Source: Four Directions Wellness Shidonna Raven Garden and Cook
Ancient African Healing Methods, Part 1: History, Healers and Herbalism
Source: Four Directions Wellness
While it’s common for us to discuss (and we will do so here) Africa as a whole, it’s important to remember that the second-largest continent on our planet is home to more than 50 sovereign nations. The African continent is split by the Equator and Prime Meridian, meaning that it is our only continent that sits in all four hemispheres. And, it stretches across both northern and southern temperate zones on the Earth.
We share our ancient human ancestry from those that inhabited the eastern portion of Africa dating back to around 100 to 150 millennia ago. This rich culture comes with it a deep knowledge and use of traditional medicine throughout the ages.
In this (and the next article), I want to share the storied uniqueness and the common, global medicinal threads that weave together ancient African healing methods. We will start with a history of Traditional African Medicine, their healers, and various ways healing takes place on the continent. Next week, we will review the way in which the media portrays African healthcare, and compare and contrast ancient African healing methods with modern medicine. To start, we must look to the past to see Africa’s healing roots.
History | Ancient African Healing Methods
Ancient African healing methods are well into their development before the history of Western civilizations recorded their own histories. As a culture, they predate all known written records, which makes it difficult to ascertain actual dates or knowledge known during specific periods. Oral traditions pass down medical knowledge and practices through the ages, from within one family, clan or tribe to the next generation.
Before colonialism, Africans used spiritual medicine solely as their means for healing. As colonial rule took hold during classical antiquity and later during European colonialism, ancient African healing methods went through a massive assault in favor of foreign medical treatments. While Africans continued to practice Traditional African Medicine for hundreds of years, this happened mostly in secrecy or with great discretion. Anyone practicing these techniques would be prosecuted as a criminal, since the new governments found these techniques to be opposed to their understanding and spiritual ways.
In 1981, South Africa legalizes parts of Traditional African Medicine again. Since then, we see a marked increase in the public reutilization of these ancient healing practices across rural African regions, even as Western medicine gained dominance in urban centers.
In the ancient African healing tradition, medicine is purely a catalyst for the body to heal itself. African healing is a process of the mind, body and spirit combined. To initiate this process, as I am about to explain, the traditional African healers’ roles in society were respected and revered.
Healers | Ancient African Healing Methods
African clans traditionally had faith healers, who managed many aspects of spiritual, political, medical, and legal life for their people. They also handled historical records (orally) for their tribes, passing along this wisdom from one generation of healers to the next.
In South Africa today, these ancient African healing practitioners are called sangomas and inyangas. These terms and roles are not uniform throughout the various African nations, but for continuity here, we’ll use these terms in this discussion.
It is also notable that, as of a 2007 South African law, sangomas/inyangas are recognized legally as “traditional health practitioners” for the purposes of herbalism, surgery, and midwifery.
Sangomas, historically speaking, are primarily spiritual healers and connect with their ancestral spirits to heal patients. Whereas, inyangas are primarily herbalists, who understand the medicinal combinations of regional plants. Mutis are those who source and prepare these spiritually curative medicines, if not done by the inyangas themselves. Today, “sangoma” is used colloquially for both titles of sangoma and inyanga, and frequently a sangoma performs both roles as a healing practitioner.
Uniquely, sangomas are usually chosen by a sickness that brings them to a traditional healer. From there, they begin their training, which can takes years. In almost all the stories I came across in writing this article, the sangomas are those who had fallen ill and couldn’t be healed by Western medicine, or are called by visions in their sleep. By ancient African healing, these sangomas find their calling and then start training to heal others. In this way, it is their belief that sangomas are interpreters of their ancestral spirits’ directions for healing and from these interpretations diagnosis and treatments are prescribed.
Ngoma and Herbalism | Ancient African Healing Methods
One of the ways that sangomas summon their ancestral spirits for diagnosis and treatment of disease is through ngoma. (This is the root of sangoma, the person who practices ngoma.) Ngoma is the ritual drumming and dancing that calls on ancestral spirits with the sangoma and patient, together with family members, or as whole tribes or clans together.
The other primary, and most apt for blending with Western medicine, is herbalism. Over the thousands and thousands of years, these ancient African healing practitioners have identified plants through trial-and-error that have curative properties. As we have discussed in the past with other cultures, Africans have amassed this knowledge in the sangomas. They use this wisdom in providing plant-based medicinal extracts and mixtures that can help patients with common ailments.
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While Traditional African Medicine can be seen as odd to the Western outsider, the fact that so many Africans rely on it as a primary form of medicine shows that more needs to be done in educating Africans about Western medicine that we know works. However, it’s foolhardy to not share in the vast knowledge about the herbalism and cultural understanding that sangomas share cross-culturally to study what we know in complementary and integrative medicine as potentially life-saving across the globe.
In the face of a Western medical industry with health care monopolies, rising health care costs and poor health care out comes, how do you approach healing? What medications are you taking? Have they improved or health or have your medications increased?
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