Based on pervasive and dominant neoliberal and biomedical narratives, several people in the Diwa community perceive and understand Munya’s experiences as psychiatric disorders, attributed to the use of cannabis. General perceptions by the community are based on pervasive biomedical metanarratives popularized by media, education institutions and Christianity in the 21st century. However, Munya understands his experiences as direct manifestations of witchcraft and spirits, where his close kin or affine are engaged in sorcery for illicit wealth accumulation, which ultimately inflicts him into panic. Although his mother’s understanding of his situation was skewed to local explanations, she also hardly rules out the use of mbanje. She is always quoted, “Munya must also stop smoking so that we can also be certain on where his illness is coming from”.

Anthropologists note that individuals accept or resist, for instance, name-callings that underlie “sinful” perceptions about mental illness (see Bruun, 2023), such as those commonly deployed by insensitive community members. Although many traditional healers, psychiatrists and nurses in the Diwa community often use “kupenga” (“madness”) or “chirwere chepfungwa” (“mental illness”) as a shared cultural understanding that explains mental health experiences, Munya resisted these concepts and accepts ‘kuvhunduka’ (panicking), whilst his mother generalised his health condition just as kurwara (illness). Many people especially those who see him at the local shopping centre, where he often relaxes and accesses mbanje address him with different unfortunate delegatory names like vhundu (slang for panicking), mujambanje (notorious eater of mbanje), or tsviru or mupengo (dangerous “lunatic”). These names unseparated, denigrate and marginalise his ‘kuvhunduka’ condition. They rationalised his “panics” as adverse effects of smoking mbanje. Therefore, the community rejects Munya as reckless with his life, ill-mannered, evil, or dangerous to the children. However, the most intricate characteristic of the story was that some of Munya’s colleagues who supplied mbanje or smoked with him were hardly misconstrued as persons with “mental illness”. Unlike some of these unsensitive community members or his colleagues, Munya however appreciated our friendship because I always addressed him by his real name, Munya, and his situation as ‘kuvhunduka’, a concept he preferred and perceived to better explain his condition.

Whilst ‘kuvhunduka’ was not a universal or common local concept used to describe mental illness experiences in Diwa, it was a concept that Munya used to describe his illness. Munya carefully chose this term to eschew the precarity associated with mental illness and mujambanje. Munya suffered stress, self-rejection and self-unworthiness from some community members. For Munya, the notion of kuvhunduka explains how he “panics” whenever he is being attacked by witchcraft familiars. Despite his acceptance of kuvhunduka, this notion has never been a perfect experience for Munya. It was a creation of witchcraft that was harming his life. Contemporary, very few people in Diwa wanted to be addressed as kuvhunduka because of how the concept has been used to explain Munya’s experiences which resonated with labellings levelled against him based on his health challenges. Kuvhunduka has acquired new negative meanings associated with “madness” and the reckless smoking of mbanje.

As Munya’s condition continued to deteriorate, he preferred to be understood as simply munhu akadhakwa (drunk person) rather than munhu anovhunduka (panicking person), because some community members have transformed kuvhunduka into the slang form vhundu (the act of panicking) to describe him as “madman”. It can be noted that the notions and concepts preferred by those people experiencing “mental illness” are transitory and require a great level of sensitivity.

The factors that pushed Munya into smoking can be encapsulated in his account: “Now I just want people to say I am drunk, not mad. Being seen as mad is embarrassing and shameful. They used to say I am intoxicated by mbanje, at least if I smoke, they will just say I am drunk. I have seen that those who are intoxicated are viewed better than me. I can also forget about relatives bewitching me and gather confidence to fight them”. The use of mbanje has never made his discrimination and stereotypes better. He acquired a new name, mujambanje (reckless consumer of mbanje), which makes Munya the sole architect of his mental illness. Munya’s ‘kuvhunduka’ further highlights how complicated relationships, names and notions in cannabis use and mental illness can be created. For Kleinman (1988), this is what he has described as rhetorical skills of individuals in deploying idioms sometimes to escape shame associated with their symptoms. However, these skills have always met some resistance from the community.

