi’.

53. In contrast to the Muluzi government's ‘tacit endorsement’ of Chisupe, Banda had forced Chikanga, whose healing career contains certain parallels to Chisupe's, to leave the country.

54. Malawi Police, ‘Chishango’; Waldorf, ‘Mchape’. See also, Anon. ‘Condoms Do Not Always Prevent’; Kaingana, ‘New Doubts on Condoms’; Machila, ‘Children Sent To Buy Condoms’; Gillies, ‘Breaking Down Sexual Taboos to Fight AIDS’; Katangwe, ‘PSI Sells 3 Million Chishango Condoms’; Mwanza, ‘Condom: Age Versus Tradition’; Somanje, ‘The Condom Stigma’.

55. DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 4.

56. DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 5.

57. Reports of the first death appeared in The Nation, 21 March 1995. Traditionally healers typically do not dose. See DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 5–7; Flint, ‘Dream Potion’.

58. Most interviewees mentioned this idea, among them Martin Chiphwanya, Albert Harawa, Andrew Faria, George Matthews, Klaus Fiedler, and Chimwemwe Budah.

59. Lester Chitsulo, communication with the author.

60. William Livingstone, beheaded in the course of the Chilembwe uprising.

61. DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’.

62. Chisupe, testimony quoted in DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’.

63. Chisupe, testimony quoted in DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’.

64. Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’, 414.

65. DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 6.

66. Chisupe, testimony in DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 3.

67. Chisupe, testimony in DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 2–3.

68. Elizabeth McGovern, correspondence with the author; political cartoons (see Figures 1–3); interviews, Andrew Faria, and others.

69. Waldorf, ‘Mchape’, 141.

70. Reports in The Nation, 29 March 1995, 8. See Figure 1.

71. Reports in The Democrat, 23 March 1995; Cammack, ‘Mchape’.

72. Reports in The Independent, 10–16 March 1995, cited by Cammack, ‘Mchape’.

73. Interview, Klaus and Rachel NyaGondwe Fiedler. The second piece is mentioned in TRS Graduate Seminar files, at Chancellor College.

74. Liomba to Medical Association of Malawi (MAM), April 1995 meeting, cited byWaldorf, ‘Mchape’, 137. Probst also writes of a ‘Malawian woman doctor presiding over [a] meeting [organized by the MoH who] stood up and forcefully demanded respect for African notions of illness and healing.’ Probst, ‘Mchape '95’, 133.

75. Reported in The Nation, 21 March 1995.

76. To ‘sit phwii’ translates roughly as ‘to be in a position where one cannot do anything’ (Yambazi Banda, correspondence with the author, 13 May 2006); Ntchire, ‘Ministry of Health, Please Shut Up’.

77. Reported in The Democrat, 23 March 1995; Cammack, ‘Mchape’.

78. ‘It perplexes me that someone sits in his office at Ministry of Health headquarters, drafts a press release and sends it to MBC to warn the public that scientifically there is no drug that can cure AIDS. Fine. [But this] guy does not tell us that he has been there to collect the medicine, tested it in the laboratory and administered it on HIV patients and the result does not uphold the claim that it will cure AIDS.’ Ntchire, ‘Ministry of Health, Please Shut Up’.

79. ‘It perplexes me that someone sits in his office at Ministry of Health headquarters, drafts a press release and sends it to MBC to warn the public that scientifically there is no drug that can cure AIDS. Fine. [But this] guy does not tell us that he has been there to collect the medicine, tested it in the laboratory and administered it on HIV patients and the result does not uphold the claim that it will cure AIDS.’ Ntchire, ‘Ministry of Health, Please Shut Up’.

80. DeGabriele, ‘Old Peppers’, 8.

81. Schoffeleers, ‘AIDS Pandemic’, 411.