spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

situation in which one is actively looking for opportunities to increase one’s power in order to
protect one’s life. This search for healing usually consists of the pursuit of effective medicines.
The concept of traditional medicine is closely related to the perceived nature of health and
illness: medicine is managed by the spiritual beings. Medicine is not just a commodity consisting
of specific ingredients that will bring healing to the body, but has an extra dimension. Medicine
is a vehicle of power from the spiritual world and mediates between the perceptible and invisible
worlds by channeling the spirits’ control over all kinds of life issues. The supernatural power
may offer protection, but it can also be harmful depending on how the medicine is used. The
ambivalent nature of medicines is congruent with the ambivalent character of the spirit world
itself: there are ‘good’ medicines designed to cure illness and to ward off danger, but there are
also ‘bad’ medicines that transmit harmful forces that are used for offensive and destructive
purposes (Ellis & Ter Haar 2004:95).
Purity and pollution
African ideas about health and well-being also allude to thoughts of purity and pollution. These
ideas are captured in extensive codes, and they form a different category to that of the
regulations belonging to the relationship with the spirit world. The emphasis of these purity and
pollution codes is on the relationships within the perceptible world. Illness and misfortune can
afflict people who find themselves in a certain ‘polluted’ life situation (for example widows,
women suffering a miscarriage or abortion, and persons handling a corpse) or when specific
communal regulations are undermined. People who are ritually impure are considered to be in a
particularly dangerous condition, which will affect the quality of individual and collective life.
Even though the polluted person may not be directly responsible for his or her state of being,
they are responsible for following strictly the pollution codes of the community in order to
safeguard the well-being of that community (Marwick 1965; Hammond-Tooke 1989; Janzen
1989; Van Breugel 2001).
In this regard Nürnberger (2007:28,36) categorizes the forces that are at play in the domain of
taboo and pollution as ‘uncanny’ or ‘dynamistic’. These forces or energies are set in motion
when communal relationships are undermined, and they create a particular dynamic that
threatens the offender as well as the whole community. Only by means of adherence to the
communal codes can the well-being of the community be protected or restored. Thus, taboos and
pollution codes serve the well-being of the (kinship) community by aiming to achieve balance or
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