spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

However, despite many attempts to articulate a new vocabulary 10 , ‘traditional healing’ proved
itself to be resilient in the discourse on healing in Africa. The term is used in academic
contributions, international health organization reports, government policies, remarks of
biomedical practitioners, as well as in narratives of indigenous healers and of their clients.
Luedke & West (2006:5) even claim that “the persistence of ‘traditional medicine’ in the face of
relentless critique makes it impossible simply to dismiss the term”.
Compliance with the term ensures ‘traditional healing’ does not need to be approached as an
analytical category that creates a barrier between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, but instead is seen
as a ‘folk category’ that can be studied in its own right (Luedke & West 2006:5; cf. Kleinman
1980:49-70; Helman 2007:84f). Folk as a separate and independent perspective represents the
beliefs and opinions of ordinary people in a society. It thus typifies healing concepts and
therapeutic practices that are alive in a particular community. The folk sector differs from both
the popular and professional sectors (in any given society) due to its distinct illness etiologies
and treatments, its definition of who the healer and patient are, and its mode of therapeutic
encounter 11 .
African ‘traditional healing’, then, is not just an analytical classification label that has been
applied to those ideas and practices that do not conform with the biomedical paradigm. Instead,
the distinction inferred by the term ‘traditional healing’ serves the interest of those who are
involved in ‘traditional healing’ — the healers, their clients and researchers. It provides a
particular lens that informs one’s worldview, molds one’s frame of moral codes, and helps to
interpret one’s experiences in life. So when healers and their clients identify themselves with
‘traditional healing’, they sustain the continued reshaping of this sector, preserving its meaning
and significance. In other words, the use of the term ‘traditional healing’ is about “the continuing
relevance of older theories to events that they fail to account for —the way social-scientific
theories and cognate folk understandings of the past haunt the present” (Ferguson 1999:15) 12 .
10. Luedke and West (2006:5) share their experiences with crafting a new language for ‘traditional healing’ issues
by indicating that they “generally ended (…) in demands from a confused audience to decode our new terms and
eventually to confess that it is, after all, ‘traditional medicine’ that we are talking about.”
11. Helman (2007:84) indicates that the folk sector is particularly vibrant in non-industrialized societies. The
framework of folk beliefs, concepts and practices is a sort of bridge between the popular sector and the professional
sector. Folk healers practice different forms of healing that are either sacred or secular, or a mixture of the two.
12. In his publication Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt
(1999) Ferguson discusses modernization as a 'myth': on the one hand it refers to something that is a false story, on
the other hand it refers to the social function of the story. In this sense a myth provides a cosmological blueprint, a
framework that explains essential categories and meanings for the (re)ordering of experiences and the interpretation
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