Mental Health and Wellbeing

Indigenous healing is a practice that cuts across through the entire history of the African continent. It is still trusted and is a widely held practice for different body ailments such as physical, spiritual, psychological and emotional challenges. In South Africa, both the developed and the underdeveloped communities consult indigenous healers for different reasons. This means that in the process of seeking solutions to our social problems, which afflict the modern era, it is imperative to look into our collective past, to the traditions and knowledges of our ancestors. The study highlights that such knowledge still exists in many parts of the world, even though it has gone through the systematic marginalization by the homogenous, Eurocentric ontology and epistemology. While investigating the impact of traditional healing agents, the study specifically examines the issue of how mental illnesses affect communities, and what are the processes of addressing this social dilemma. It also explores the role of indigenous healing as a health care delivery system in the context of a pluralistic and a transcultural society. Its main purpose is to advance a decolonizing agenda by unearthing what was submerged, and/or lost during the Apartheid era, and its subsequent colonization that dominated the African continent in the past decades. This provides insights on how Zulu people and other African people practice their traditional beliefs through traditional ceremonies, rituals, rites, and traditional symbols, showing the efficacy of traditional medicine (umuthi) in healing and transforming lives of the people and their communities. It is a qualitative ethnographic study that combines interviews and focus group discussions to establish the extent to which traditional medicine could equip modern health practitioners with knowledge of traditional healing techniques to improve social well-being. The study is located at Nongoma district in Kwa-Zulu Natal, Southern Africa. The ethical clearance for data collection was approved by the Stellenbosch Ethical Clearance Committee in November 2023.