A Conversation With Credo Mutwa: An Herbal Cure for AIDS?

The following is a transcription of a conversation between Credo Mutwa and Steve, who is helping him to communicate his information through this website. It was recorded on Sunday, April 29th 2001 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Credo: "I wish to appeal to the world. First, I am not a quack or a charlatan or a sensationalist. I am an old man who has seen much. I wish the world to know that there is a faint ray of hope that emanates from South Africa.

It is a plant which is almost on the point of extinction, a plant called 'Suderlandia Fructosate'. This plant works miracles on people who have the terrible disease called Aids. And it is so miraculous that the miracles are seen within a week or a fortnight. A person, who was lying down on the point of death, when given this plant, rises and has much energy and is free of depression and has a good appetite. And I feel that as a nation as a matter of world emergency because the big scientists have not produced a viable safe treatment for aids. I say that this plant should be planted by all caring governments, by all caring organisations and that it should be given to human beings free of charge."

Steve: "Absolutely. You know what I think is important though Credo, that people understand what to do with the plant."

Credo: "They don't do nothing sir, you are going to laugh about this. You plant the plant okay, but then you take the little leaves from it and you put them in a tea cup and you pour much boiling water on it. And then you let the cup stand there, like tea you know, and you just drink, the patient just drinks."

Steve: "The leaves and the red flower?"

Credo: "Yah."

Steve: "Mix them together? Do you need to dry them first?"

Credo: "No you can take them straight from the garden, because if you dry them too much they somehow loose some of their good spirit. Now this is all you do. Now, there are good doctors I'm working with who are making pills out of this medicine. But you know sir, I feel we are faced with a national emergency, a world emergency.

You know sir, what I say is this. I can't cure the people of Africa without curing the people of the Caribbean, because Aids is running around the world. If I cure the people here and they get better, more Aids will come in and eat the same people whom I tried to cure. So the whole world must be cured. Look, can we say this? Nobody will arrest us or anything?"

Steve: "Well yes, I mean it's not against the law to say this, it's in our rights to speak."

Credo: Thank you sir. I will tell you why. Originally the plant of 'Suderlandia' was all over South Africa. And I will tell you what used to happen. There was a funny little grayish brown bird, which used to feed on 'Suderlandia's' and this bird was very edible. And starving people used to hit it with katties (slingshots) and kill it. Now the bird is gone almost. And now... so the land here is difficult to cultivate

Steve: The seeds are not being spread.

Credo: "Yah, yah. What is happening is you need to take a fine sandpaper and sandpaper each little seed. The seeds are very tiny, tinier than grape seeds. And you sandpaper each seed and you plant it in a small blompot (flower pot). And you allow it to grow until it is about maybe four inches, three inches high. Then you take it and you plant it in the big veld (grassland). You can make a big garden, maybe twenty acres or so and you plant there. They just grow. There are farmers who have already planted them but they are too few. This is a world emergency and we must not be selfish.

In the last few years or so there has been many claims made by people about plants and herbs, which they say are beneficial in the fight against aids. Some of these claims have proven to be false and at best have proven to be exaggerations. But in South Africa there is plan, which is on the brink of extinction. This plant is called by white people in English 'Suderlandia Fructosate'. This plant is also called by the Afrikaans people 'kankerbos', which means cancer bush or 'kalkoenbos', which means turkey bush. Now this plant was known in South Africa and other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa for thousands of years. It was an anti-depressant, it was appetite booster, it was also and still is a dramatic booster of the human immune system.

For many years African people and Xhoi-xhoi people and Xhoi-san people as well as Bantu people used this plant in the fight against cancer, and it was very effective there, and it still is. And they used it also in the fight against diseases like tuberculosis before there was streptomycin and other drugs to fight tuberculosis. In the old days when ordinary venereal disease like gonorrhea, syphilis and others were as incurable as Aids is today, our people used this plant to fight those diseases. If they had not had this plant, the black people of Southern Africa would have been destroyed just as the Australian Aborigines were destroyed, and other races of aboriginal people in other parts of the world were brought to extinction by diseases brought in from Europe.

