Faraday Muti Market

[by Cathy Gatland in Johannesburg, South Africa] As this busy year has flown away from me, here’s a sketch I did in May during our series of USk10x10  workshops when Lisa Martens held a class “Through the Windows” from the upstairs parking area of Joziburg Lane where I’ve sketched various city views from before.

This time I felt a rather illicit voyeur as I squinted down at a section of the Faraday Muti Market below, which I’ve never had the courage to venture right into myself (if you have the stomach, read blogger 2Summers account here). It is a traditional African healer’s market, or hospital, where animal and herbal products are on display and traditional doctors at hand to prescribe exact combinations of herbs, spices, bones, flesh and more to cure every ailment or life problem. Fortunately this particular section seemed to consist of grains, herbs or husks laid out on mats in the sun and the animal or ‘bush meat’ aspects were hidden from my squeamish birds-eye view. A Don Quixote-like figure poked and slashed at covered piles of products with his stick, as people calmly observed him. Others came and went, as generations before them have done, to consult the doctors and sangomas for trusted age-old remedies and spiritual and supernatural help – as the 21st century rushes past on the M2 highway behind.