In the prolegomenon of this article, Munya’s mother and bamunini construct Munya’s experiences, as “psychosis” attributed to excessive smoking of mbanje by someone too young. Although cutting of incisions (nyora) on the body as a way of trying to detoxicate individuals from mbanje is not a shared and generally accepted cultural understanding, it gives us meanings on how community especially close kins or affines can easily construct “mental illness” as the manifestation of cannabis use. In contrast, Munya articulated his side of the story which refuted the association of his condition with cannabis use. He recalls that his kuvhunduka had started before he even started smoking mbanje. Munya explained

My situation started well before many people [including his parents] knew it. The people who first noticed it were my classmates. I went to school, and my colleagues, said I was speaking too much, not that I was speaking louder but speaking without listening or giving others time to speak. Christine, one of my classmates was the first to notice it. She went to tell her mother that the way I was talking too much (kutaurisa) was problematic. I was panicking (kuvhunduka) and my heart was beating faster. I am not mentally ill (kupenga) but its kuvhunduka. I had not started smoking mbanje when I started kuvhunduka. My situation did not start in the field that my mother always referenced. Yes, she first saw it when I was in the field on chisi and suspected that it was mbanje. I started smoking later after five years from this field episode.

Generally, several community members, health providers and police officers attribute various mental illnesses of young men to excessive use of substances. Despite a shared local and cultural understanding of mental illness, many community members seem to be shifting their explanations of mental illness towards cannabis use—governed by powerful biomedical metanarratives. This appears to resonate well with Foucault (1988) who argues that the control, surveillance and treatment of “mad” is often governed by prevailing institutional powers, where biomedicine decides and constructs how “mad” persons are governed.

When Munya was smoking cannabis, he torched his mother’s thatched kitchen and missed his sister with an axe. Expectedly, he was arrested for an act of arson and attempted murder. The police officers who arrested him attributed this incident to smoking mbanje, whilst on the other hand, his mother perceives that witches wanted her son to murder her sister, destroy properties and later avail him to perish in prison. In support of her perceptions, before this incident occurred, the mother had dreamed of her daughter swimming in red water, which she symbolically interpreted to foretell the death of her daughter, the sister to Munya. She strongly believed the interpretations of her dreams and how prayers and ancestral spirits had helped dissipate the severity of this hatched witchcraft plan by one of Munya’s close kins.

It can be noted that the construction of the relationship between mbanje use, and mental illness is often obscured by legal and pathological narratives. It too deconstructs the local construction of ‘kuvhunduka’ experiences and privileges “mental illness” metanarratives. Subsequently, when Munya was attending court for the crime, psychiatrists and psychologists later diagnosed that he had some underlying mental illness—a “relapse” produced by excessive use of mbanje. He was transferred to Parerenyatwa Psychiatric Unit, a major hospital in Harare, Zimbabwe. At this point, Munya’s experiences were transformed from legal (smoked) to pathological objects (mental illness), based on biomedicine perspectives. Whilst the diagnosis of mental illness was a positive step for the treatment of mental illness, the phenomenological understanding of Munya and the local explanation of ‘kuvhunduka’ was missing in the whole gamut of explanations and treatments. Kuvhunduka that resonated with witchcraft.

Munya explained his experiences at psychiatric hospitals as corresponding to that of prison or police detention he had initially endured in the hands of police officers for “his crime”. The Kuvhunduka narrative from Munya during his “confinement” has never been tolerated and has been misconstrued as “madness”. Except for some psychiatrists and psychologists, few people wanted to listen to his kuvhunduka story. The interpretation of Munya’s health by local nurses in Diwa and psychologists and psychiatrists was related to smoking mbanje, thus making his “condition” a wilful intent. Munya explains

People lied that I was in a psychiatric hospital. That one was not a hospital. We all agreed with some of my colleagues that it was just a prison for smokers. We were all the times accused of smoking mbanje. We were always taught how to stop smoking when we were “set free’. They called it ‘restoration’. You know kusina amai hakuyendwi (Shona proverb: you should not go where there is no mother). I also stopped smoking because I had no access to mbanje. But the panicking has never stopped, although some officers said I was getting better.

