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Magical Ancestor Calling: How Do Traditional Doctors Communicate with the Dead?
In South Africa, traditional doctors, as practitioners of traditional African medicine, play an important role in treating physical, emotional and spiritual illnesses. Their functions ranged from prophecies, instructing life and death rituals, finding lost objects, resisting witchcraft, and narrating history and cosmology. According to statistics, South Africa has nearly 200,000 traditional doctors, while there are only 25,000 doctors with biomedical training, showing the widespread influence of traditional medicine. These traditional doctors are highly respected in society, especially in communities that believe illness results from witchcraft or poor communication with ancestors.
About 60% of the South African population consult traditional doctors when seeking medical treatment, often in conjunction with modern medical services.
Traditional doctors are generally divided into two categories: seers (sangoma) and herbalists (inyanga). These roles are not limited to medical but also involve social and political functions. In South Africa, many communities believe that in order to achieve harmony with the spirits of the dead, ancestors must be honored through rituals and sacrifices. Therefore, traditional healers often invoke ancestral spirits through burning certain plants (such as impepho), dancing, chanting, and drumming.
Treatments given to patients by traditional doctors, often called muthi, often contained plant, animal, and mineral ingredients and were imbued with spiritual meanings for the patient. For example, lion's fat might be used to promote courage in children. These remedies ranged from physical and mental ailments to social discord, spiritual distress, and drops that gifted love and luck.
Traditional doctors believed that in order to relieve their patients' suffering, a balanced and harmless relationship must be established between the patient and the spirit causing their illness.
American anthropologists often find traditional healers administering treatments in sacred healing huts. In the absence of physical huts, alternative forms such as miniature sacred sites imsamo are also used. They believed that ancestral spirits could give patients instructions and advice to cure their illnesses and psychological distress.
During the course of treatment, traditional doctors use and alternate many rituals and diagnostic methods in order to obtain the patient's official name and then contact the deceased by throwing runes or animal bones. During this process, the doctor will explain the items thrown and provide individual countermeasures based on their arrival.
Like dream interpretation, traditional doctors also refer to patients' dreams to understand the cause of illness and the treatment required.
Muthi is a spiritual healing medicine prescribed by traditional doctors. It is mainly derived from plants and may be combined with animal or mineral formulas. Of the approximately 30,000 plant species in southern Africa, 3,000 are used in traditional medicine. The psychoactive effects of more than 300 of these plants still require further research.
The training process of a traditional doctor is regarded as a "calling". During the training, the trainee must undergo severe tests and rituals to transform into a qualified traditional doctor. This process includes songs, dances and dream interpretations that go through various memories, and eventually evolves into an important commemorative ceremony.
According to the saying, "thwasa" means "toward the light" and symbolizes the transformation of this process.
At certain points in their training, trainees are required to perform ritual animal sacrifices, usually chickens or goats, in order to summon ancestors and receive their blessings. The entire ceremony included community support and witnessed the birth of a new traditional doctor. The role of traditional doctors is not only medical treatment, but also the inheritors of culture and spirituality.
As times change, these traditional rituals continue to adapt to new social issues and cultural influences. From early themes of hunting to later social resistance involving firearms and colonial rule, these changes also contributed to the evolution of ngoma (traditional healing) with changes in society. Today's traditional doctor's role in the community is no longer that of a sole medical provider, but also a custodian of culture.
With the passage of the Traditional Health Practitioners Act in South Africa in 2007, the status of traditional doctors has been legally recognized. This not only allows traditional medicine to occupy a place in modern society, but also makes us further think about today's rapid development of science and technology. How can the balance between traditional and modern medicine be redefined?
