ETD Collection

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    The perceptions, attitudes and knowledge of traditional healers and traders about using cultivated plants in South Africa.
    (2018) Mbongwa, Nolwazi Sinqobile
    Afrocentric worldviews believe in the existence of ancestors, and traditional healers are consulted for communication with them. Traditional healers dispense various animal and plant parts to rid their clients of the problems that they might be facing. Animal and plant parts that are considered medicinal in the broad sense are therefore vital in African belief systems. Medicinal plants are rapidly declining in the wild due to over-harvesting, development and urbanisation, and various initiatives such as law enforcement have been used to combat the decline, but they have not been successful. Cultivation is one of the methods that has been used to mitigate the decline of medicinal plants. Cultivation is viable because healers and traders can easily practice it, if they have the necessary requirements for it such as land, water, propagation material and time. Importantly, however, there is limited scientific knowledge about the acceptability of cultivated medicinal plants by healers and traders. The aim of the study is to determine the perceptions, attitudes and knowledge of traditional healers and traders about medicinal plant cultivation, and identify plants that are a priority to healers and traders, to contribute to a greater understanding of the cultural opportunities and challenges for cultivating medicinal plants as a conservation strategy. Five markets were surveyed: Marabastad, Mona, Faraday, Ezimbuzini and Warwick. Healers from Soweto, Nhlungwane and Umlazi were surveyed. Two residential areas and three markets are located in KwaZulu-Natal province. Two markets and one residential area were surveyed in Gauteng province. Semi-structured questionnaires were used to survey the places and overall 114 respondents (42 healers and 72 healers) were interviewed. The results of the study show that healers and traders accept using and selling cultivated medicinal plants. Nevertheless, certain aspects of the spiritual and cultural entities of medicinal plants need to be sustained and ensured even when cultivating. Plants that are used for rituals and those that are chosen by ancestors via dreams are specifically required to be collected in the wild. Healers and traders have different knowledge about spiritual limitation concerning medicinal plants. However, the perceptions are not significantly different to a point in which they would be approached separately in conservation plans. Furthermore, location and ethnicity also have a great influence in both healers and traders perception about cultivated medicinal plants.
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    Endless hope or a hopeless end?: constructing ownership and evidence through the development of an HIV prevention campaign for young women in South Africa
    (2018) Mangold, Kerry
    The following dissertation explores the development of the national She Conquers HIV prevention campaign for adolescent girls and young women in South Africa. In 2016 when the research for the thesis was conducted almost two thousand young women between the ages of 15-24 years were reported to be infected with HIV every week in South Africa. This led the South African government to initiate the development of a national campaign to address the vulnerabilities of young women and significantly reduce the number of new infections. I examine the complex policy-development process for this campaign using insights from three worlds: the young womens world; the policy world and the NGO world. I use the grounding policy principles of “evidence”, “ownership” and “hope” to guide my analysis. I explore the meanings and dynamics of each principle and compare this to its enactment. I suggest that the enactment of the core principles is constructed by policy makers in an attempt to build hope and mobilise funding from donors for the implementation of the campaign. I suggest that the mismatch in ideology and lived experience of these notions undermines the intention of engaging the young women in the development of the campaign and silences them. I argue that their silence perpetuates a feeling of hopelessness amongst young women, whilst simultaneously building hope amongst donors and development partners, and leading NGOs into despair.