The citing of chisi in the introduction may be interpreted as incantations curated by spirits of chisi. To understand cultural nuances associated with chisi, I interviewed Chief Makuni, the autochthonous of the land (varidzi vepasi), concerning mental illness. His conception below further unsettles cannabis use.

When the month is about to end or start, this period is referred to as nhinda, huwakwedza or chisi. This occurs when the moon becomes thin (mwedzi mutete). It is the time when people are prohibited from working in their fields by spirit mediums, and several women go to the menstrual cycle (kuyenda kumwedzi-literally translated to the moon). They are cleansed to be fertile. However, mwedzi mutete is associated with several “extremes” for people especially those with chronic mental illnesses. This is the time when many of them become violent or too silent. The spirit mediums would have stopped providing their close spiritual protection as they would be attending to other spiritual commitments. This is the time when different illnesses wreak havoc. People must rest to avoid encounters with misfortunes and afflictions.

Munya’s kuvhunduka experiences often “deteriorate” during chisi. It appears, that Munya’s underlying ‘kuvhunduka’ responds to the effects of “mwedzi mutete”. The behaviour of Munya in the field appears to have been coupled with disobeying the taboo of chisi and the arrival of mwedzi mutete. However, many people disobey this taboo without consequences of mental illness, because they don’t have an underlying mental illness. However, the constructions of mental illness during mwedzi mutete situates Munya’s kuvhunduka as a spiritually caused illness.

In a local weekly Shona newspaper, Kwayedza, journalist Mapupu (2019) wrote salient ethnographic insights on mwedzi mutete. He found out that when people are saying mwedzi mutete, they are signalling deep mental illness meanings. It either means a person is mentally ill, or the mental illness is at its peak because of the embodied “thin moon”. This local ontology of mwedzi mutete echoes the observation of psychiatrist Kirmayer (1992) who argues that illness experiences are articulated through metaphors. Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987, p. 21) supported that “natural phenomenon”, human artefacts, animals and topography are important in classifying and humanising human experiences. It is noted that notions of spirits, experience and time refute the individual responsibility that stresses the individual, particularly demonstrated by smoking mbanje, as an artefact of mental illness. In this context, an individual agency of smoking cannabis is deconstructed by the agency of the spirits (see Niehaus, 2002).

Ngozi, aggrieved spirit, has since been the mostly feared spiritual phenomenon in Diwa area. It unleashes various sociocultural afflictions and misfortunes, especially by causing fast and cruel deaths, illnesses, miscarriages and divorces among others. Munya’s explanation of his own experiences can be explained as one of the manifestations of ngozi:

Many n’angas (traditional healers) told me that smoking mbanje will never cause permanent mental illness. My brother Tindo was once possessed (akasvikirwa) by the spirit of our aunt who died long ago without children. As he was possessed, he told my father that my situation was an act of witchcraft. The person behind my illness had seen that I was bright in school and wanted to disrupt my progress in education. He also said I was in the process of becoming mudzimu (spirit medium). When his spirit had gone, elders failed to know whether I was possessed, mentally ill, bewitched or smoking. Some also said that ngozi from our late aunt who died without children, because of sorcery within the family was coming to haunt us. This ngozi spirit has never been appeased. Elders believe a ngozi within the family, is less life-threatening. The one from another family is too harmful. This kind of ngozi may cause symptoms like my “panicking” experiences, for family members to search for meanings and appease.

