The African Bantu traditional practice of medicine: Some preliminary observations

This paper is a record of experiences in a simple general practice among rural Africans (mainly Zulus) in South Africa where medical communication was in the African language of disease. To achieve meaningful and effective understanding it became necessary to investigate and explore certain relevant communication patterns used by patients. This dialogue about disease, illness or sickness, revealed an interpretive point of view from which a theory underlying the practice of a system of traditional medicine was structured. The problems of communication between traditional and modern medicine essentially concerns the very divergence of subjective truths accepted by African believers and regarded by them as objective truths. Thus the truths of faith and the truths of science resemble one another in social consequences, though they differ in the methods of demonstration, proof or verification. It must be admitted, however, that every proposition, scientific or unscientific, which is a relevant explanation, for an observable fact like sickness, has some evidence in its favour—namely the fact to which it is relevant. These propositions of traditional medicine can and must be criticised by scientific medicine not by apodistic argumentation, but by its involvement in the practical solution of problems of health and disease. Internal criticism of African medicine is weak or lacking; and the more the group or society is isolated by lack of effective communications in space and time, lack of health manpower and material resources, the more the group or society is isolated and insulated, the more such beliefs become canonized as truth. Understanding of these beliefs must begin with a systematic and true account in subjective terms of what some Africans do, think, entertain and fear in problematic situations sickness, disease and dis-ease; and this can only be achieved by a systematic study of various traditional medical systems.