Traditional healers of Southern Africa
Traditional healers of Southern Africa are practitioners of traditional African medicine in Southern Africa. They fulfill different social and political roles in the community like divination, healing physical, emotional, and spiritual illnesses, directing birth or death rituals, finding lost cattle, protecting warriors, counteracting witchcraft and narrating the history, cosmology, and concepts of their tradition.
Five sangomas in KwaZulu-Natal
Sangomas greeting each other
Sangoma performing a divination by reading the bones after being thrown
Preparing and drying out freshly picked mutis
Traditional African medicine
Traditional African medicine is a range of traditional medicine disciplines involving indigenous herbalism and African spirituality, typically including diviners, midwives, and herbalists. Practitioners of traditional African medicine claim, largely without evidence, to be able to cure a variety of diverse conditions including cancer, psychiatric disorders, high blood pressure, cholera, most venereal diseases, epilepsy, asthma, eczema, fever, anxiety, depression, benign prostatic hyperplasia, urinary tract infections, gout, and healing of wounds and burns and Ebola.
Ghanaian foods, used as traditional medicine, 2014
Nurse at Koidu Hospital in Sierra Leone consulting with patients.
Prunus africana with stripped bark.
Preparing and drying out freshly dug traditional medicines (muti)