spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

purity 15 as the desired state of every individual. In being pure the individual supports and
contributes to the proliferation of communal life.
2.3 NGOMA PARADIGM
The religious beliefs that generate specific ideas about health, illness, medicine and healing (like
the ones discussed above) constitute a certain framework, a distinctive religious theory, that
provides the basis for various and locally specific practices of healing. This comprehensive
frame of concepts and beliefs, as well as the related rituals and applications, is usually referred to
as ngoma.
Ngoma is an indigenous word that Turner (1981) simply translated as ‘drum’, but John Janzen,
an influential scholar on the subject, suggested the Bantu word to be maintained, and his
example has been followed by others (cf. Van Dijk et.al. 2000). Using the indigenous term
implies affirming ngoma’s intrinsic plurality of meaning and dimension — it can refer to a
physical drum, or to the communities’ music, singing and dancing (often accompanied by
drumming), but it can also refer to their aims and symbols, or the group itself of performers
(Stevens 1984:29f; Janzen 1992:83; Blokland 2000:19f). When using ‘ngoma’ as a term of
reference, the plurality of connotation is retained rather than narrowed down to a concept that
can fit Western analytical approaches, or that serves Western preoccupation with matters like
trance and possession. Ngoma should be regarded as much more than that; it is a dynamic
collection of traditions and processes dealing with the interpretation of suffering and aiming at
its removal.
2.3.1 Institution of African traditional healing
Although ngoma is a phenomenon that moves beyond the clear lines of (Western) categorization,
it has been identified as “a classic ― that is, ancient and formative ― institution in Central and
Southern African healing” (Janzen 1992:109). Ngoma practices can be found throughout the
region of Central and Southern Africa, the same region in which the Bantu languages are found.
The linguistic, behavioral, structural and musical constituents of ngoma have given rise to the
idea that ngoma is a Southern African healing system, which “can and should be studied in its
own right as an indigenous institution, produced within a regional cultural and historical setting”
(Van Dijk et.al. 2000:5). Even though the local practices may vary from place to place, and the
15. In the various anthropological studies on taboos and pollution codes of Southern African kinship groups
‘balance’, ‘coolness’, and ‘harmony’ are terminologies that are used to express the same desired condition of purity
(Marwick 1965; Hammond-Tooke 1989; Janzen 1989; Van Breugel 2001).
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