Now, we have found... me and a group of doctors, doctors like Dr Nigel Gerica , Dr Ben van Wyk, Dr Albreght, Dr Mayeng. We looked at this plant and we found that it was having dramatic impact in creating a better quality of life. People with full-blown aids, people who had been sent home to die. Not only did we, the five of us, use the plant to help many people to a better quality of life within the space of a month or a fortnight. There is a lady in a hospital in Zululand, a white lady who has saved many, many people who have been condemned to die of Aids in this hospital. Then I also have my student, Virginia Ratele, who has saved many people who were condemned to die of aids. She has done this in her tribal village near the town of Kuruman.

There is something very strange that is happening now. I and Virginia, who live amongst the mountains of the Magaliesberg, are being terrorized and threatened by white men who are very professional in the way they do this. They are able to neutralize the security lights and the alarms with which the house in which we live are fitted. They are able to break in through the doors even though we put devices in the keyholes to stop people from doing so. These are not your run of the mill thieves; they are professional men who know exactly what they are doing.

I feel that all of human kind is facing an emergency, and that all greed and selfishness should be swept away, and this plant should be made available to nations in the world. The way the plant grows, I know it can grow in Nazareth, in the United States, India and in China and in other places where Aids is rampant. I do not claim that this plant, dramatic as the results are is the cure for Aids. I say it is a stopgap, which must be used by all human kind in order to halt the disease of Aids. Until such a time as the pharmaceutical scientists can come up with a real cure, a cure which is not at all toxic. I say that this plant 'Suderlandia' is not at all toxic. It was even used by men such as President Paul Kruger of the South African Republic of 1899 or thereabouts. And Paul Kruger who used this plant lived to be a very old man, and at one time Paul Kruger tried to send a consignment of 'Suderlandia' to save the life of a German Prince who had cancer of the throat. But the ship that sailed from Mozambique was too slow and arrived too late to save the prince.

I say this that the United Nations should take over the growing of this plant because we are faced with a world emergency. We are faced with a disease which devastates all of human kind without thinking. And we have got to stop Aids not only in Africa but in other parts of the world too. This disease has got to be stopped; it is not a natural disease. I have dealt with Aids now for the last five years and I now firmly believe, I Credo Mutwa, that Aids is a manmade disease. The way it behaves in the human body is like no God created ailment ever does. The disease shows a Satanic intelligence and I appeal to all people throughout the world, that here in South Africa is a faint ray of hope, which is however .to be drowned by greed, by selfishness and cowardly secretiveness. I say that this plant belongs to all humankind. It belongs to the little children dying of Aids; it belongs to the men and women who are ravaged by this ailment. And I believe firmly that scientists will be able to create a cure for Aids out of this plant. And I am making this worldwide appeal because our government appears totally indifferent to this offer, which I am making freely for all humanity. Our government does not seem to be able to take the one step, to have this plant planted throughout South Africa as a matter of national emergency.

One 'Suderlandia plant' is capable of treating 10 people, and we need plantations of this plant. And I say that this plant should not be the plaything of greedy businessmen. It should not be the plaything of thieving pharmaceutical organizations that steal Africa's treasures and lock them up in computers and call them their intellectual property. I say this that this plant belongs to all the humankind, and that the greedy organizations leave it alone. We do not need a disease like Aids to reduce the population of the world. I am told that this disease was created specifically to destroy Africa and I now believe this. After more than five years of dealing with this disease. And I say this. I will not allow Africa, a misunderstood and misrepresented nation, a misunderstood and misrepresented continent, to perish, to suit the designs of conspirators. I say that Africa must live, I say that India must live, China must live, and even the United States must live. There is hope, a little ray of hope, a green ray of hope, emanating from South Africa, and I call on all human fellow human beings to make it larger, to spread hope throughout the world. I beg to remind all that there was once a time malaria devastated whole communities throughout the middle east, throughout Africa and elsewhere. And out of South America there appeared a ray of hope, which grew, larger and larger. That ray of hope was called the bark of the Cinchona tree, quinine. And quinine saved thousands of lives, which would have otherwise been swept into oblivion.

I say that people should not look upon me as a quack or a crank. I am a researcher, self-taught. I am a writer of books, which have sold worldwide. I am an inventor and a historian and a traditional healer. And I say please, those who don't believe me come to South Africa and look at this plant yourself. I say that no organization has the right to call this plant it's property, none. And I say let hope for humankind be lighted from the southern tip of Africa to overspread the whole planet.

