spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

church-based healing discourse does not necessarily exclude other notions as significant in this
particular discourse.
5.4.1 Power as existential need for human life
The treatise on the discourse of African traditional healing (in Chapter 2) already revealed the
relationship of vital force and human life: each and every living being is believed to contain a
vital force. Ellis & Ter Haar (2004:94) state that the notion that every living being can be
indentified with vital force has been recorded over many decades from all parts of Africa. This
vital force, or basic vitality, is the foundation of existence. Within the church-based healing
discourse, the same kind of meaning is attached to vital force as vital power: vital force is an
existential need for human life, because a human being cannot be or cannot become if the vital
power is absent. The human effort to get hold of that power should not be understood as rooted
in selfishness or arrogance, but as a deep basic need that guarantees life (Anderson 1990:70).
The consequence of the perception of power as an existential vital force is that every human
being is eagerly engaged in the quest for more power, including the defense or the manipulation
of that power. The nature of power is not only defined by its existential notion, but also by its
‘fluidity’, in the sense that power only becomes meaningful within the boundaries of a
relationship: “power is an unending series of transcendent and transformative maneuvers, each
one moving beyond, countering, inverting, overturning, and/or reversing the one preceding it”
(West 2005:7). Every human being possesses vital force, and every human being is supposed to
increase his or her life-giving power in order to become who he or she is destined. Power in this
sense is the first principle of life (cf. Magesa 1997:54f; Nkemnkia 1999:166ff).
In the same vein, power or vitality equals health and well-being. The human being is perpetually
seeking restoration or defending his or her health, because the devil and demons are trying to
undermine the vitality of human life. In the hermeneutic of healing churches, there is a clear link
between the experience of illness or misfortune and the draining of life power by demons. Any
form of threat to existential well-being is interpreted as an attack on the vital power of the human
being.
As is the case with the African traditional healing discourse, the healing churches hold firmly to
the idea that a person receives his or her vital power from a divine source. The human being does
possess power, but is not able to generate this power alone, so he must negotiate or manipulate
power for the sake of life and protection. This negotiating and manipulating of power is an
ongoing process, in which the spiritual and divine realm is consulted. Power is derived from
143