Africa’s witch doctors gaining respectability

Press, 23 September 1980, Page 23

Africa’s witch doctors gaining respectability

NZPA-Reuter Salisbury Africa’s traditional healers —- family physicians to millions of blacks, “witch doctors” to most foreigners — are fast recapturing their old powerful place in African society and playing an important new role in health care. Black Africa’s richest and most populous nation, Nigeria, set the pattern for other countries recently when it introduced legislation to absorb the traditional healers into the public health service. “Traditional medicine will begin where modern medicine has failed,” said the chairman of the House of Assembly’s education and social services committee, Mr Oluwole Awolowo. In Kenya there is a mounting clamour for abolition of laws that most African nations inherited from European colonial rulers suppressing cen-turies-old spiritualism and herbalism. The World Health Organisation said recently that there was a need to recognise and use skills of traditional healers in tan-, dem with modem medicine. . ~.x , Zimbabwe, m its fifth month of independence after nine decades _ of white rule as the Britisn colony of Rhodesia, has wasted little time in reinforcing its tiny army of 800 conventional physicians with some 4000 reg-

istered African healers. Like most African countries, Zimbabwe’s population of more than seven million has a grave shortage of doctors. “The traditional healers can fill a lot of gaps” Zimbabwe’s Health Minister, Dr Herbert Ushewokunze, a qualified doctor and a spirit medium, told a two-day convention of traditional healers at Gwanzura stadium, near Salisbury. “They are particularly successful with psychosomatic conditions, cases of asthma, tuberculosis, bums, wounds and venereal disease,” he said. Dr Ushewokunze, like the witch doctors, was bare-foot as a sign of respect for ancestral spirits. Some of the traitional healers wore leopard-skin robes or black-plumed headdresses and carried spears. During his address some grunted vigorously and went into shuddering trances to invoke their spirits.. Dr Ushewokunze said that, as in conventional medicine, “there is a need for keeping records covering a patient’s progress and the type of herbs, plants and roots used.” Many Western doctors working in Africa have pet anecdotes of how traditional cures — secret potions from thousands of herbs and psychological responses to medium’s communications with ancestral spirits — have

worked where conventional treatment has failed. “Africans suffering mental disorders are often impossible for us to treat,” one psychiatrist said. “Yet they can be fixed by their own witch doctors.” The convention of Zimbabwe’s National Traditional Healers Association attracted about 1500 “Ngangas” (herbalists), and “Masvikiros” (spiritmediums) from all over the country. Dr Ushewokunze expected that another 2500 would register. Dr Gordon Chavunduka, dean of sociology at Zimbabwe University, was reelected president of the association, whose members will be recognised by the Government in much the same way that Western trained doctors are now. “For 80 years, all Ngangas and spiritmediums were suppressed by the colonial government,” Dr Chavunduka said. “They tried to destroy the traditional medical system. Now the traditional healers are playing their proper role again.” The healers, who use an assortment of materials including herbs, bits of bark, bones and skins in healing, will now be encouraged to visit patients in state-owned hospitals, set up consulting rooms in cities, towns and villages and pool financial resources and know-how to build a special research centre. Lymon Msibi, a top herbalist in the black township of Soweto, near Johannesburg in neighbouring South Africa, recently urged that traditional healers also be given an official role in that country’s medical system. Dr Chris van der Heever, the white chief medical superintendent at Soweto’s Baragwanath Hospital, said he would welcome the idea. “We have found that traditional herbalists using traditional cures have been important in curing patients, especially where

psychology is concerned.” At the Salisbury rally, Mutandwa Mudzimundiringe, aged 33, reeled off a litany of successes in treating pneumonia and nervous disorders, heart troubles and hernias, malaria and measles, rheumatism and rickets. “I can cure anything except broken bones or things needing surgery,” he said. “It is a gift from God. I dream of being in the forest and taking such and such a herb to cure certain things. My secret herbs are the equivalent of the white man’s pills.” The healers’ regained respectability is expected to be a shot in the arm for health services on a continent where life expectancy is as low as 45, where 17 per cent of children die before their fifth birthday, where a million children are expected to perish of malaria alone this year and where 60-70 per cent of all doctors are in urban areas with only a fifth of the population. But the move to give traditional healers a bigger role is not without opposition. . ■ “It would be dangerous to entrust the lives of patients in the hands of untrained people whose only claim to professionalism may be some dubious hereditary ritual in their home village,” a white Zimbabwean doctor wrote to a newspaper recently. But another white Zimbabwean doctor, Dr I. R. Rosin, a surgeon, said that about half of all illnesses were psychosomatic and curable by traditional healers. “These illnesses cannot respond to pathological treatment and in most cases only the Ngangas can heal the patients.” Dr Rosin said. Dismissing criticism, Dr Ushewokunze echoed many black African leaders’ thinking when he said: “Now that we are m power, the traditional healers are going to get our blessing as they perform a wonderful role.”