If Aids were created to reduce the human population, then it is a self-defeating thing. The only way to make people breed less is to end war in the world. When there is war shaking continents people breed more. People breed out of fear. People breed out of insecurity. You, the hypocrites of the United Nations, you the liars within the walls of the United Nations, you, I challenge you to create a safer world and not a world rotten with disease.

Thank You.

Credo Mutwa

A Reporter's Interview With Credo Mutwa

"I have a sick, disgusting obsession to make this country great -- not through guns and revolution but through love and laughter." Credo Mutwa's eyes practically sink behind his tree-thick lenses and disappear into bloated cheeks as he breaks into a smile as broad as the Limpopo. We're sitting in a rented apartment, supplied courtesy of Absa Bank (who recently subsidised his journey to the British Museum of Mankind in London during December 1996).
There, he unearthed and identified various ancient South African artefacts -- retrieved from over 5 000 pieces that have, until now, lain virtually entombed. He brought them home to South Africa for the Living Symbols of Africa exhibition.

They include Zulu love-letter necklaces, Ndebele beaded aprons, ceremonial Zulu spears, knobkerries and beaded cattle horns. They have, inevitably, been stripped of the traditional, historical contexts in which they functioned as integral components of daily tribal life. Yet Mutwa believes -- perhaps naively -- that their presence and once-dense symbolic resonances can be resurrected.

"These artefacts could set South Africa dreaming again for their stories are pointers towards greater knowledge, wisdom and pride," says the man widely regarded as one of the few remaining cultural visionaries in South Africa capable of re-fertilising the eroded soil of South Africa's ancient past.

Yet Mutwa is certainly not one of a kind. Men like him still live in the hills and valleys of rural South Africa, recounting ancient lore and legend and prophesying spiritual renewal. What separates Mutwa from his equally sagacious peers is the public visibility of the man. This, coupled with his extraordinary verbal prowess and a seemingly unlimited database of historical references and parables, has secured him the status of mystic healer -- the last of an endangered sacred species.

But who is Credo Mutwa really? "A foolish man who has dreams," he says humbly. Is he a gentle, unashamedly romantic proponent of love as the cure for all ills; a visionary ahead of his time? Or is he a charlatan and opportunist who consorted with the enemy? That depends on the angle of vision.

A proud Zulu with an unashamedly unpoliticised conscience, Mutwa has travelled the flimsy line between veneration and vilification. He is a celebrated author and sculptor and has published, exhibited and travelled widely, attending conferences on shamanism, philosophy and the arts. People still come to him from afar to be healed. Yet during the 1976 Soweto riots he was labelled an apartheid collaborator.

His son was killed by comrades, his house was burnt down and he was literally chased from the township. He landed up in Mafikeng where, with the approval of his friend President Lucas Mangope, he established a traditional healing village, which developed into a popular tourist attraction.

Then, Mangope fell and Mutwa's sun seemed about to set. Shunned by the new North West Province legislature, in 1995 he was evicted from the village because "it stood on land belonging to the Parks Board". Today his original cultural village is in ruins but he has built another in the Shamwari Game Reserve.

"I believe that if African culture is fully utilised in all its richness it can benefit hundreds of thousands of people, he says, unearthing self-drawn sketches of African warriors engaged in traditional wrestling matches. "Today, we have been inspired by kick-boxing from the Far East but centuries ago this was common practice, alongside bare fist and stick fighting. It was good fun and it served as an outlet for anger and ensured peaceful inter-tribal coexistence. If these sports had to be revived today they would become a major tourist attraction and job creator."

Mutwa makes no claims to cultural purity, nor does he advocate the return to a mythical South Africa untainted by change or outside influence. He translates life as a series of confluences of different histories -- biblical and secular. And these he liquidly conflates into lessons for the present and future.

"During the iconoclastic Middle Ages the monasteries secretly preserved the ancient knowledge of Europe. Not only the Christian teachings but the ancient Greek Homeric philosophies as well. And whoever started the Renaissance built a mountain of creativity," says Mutwa.

He adds: "All humans want recognition, whether they are soccer players or serial killers, because the greatest expression of human freedom is being recognised for one's value. And the greatest anchor for democracy is creativity. One cannot have democracy on the dung-heap of crime. But if you create shining winds of beauty and unleash creativity it can reform even the most hardened of criminals."