Healing

Religious View of Sickness

Religious worldviews are quintessential to understanding traditional healing systems and medicine; how the people make sense of illness or misfortune; and what therapeutic and prophylactic mechanisms they adopt. Traditional healing is holistic, encompassing the physical, mental, psychological, material, and emotional aspects that result in a total well-being and wholeness. It focuses not only on symptoms or diseases, but also deals with the total individual. In a sense, healing focuses on the person, not the illness.

In most African cosmologies, sickness, diseases, and other misfortunes are largely linked to supersensible origins such as the wrath of divinities and neglected ancestral spirits, malevolent spiritual entities, witches, and wizards and sorcerers. However, people also recognize nonreligious etiologies of disease. Diseases are viewed as a direct intervention by the deities or the malevolent spiritual beings, a signal that some adjustment to the person's life is expedient. Diseases or misfortune of any other kind is a signifier that an overhaul of a person's psychic motor is necessary.

In the mental and social attitudes of many Africans, there is no belief more ingrained than that of the reality and existence of witches. All strange diseases, abnormal occurrences, physical disorders, ailments, accidents, untimely deaths, inability to gain promotions in office, failure in examinations and business enterprise, disappointment in love, barrenness in women, impotence in men, and failure of crops are attributed to witches and other spiritual agents of malevolence. This explains why they are very much dreaded and feared in the society.

When confronted with illness, impending danger, and misfortune, there is usually recourse to divination in a process of explanation, prediction, and control. The people divine in their quest to know the behest of the Supreme Being, the divinities, and the ancestors, on the one hand, and to inquire about the particular kind of fortune or misfortune involved in their destinies, on the other hand. The diagnostic process, cure, or prevention that follows is often undertaken and supervised by diviners and healers who play an interlocutory role between the physical and spirit worlds.

Some Examples

Among the Zulu in Southern Africa, the roles of izangoma diviners and izinyanga healers are differentiated, although not mutually exclusive. The role of the Nganga is central within the Bwiti ritual world in Gabon and Cameroon. She or he is believed to have extensive knowledge of healing practices. Most healers or medicine men rely on some type of divination in diagnosing a client's illness, and a divinatory technique may also be used in determining the appropriate treatment. Those who play these special ritual roles in the society undergo special medical training, which involves the novice being apprenticed to a practicing healer for several years. Epistemologies of healing are also transmitted from one generation to another. Diviners/healers are sometimes tied to specific deities in charge of divination and healing. The izangoma are called to their profession by their ancestors usually manifesting in tbwasa/intwaso, an illness syndrome.

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