The place where you work

Task 1. You are going to hear two people, Jane and Martin, discussing the places they have worked in and whether they were happy there. They will be expressing different views and you must put a Y (yes) or N (no) according to whether you have heard the view expressed or not.

1. Buildings with air-conditioning can make you ill.

2. Office life is dull and boring.

3. Working in old buildings can be bad for your health.

4. Fresh air is preferable to air-conditioned air.

5. Artificial light can make you tired.

6. Outside views can be distracting.

7. The layout of an office can't influence how you feel.

8. People who work in the same office should only make necessary phone calls.

9. Quiet offices are not necessary for creative work.

10. Busy offices are exciting places to work.

Task 2. Now listen to the tape again, and look at the sentences you marked with a Y. Which of these views are expressed by: a Jane? b Martin? c both of them?

U THINK & SPEAK OUT

At the mercy of the cure

Mark Mathabane (1960 - ) was born in South Africa and grew up in a black township outside Johannesburg. He longed to escape the poverty and violence of apartheid. Through the efforts of tennis champion Stan Smith, Mathabane re­ceived an athletic scholarship to an American college. He began writing as an undergraduate and edited a student newspaper. After graduation from Bowling College, he studied journalism at Columbia University. Mathabane's autobiogra­phy Kaffir Boy, published in 1986, recounted his South African childhood. Three years later he published Kaffir Boy in America, where this essay first appeared, about his first ten years living in the United States.

In this essay Mathabane explores the differences between Western and traditional African medicine. When he examines the psychological impact of apartheid, he draws comparisons to Nazi concentration camps.

Upon returning to Dowling in the new year, 1982, I found a letter from home waiting for me with the miraculous news: my mother had finally been cured of her insanity. I was overwhelmed with joy. The contents of the letter related how Aunt Queen, the isangoma, had spent over a year treating my mother. She was said to have used mutt (tribal medicine), consisting of special herbs, bark, and roots – and divination, a seeing into the past and future using bones.

Apparently my mother's kindness had done her in. While in South Africa she had, against my protestations and those of the family, taken in as boarders from the Giyani homeland in the Northern Transvaal a tall, raw-boned nyanga (medicine man) with bloodshot eyes, named Mathebula, and his family of five. They had nowhere else to go. The shack became home for about fifteen people; some slept under the tables, others curled up in corners and near the stove; there was no privacy. My mother had made it clear that their moving in with us was only a temporary measure, to provide them a roof over their heads while they hunted for their own shack. When months passed without the Mathebulas making any attempts at finding alternative housing, my mother had politely requested them to leave. This angered the wizard, a proud and chauvinistic man. Nonetheless he speedily con­structed a shack in one of the rat-infested alleyways. But he never forgave my mother.

From strands of my mother's hair and pieces of her clothing, which he had gathered while he lived in our house, he allegedly concocted his voodoo and drove my mother mad. It took Aunt Queen almost a year to piece together what she deemed a "dastardly plot." Daily, out in the yard, under the hot African sun, with my mother seated cross-legged across from her, my aunt shook bones and tossed them onto the ground. From interpreting their final positions she believed that she was able to name the sorcerer and the method he used to bewitch my mother. To a Western mind this of course sounds incredible and primi­tive. But witchcraft is a time-honored tradition among many African tribes, where convenient scapegoats are always blamed for events which, through limited knowledge and technology, seem inexplicable. Belief in witchcraft can be compared to a Westerner's belief in astrol­ogy holding answers to man's future and fate.

"Now you know the truth," Aunt Queen said to my mother at the end of her confinement, when she was finally cured. The two spoke in Tsonga. "What do you want me to do?"

"Protect my family from further mischief."

"Is that all?"

"That's all."

"Don't you want revenge? Are you simply going to let him go scot-free?"

"I'm not a witch. I'm a child of God. I harbor no malice toward him or his family. I seek no revenge." My mother, despite her belief in witchcraft, still considered the Christian God to be all-powerful. This position of course had its contradictions, and since this episode oc­curred I have pointed them out to her from time to time. She has modified her beliefs and is now more under the sway of Christianity.

"But your ancestors must be satisfied," Aunt Queen said. "And what about the pain he caused you? Do you know that he intended to kill you?"

"But Christ prevented that. He led me to you and gave you the Power to cure me."

"You know, Mudjaji [my mother's maiden name], you're so loving that it's impossible for me to understand why anyone would want to harm you. The only thing left for me to do to complete the cure and prevent a relapse is to send the mischief back to its perpetrator." It was believed that no cure of witchcraft was complete until the black magic had reverted to the sorcerer.

"Please don't do anything that would harm him or his family," my mother pleaded.

"The gods will decide," Aunt Queen said.

