African Belief Systems Research Articles

Blood money: An examination of oral narratives concerning wealth‐giving snakes in the career of Khotso Sethuntsa, with particular focus on their socioeconomic implications*

Summary This article examines the oral narratives concerning the millionaire herbalist Khotso Sethuntsa's purported ownership of wealth‐giving snakes and his career as a seller of these magical serpents, a practice known as uthwala. It is argued that the uthwala narratives featuring Khotso Sethuntsa (hereafter referred to as the Khotso narratives) are shaped by the specific milieu from which they spring. Particular attention is paid to socioeconomic factors in this regard. The Khotso narratives provide a striking illustration of the way in which socioeconomic changes in South African society affected not only the material world but also perceptions of the indigenous spirit world. A number of other significant contextual aspects are taken into consideration, including the effect of Western religion on African belief systems and consequently, on indigenous oral narratives. This study also pays attention to the moral dimension of the Khotso narratives, examining the way in which these accounts can provide a way of passing moral judgement on one particularly wealthy individual who flaunted his wealth in a poverty‐stricken community. The moralising dimension of the Khotso narratives is related to the way in which these stories express some of their narrators’ needs, preoccupations and desires, while serving as a means of realising some of these desires, albeit purely at an imaginative level. Finally, the Khotso narratives offer insights into the nature and function of oral narrative in the South African context.

Use of indigenous and indigenised medicines to enhance personal well-being: a South African case study

An estimated 27 million South Africans use indigenous medicines (Mander, 1997, Medicinal plant marketing and strategies for sustaining the plant supply in the Bushbuckridge area and Mpumalanga Province. Institute for Natural Resources, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa). Although herbal remedies are freely available in amayeza stores, or Xhosa chemists, for self-medication, little is known about the motivations of consumers. According to African belief systems, good health is holistic and extends to the person's social environment. The paper makes a distinction between traditional medicines which are used to enhance personal well-being generally and for cultural purposes, on the one hand, and medicines used to treat physical conditions only, on the other. Drawing on an eight-month study of Xhosa chemists in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa, in 1996, the paper identifies 90 medicines in stock which are used to enhance personal well-being. Just under one-third of all purchases were of medicines to enhance well-being. Remedies particularly popular included medicines believed to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck. The protection of infants with medicines which repel evil spirits is a common practice. Consumer behaviours indicate that the range of medicines available is increased by indigenisation of manufactured traditional medicines and cross-cultural borrowing. Case studies confirm that self- and infant medication with indigenous remedies augmented by indigenised medicines plays an important role in primary health care by allaying the fears and anxieties of everyday life within the Xhosa belief system, thereby promoting personal well-being.

Traditional healing practice using medicinal herbs

Traditional healing practice using medicinal herbs

Slavery, segregation and racism: trusting the health care system ain't always easy! An African American perspective on bioethics.

Many people are surprised at the level of distrust of the health care system held by African Americans. However, fear and distrust of the health care system is a natural and logical response to the history of experimentation and abuse. The fear and distrust shape our lives and, consequently, our perspectives. 2 That perspective keeps African Americans from getting health care treatment, from participating in medical research, from signing living wills, and from donating organs. That perspective affects the health care that African Americans receive. This fear and distrust is rarely acknowledged in traditional bioethical discourse. Some bioethicists question the existence of a "uniquely" African American bioethical perspective. 3 They maintain that since the values and beliefs held by African Americans are also held by other oppressed groups, such as Native Americans, there is no African American perspective. However, these traditional bioethicists miss (or ignore) an important point: perspective is merely a subjective evaluation of the relative significance of something -- a point-of-view. 4 Thus, to acknowledge an African American perspective, it is not necessary that African American values and belief systems be entirely different from others. It is faulty to assume that any group shares exactly the same value system with other groups. For example, Americans do not have one ethical perspective. Rather, race, class, and gender modify the commonality of the American experience. Different groups have had different experiences that, at a minimum, modify the dominant American perspective, if not replace it with an ...

