Medicine

African medicine is the health practice involving the application of indigenous resources, spiritual and material, in providing mental, psychological, social, and physical well-being and wholeness to a human being and his or her environment. It addresses the well-being of the individual and the community, the fertility of the soil, and animal production. The material resources include the use of elements from plants (roots, leaves, and barks), animals (blood, intestines, flesh, bones, and shells), and minerals. Spiritual resources involve interaction of the human with spiritual entities, including the use of words—symbols employed to invoke the power of spiritual beings.

Medicine involves the triad practice of explanation, prognostication, and control (treatment and/or prevention) of disease or illness. The African conception of wholeness and well-being goes beyond a simplistic perception of the soundness of body and mind and the stability of mental and physical conditions only; it also expresses harmonious relationship with the spiritual and physical environments. Africans conceive of disease and illness, in a holistic manner, as having a deep spiritual and metaphysical nature and causation.

Traditional medical practices therefore include nonempirical and empirical means to heal human beings from spiritual, psychological, social, physical, and political dislocations, and to restore cosmic balance. The different peoples of Africa, in varieties of culturally constructed ways, express their notion and understanding of the means through which disease and illness are communicated, diagnosed, and treated. All these are closely linked to and connected with mythic narratives and ritual practices, the dimensions through which the peoples offer explanations for the causes of disease, prognosticating into the possible cure and control, and removal or prevention of disease in some ways different from Western medical practice.

The similarity in their understanding of disease and illness, and approach to healing notwithstanding, African medicine provides indigenous resources for maintaining and restoring of health by the use of spiritual and material elements that are available in their different environments. This entry looks at the African view of disease, its health and healing practices, the people who employ them, and the spread of African ideas to the larger health community.