Two weeks after my mother returned to Alexandra, the sorcerer's favorite son was stabbed to death during an argument in a shebeen. Hardly had he been buried when another of his sons was stabbed to death by tsotsis (gangsters) during a robbery and dumped in a ditch. My mother felt remorse over the deaths and grieved for the sorcerer's family. Aunt Queen told her that there was nothing she could have done to prevent their fate.

Here I was in America, in the heart of Western civilization itself, having to grapple with the reality or unreality of witchcraft. I remem­ber how my mother's incredible story tested my "civilized mentality," my Western education, my dependency on reason, my faith in science and philosophy. But in the end I realized that her insanity, of course, had rational causes, just as did Uncle Piet's gambling, matrimonial problems, my father's alcoholism, and the family's poverty – all of which they tended to blame on witchcraft. Either my mother's undiagnosed and untreated diabetes or the oppressive conditions under which she lived, or a combination of the two, had deranged her. Aunt Queen was the tribal equivalent of a shrink. Her "magical" treatments of diseases owed much to the power of suggestion and her keen knowl­edge of the medicinal effects of certain herbs, bark, leaves, and roots, from which, it has been discovered, a good deal of Western medicine has gained real remedies. As for the deaths of the Wizard's sons, this was, of course, pure coincidence, since Alexandra, especially the neigh­borhood in which my family lived, was an extremely violent place: on one weekend over a dozen murders were committed.

I realized all this from the knowledge I had gained since coming to America and discovering that there was a branch of medicine of which I had been completely ignorant while I lived in South Africa: psycho­analysis and psychiatry. The inhuman suffering experienced by blacks under apartheid had devastating effects on their mental and physical well-being. Given the primitive state of health care in the ghettos, en­demic illiteracy, and the sway of tribal beliefs, my mother and most blacks were ignorant of causal relationships. They therefore blamed witchcraft for mental illnesses like schizophrenia and paranoia; diseases like malnutrition and tuberculosis; problems like unemploy­ment, alcoholism, and gambling; and unlucky coincidences, such as being arrested during a pass raid while neighbors escaped, or being fired from a job. Their lack of access to qualified medical doctors, psy­chotherapists, and social workers forced them to rely on the dubious and often dangerous "cures" of isangomas, especially since such "cures" at least offered the victim much-needed psychological relief.

Superstition is present in Western societies as well, astrology be­ing one example. Some people also blame their misfortunes on the Devil. And many govern their lives through card-reading and palm­istry, and rely on charlatans to cure them of cancer, AIDS, blindness, varicose veins, and other diseases. Until education dispelled my ig­norance and fortified my reason I was to a degree superstitious and believed in witchcraft.

The psychological problems experienced by blacks in South Afri­can ghettos are somewhat similar to those experienced by inmates of concentration camps during the Second World War. From Death-Camp to Existentialism, by Viktor E. Frankl, explains how psychotic behavior can become a "normal" way of life, a means of survival, for helpless people whose sense of identity and self-worth are under constant at­tack by an all-powerful oppressor. Jews in concentration camps were at the mercy of their Nazi guards, just as blacks in the ghettos of South Africa are at the mercy of apartheid's Gestapo-like police. Some vic­tims of oppression even come to identify with their oppressors and persecute with relish their own kind. There are cases of Jews, known as Capos, who, in return for special privileges like food and cigarettes doled out by SS guards, treated other Jews sadistically and even herded them into crematoriums and gas chambers. In South Africa black policemen, in return for special privileges such as better housing, resi­dential permits, and passbooks for relatives, shoot and kill unarmed black protesters, torture them in jail, uproot black communities under the homeland policy, and launch brutal raids into the ghettos to en­force Kafkaesque apartheid laws. Such are the evil consequences of unbearable pressures.

Understanding Meaning

1. According to the relative's account, what caused Mathabane's mother to become disturbed?

2. How does the author respond to the concept of witchcraft?

3. How was Mathabane's mother cured? Since the cure required a year, what other explanations can be made for her recovery?

4. What does Mathabane believe led to her recovery?

5. What does this essay reveal about the differences between Western and traditional African medicine?

6. How does Mathabane's new knowledge of psychoanalysis lead him to view his mother's illness? How does it help him understand the effect of apartheid?

Critical Thinking: Discuss whether or not superstition such as witchcraft becomes a way for people to accept oppression, to perceive political problems in spiritual ways.

Writing Suggestions: Write a short essay about people who believe in astrology, numerology, crystal therapy, or palmistry. Even if you share in these beliefs, try to ob­jectively examine why people accept ideas that many scientists discredit. Do these beliefs allow people to cope with problems? Does a belief in as­trology help provide guidance to people faced with doubt and confusion? Can it lead people to deny the real cause of problems?

Collaborative Writing: Discuss Mathabane's essay with a small group of students. Ask members to share instances where their education has led them to question some of the beliefs they grew up with. How had edu­cation changed perceptions about race, gender, technology, careers, or college? Can mass education eradicate traditional beliefs and values? Have your group work together to draft a short statement on how college has affected student values.