A gift without shortcomings: Healers negotiating the intersection of the local and global in the context of HIV/AIDS

The paper will examine the idea of citizenship from the point of view of two healers, an inyanga and isangoma, one of whom is HIV positive, who live in the remote Okhahlamba region of South Africa. It will therefore provide a view of citizenship from below. The ways in which both healers explore their relationship with the world beyond Okhahlamba illustrates their personal wanderings beyond local environments and the ambivalence with which the wider world is viewed - a common perception of many rural dwellers whose lives, nevertheless, intersect with wider worlds due to migrancy: the experience of the inadequacies of local government, formal health and social welfare provision, and the arrival of international ARV programmes. Healer narratives suggest ways in which rural communities in South Africa claim an otherness in relation to wider worlds, an otherness that reiterates identities Of difference in relation to wider structures of governance. Local explanations for the HIV/AIDS pandemic are outlined and are given meaning through being placed within the experience of how the divided and divisive history of South Africa continues to haunt present constructions of worlds and notions of identity in response to widespread death and the politicisation of disease.