Not just pretty Euphorbia clavarioides in Johannesburg's Muti Market

摘要

In South Africa, it's illegal to pick flowers, much less pluck a fruit or take a small cutting from a plant in nature to cultivate at home. Yet, at the Johannesburg Muti Market, a blind eye is turned to the environmental degradation wrought by sham witchdoctory. I visited the Muti ("medicine") Market in August of 2010 with Charles Craib. The market is said to be traditional, as much a tourist destination as a source of native potions for casting love spells and making harder hard-ons. A large steel building, built by the city to house the once less-formal street market, sets the scene in this old light-industrial area. Ramshackle wood huts around the building are staffed by a motley crew of potion purveyors, mainly selling chopped up bits of dried herbs, barks, and chunks of live plants. Two levels inside, connected by ramps, feature larger collections of ever more gruesome contrivances: animal skins and skulls, chunks of metal and bones, chopped up plants dead or alive, huge piles of wild-harvested bulbs.