Anthony Karoly Smida: healing with cannabis

Everyone laughed at “Gogo-Tony” when he told them about the dream he had of a lion leading him to medicine.

When Anthony Karoly Smida ended up in hospital with a life-threatening illness, this lion not only led him to his healing but also to his calling, of healing others.

“I was born a gypsy, an oracle by birth, and I never fitted in,” Smida says. “I have a strange family, my mom was
15 years old when I was born, and my father 23 years old.

“During a one-day pass from the army, my mother and father married because she was pregnant.”

By the age of four, his parents had split and Smida and his two siblings were adopted by their grandparents.

“By 15 years old I rebelled and was not only expelled from school but also kicked out of the house. I ended up
in the streets for three years, and that’s where everything went south,” he says.

Aged 33, he was diagnosed with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacterium that causes infections in different parts of the body – it cost Smida a leg in 2014.

When he was diagnosed in 2011, doctors told Smida he had only six months left to live because the disease is incurable.

In 2015, Smida was again hospitalised and doctors were wanting to further amputate the leg when a lion appeared to him in a dream and showed him his medicine – dagga.

“Everyone laughed at me when I told them the dream,” he said, but he was determined to pursue the “medicine” he’d seen.

He went to his local police station where he met the station commander to discuss his rare disease and the medicine he needed to stay alive.

“I wrote a declaration of admission of guilt that I would be growing, producing and using cannabis as medication,” says Smida.

“The station commander told me she could not give me permission to do so and would be forced to arrest me if I was caught.”

He counts on his fingers up to 10 – the times he has been arrested since that meeting. Smida also confessed to his local municipal office’s secretary. He saw the lion wherever he went.

“I realised I couldn’t deny where I am, I am the light and this is where I was supposed to be.”

The lion, he says, represents a more traditional lion to him, the Lion of Judah.

“Realising I had a calling, I had to honour who I was supposed to be, the oracle,” Smida says.

So he studied herbalism at the Herbal Academy. The lion was not finished with him, though, and led him to Jason Wallis, a sangoma known as Baba Talunga, under whom he spent more than a year learning about traditional healing.

Due to bad timing and his great calling to help others, he hasn’t been able to twasa (psychologically manifest his calling) yet.

According to the Umsamo Institute, ukuthwasa is an acceptance of an idlozi (spirit of a healer), which wants to come back and continue performing its duties.

“I have a gift. I don’t need bones to look into someone’s life, I look at my creator,” he said.

When Baba Talunga gifted Smida with his first set of traditional robes last year, he was also given a new name, Gogo-Tony.

“The ancestors said I was allowed to wear the nyanga because I have work to do.”

Smida says people stared at him walking down the streets, with his prosthetic leg and dressed in the traditional robe and beads.

“I am not fazed about what people think about me because I don’t work for money. It is only by God’s grace that I get out of the bed.

“And when I look at the lion’s face in all its agility and glory, it insists, it’s like ROOOAAAR, I am here.”

– marizkac@citizen.co.za