Browsing by Subject "Traditional Healers"

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    Negotiating healing: understanding the dynamics amongst traditional healers in Kwazulu-Natal as they engage with professionalisation
    (Taylor & Francis, 2005) Devenish, Annie
    Traditional healing in South Africa is undergoing a process of change. Recognition of the role of traditional healers in health care, especially in the face of the HIV and AIDS pandemic, has led to government calls for professionalisation amongst this group. Traditional healers themselves have been increasingly experiencing a need to professionalise in order to gain more equal treatment in the public health sector and to secure access to state resources and support. In response to these developments, the government passed the Traditional Health Practitioners Act in 2004, which sets the parameters for official recognition of healers under the state. This paper focuses on the dynamics and politics amongst traditional health practitioners as they undergo this process of professionalisation, focusing on the KwaZulu-Natal Traditional Healers Council, the official body responsible for representing healers in the Province. It explores and analyses several key tensions amongst healers within and beyond the Council, showing how these tensions reveal particular power struggles over authority, as well as conflicting perspectives on the control and use of indigenous knowledge and the parameters of 'authentic' and 'appropriate' healing practice. The paper also looks at how the KwaZulu-Natal Council has attempted to mediate these tensions, emphasising that healers will have to find ways to resolve such conflicts in order for them to be able to come together and work on a common vision of professionalism.
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    Negotiating relationships between biomedicine and sangoma: Fundamental misunderstandings, avoidable mistakes
    (2005) Wreford, Joanne
    In South Africa, traditional African and biomedical practitioners operate in parallel, but largely separate, arenas, in which collaboration is largely absent. This paper suggests that any positive benefits of pluralism tend to be undermined by fractious and confrontational relationships between the biomedical and traditional systems, a situation which appears especially the case for traditional practitioners such as sangoma, who call on the spiritual guidance of ancestral agency in their healing work. Motivated in part by the author’s personal experience of training and qualification as a sangoma, this paper seeks to stimulate an intellectual debate about sangoma healing as it relates to the scientific understandings of biomedicine, most especially in the context of HIV/AIDS interventions in South Africa. The collaborative medical relationships advocated here do not deny the technical expertise of biomedicine nor question the commitment of allopathic practitioners to health and healing. Rather the paper seeks to address the risks to biomedicine’s efficacy in the hubris which drives it to remain disengaged from its traditional counterparts. The paper argues that as biomedicine appears uncomfortable with the spiritual aspects of the traditional paradigm, the absence of spirituality in allopathic practice confuses traditional healers, a situation which prejudices working relationships. I will argue that biomedical professionals, rather than denying or decrying traditional African healing, could emulate the few of their number who have engaged with traditional practice. I will demonstrate how a working knowledge of some of the fundamental ideas of African healing and its spiritual evocations - the question of healing and cure, theories of pollution and cleansing, the functions of ritual, the purposes of witchcraft and the healing of witchcraft, to mention a few – may actually empower biomedical practitioners, and enable them to work with rather than against sangoma.