ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Swaziland that year to serve as an anthropologist on the Agency for International Development-funded Rural Water-Borne Disease Control Project. The high rate of population growth, however, threatens to overwhelm Swaziland's reasonably healthy economy and the health status of the population as measured by infant mortality and life expectancy is lower than that of countries with similar income levels. In 1981 the Swaziland government had a rather ambiguous policy toward traditional healers. A system of registering healers began in Swaziland late in the British colonial period when it became recognized that doctors and nurses would not easily displace traditional healers and that the latter could not be completely ignored by the government. Illnesses and conditions related to sexual intercourse are important to healers and, it appears, to the general population of Swaziland. Swazis make a basic distinction between diseases or conditions regarded as "African," "Swazi," or indigenous, and those that are of foreign or origin.