My brother from my stepfather also got mentally ill. He started when he was in the shop. He indiscriminately and violently looted groceries from the shop. We were all victims of witchcraft pervasive in our extended family. It was family issues. We have many family challenges: witchcraft (huroyi) and sorcery (kuromba). Contrary to my situation, my brother has been healed by the prophet Dollar and is now doing well. When I also visited Dollar, he said I was too late (ndakanonoka), as my situation had deteriorated, and I encountered Western medicine. My Father was told by Chayambuka, one of the renowned healers, who once tried to heal me in Tsombe that mbanje will never cause kupenga “madness”. He also said my situation is never related to smoking mbanje. Still, smoking mbanje was later used by witches or sorcerers in my family to avoid accounting for my situation.

Mental illness related to the process of becoming a traditional healer has never been spared. Some elders in Diwa suspected that Munya might have been in the process of becoming a traditional healer hinted by a possessed sibling. Mental illness is often one of the characteristics of the liminal or marginal phase of spiritual transition undergone by traditional healers in their ‘rites of passage’ (See Turner, 1982). This liminal phase is locally referred to as kusuka homwe (cleansing medium). Mental illness experiences during spiritual transformative processes are not new among anthropologists, they have constructed these mental illnesses that can only end when one accepts the spiritual calling (Bourdillon, 1987, p. 164; Luedke, 2007, p. 716; Reis, 2000, p. 62; Janzen, 1992, pp. 139–140; Turner, 1982, p. 282).

Munya, including his mother’s accounts, highlights witchcraft, which frequently features in family affairs. Explanations by Munya’s brother linked his illness to witchcraft, particularly invoked by jealousy of Munya’s perceived intelligence at school and being one of the most loved children in a polygamous family. This had raised witchcraft accusations at the family level.

Some of Munya’s relatives were perceived to be engaging in “occult” farming magic (tsvera/divisi) to enhance their yields. The mother of Munya constructs this kind of mental illness as a ritual for accumulating illicit wealth. As sufferers “panic” and wander at the shopping centre, sorcerers will also accumulate more wealth. Furthermore, Munya’s mother also notices some profound increases in the severity of mental illness of her son, especially during the summer season when peasant farmers start engaging in farming preparations. Munya stays at the shopping centre but frequently relocates to the homestead whenever the rain season begins. This norm points to a systematic illness being controlled by “someone living” (munhu mupenyu)—a “sorcerer”. Munya would have been called by goblins to engage and invoke farming charms.

My interview with Pachawo, one of the n’angas in Diwa, about mental illness experiences and cannabis use, revealed an inextricable proliferation of sorcery which has gained traction in recent decades. She explains

These young people are engaged in sorcery (kuromba) of zvikwambo and zvidhoma for accumulating wealth, and power, and starting businesses and or even buying posh cars. These charms are detrimental to the health and lives of children. Do you see the level of greediness that has become common in societies? Young people are interested in wealth and money, and this is affecting their children. Witchcraft is very tricky; it can influence you to get infected with HIV/AIDS or even smoke mbanje.

Sorcery for illicit accumulation is not a new social phenomenon in Zimbabwe. Zvikwambo (goblins) or zvidhoma (zombies) are well-known familiars bought or sold to accumulate wealth through supernatural means but causing illnesses in the family (Shoko, 2007, pp. 64–67), normally mental illnesses. Similarly, in South Africa, Niehaus et al. (2001, pp. 51–56) pointed out that tokolotsi and mamlambo require blood and human sacrifices from their kin. Anthropologists described this as an “occult economy” (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1999), premised on real or imagined “illicit accumulation” in South Africa. Anthropologists Sanders (2003) and Pfeiffer (2002) cited disruption of social cohesion, that invoked sorcery idioms particularly in Tanzania and Mozambique produced by Structural Adjustment Programmes that heightened competition and inequalities. Mental illness, therefore, becomes an anti-social ritual, through which sorcerers gain political and economic power.