spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

elationships and produces new constellations of those who need help and those who provide
help. The mediation of divine healing power and the support of the social environment are
demonstrated in healing rituals. These rituals belong to the community. Essentially they are only
meaningful within a particular network of relationships because they are performed according to
the frame of reference of that particular community. Furthermore, healing rituals are
manifestations of the restoration of the individual’s deficient relationship(s), and of the
transformation of the community itself. In that sense, healing as well as its display can be seen as
a service of the community.
The service of the community is based on facilitating processes of healing by partaking in the
healing rituals. But healing as a community service does also mean the community is the service.
Throughout the process of diagnosis and searching for an appropriate treatment, the community
group can be identified with the treatment itself. The various elements and stages of the healing
process coincide with the persons involved in the search for healing. The restoration of health
and well-being cannot be achieved if there is a lack of involvement by that very community or
network of interrelated people: the patient, the kin, the healer, the wider circle of those that ‘have
been there’, all have a task to fulfill. And by doing so, they have become the modus operandi of
the healing process. They actually are the specific method of healing.
2.5.3 Borders as constituents of the healing community
In the discourse of African traditional healing, relationality is also a very important notion when
it comes to the sustainability of healing processes, practices and communities. In other words,
the activities of the expert-healer, in order to create a market that addresses the continuous need
for healing, are determined by his or her ability to address relationality. Obviously the healer
needs to make use of relationality, that is of the interrelated spiritual and human relationships, so
that healing power is distributed towards the afflicted person. But the healer also needs to invest
in the relational healing network in the sense that he or she knows which borders to cross and
how to travel back again.
Borders are dividing lines drawn between the known and the unknown. By crossing, recreating
and protecting these borders, healers connect and weave together familiar and unfamiliar
techniques, the visible and the spiritual domain, the homeland and the foreign country,
conventional and new knowledge. The coupling of the known and the unknown (the very
moment the healer crosses the border) happens for the sake of people who seek health, wellbeing
and restoration of disrupted parts of their lives. Wholeness seeps into life when (for the
moment) borders are crossed, barriers are broken down and relations are connected, (again) like
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