Pharmacopeia of Cat Fur, Crocodile Heads

Akwesi Abeka had a pain in the neck, literally--a throbbing, fist-size growth below his jaw that closed his throat, forced one eye shut and made him look lopsided.

So the 21-year-old student shuffled through the teeming Kumasi market in search of Seidu Iddrissu, a healer he had heard of but never met.

He found Iddrissu behind a row of stalls laden with tools of the healer’s trade--chunks of tree bark and roots, piles of dried chameleons, bundles of python skins and heads of crocodiles, monkeys, cats and birds.

Iddrissu put a poultice of charcoal medicine and lime juice on Abeka’s cheek to lure “dirty blood” from his neck. Six days later, Abeka returned with a single apricot-size lump where the poultice had been applied.

This time, Iddrissu poked the bulbous growth with his finger and felt the glands. He looked into Abeka’s mouth at the white splotch from where the growth protruded, quietly asking if anything hurt.

“It was swollen up, but there wasn’t water in it,” Iddrissu said. “Now the water has come. I will apply the medicine again, and it will burst in three days’ time. He will be better.”

Iddrissu, 58, fits a common healer profile. Descended from a family of healers, he can treat malaria and problems like Abeka’s growth but also uses the spells and charms of superstition.

He tells how chameleons--known for changing color--are good for medicines that change behavior, such as getting a former lover to come back. Tortoise shell and the heads of crocodiles and vultures are burned to make a charcoal medicine for poisoning, because poison is like germs and those animals eat germs, he says.

A few minutes before Abeka arrived, Iddrissu sold small swaths of monkey, cat, dog and mouse fur to a woman for 10,000 cedis ($5) for a spell to break up her daughter’s husband and his lover.

The theory was simple: Wrap the hair of animals that don’t get along--cat and mouse, dog and monkey--in a paper with some gunpowder and throw it in a fire while chanting the names of the people to be separated.

Iddrissu said the flash and smoke would signal the imminent split.