Effective Coping Strategies of African Americans

What are the coping strategies that have enabled African Americans not only to survive but also to achieve against all odds? Are they shaped, at least in part, by cultural patterns and characteristics that have survived from life on the African continent to the present? If so, what does this suggest for social work practice and social welfare policies and services? This article discerns successful coping styles among African Americans that reflect the transmission of African belief systems and cultural values. This article identifies several studies that explored the Africentric orientation to coping and resolving problems. These coping mechanisms are reviewed across system levels: individual, family, community, and organization. Implications for social work practice with African Americans are discussed and future research efforts are suggested. Traditional African Cultural Patterns Despite their unique experience during and after slavery, African Americans have been viewed and judged by most social scientists with the same worldview applied to the dominant culture. Differences from established dominant norms have been interpreted negatively or, at best, neutralized. Herskovits (1935) was among the few American scholars in the first half of the 20th century who described the highly developed political and legal systems, literature and art, and arrangements of interpersonal and family relations on the West African coast, the major area from which slaves were brought to America. Possibly among the first American theorists to discuss distinct worldviews and values of African Americans were Kluckhorn and Strodtbeck (1961) and Parsons and Shils (1967). More recently, Houston (1990) pointed to the structure, content, and practice of religion in African American churches as evidence that African culture survived the African diaspora. He described the large number of African priests who were among slaves brought to America as providing some of the means through which this cultural adaptation took place. These priests provided a degree of stability, affective experience, and group cohesiveness through which some of the coping strategies, based on their cultural past, could emerge. Houston stated, Because of the many covert, subliminal, nonverbal, and otherwise seemingly innocuous means of culturally transmitting and conditioning personality from parent to offspring, it is possible that personality represents the most profound and intense of all African survivals (p. 119). Nobles (1972, 1980), Ak'bar (1984), Baldwin (1985), and Asante (1988) are among contemporary scholars who have identified an Africentric approach to philosophy and human behavior and contributed to the development of what has come to be known as the Africentric paradigm. This paradigm proposes that in African culture humanity is viewed as a collective rather than as individuals and that this collective view is expressed as shared concern and responsibility for the well-being of others (Ak'bar, 1984; Ho, 1987; Houston, 1990; Schiele, 1990). In fact, most African languages did not have words for alone and ownership at the time of initial contact with Europeans. The Africentric paradigm acknowledges feelings and emotions as well as rational and logical ways of thinking equally. Materialism and competition are supplanted by spiritual awareness and by cooperation with others (Ak'bar, 1984; Baldwin, 1985; Ho, 1987; Turner, 1991). A belief system that recognizes and appreciates the rich heritage and experiences of African Americans, including the devastating impact of oppression as manifested by racism and discrimination, emerges from this perspective (Everett, Chipungu, & Leashore, 1991). Scholarship using this perspective identifies positive aspects of African American life richly embedded in spirituality and a worldview that incorporates African traits and commitment to common causes (Grier & Cobb, 1968; Hill, 1971; Houston, 1990; Nobles, 1972, 1980; Miller, 1993). …

Pearce's "African Philosophy and the Sociological Thesis" a Response

Carole Pearce's argument against African philosophy is founded on a set of factual flaws and the fallacious assumption that African philosophy is equivalent to ethnophilosophy, which she defines as a form of intellectual apartheid founded on irrational belief systems. I argue that African philosophy is in no way qualitatively different from, say, French or Chinese philosophy, and that ethnophilosophy is merely one aspect of it But ethnophilosophy could play the important role of critically evaluating African ethnic belief systems and the interpretation of such by Western anthropologists. In general, African philoso phy is nothing more than the philosophical research (of whatever order) carried out by African philosophers in the context of African research paradigms.

Christian Acculturation and Fang Witchcraft

No one has ever supposed that political independence in Africa has meant independence from European culture. Much less has it meant independence for the Africans themselves from some of the dysfunctional and primitive elements that linger on in their age old civilizations. For those who are still concerned with the continuing interworking of African and European culture on that continent as well as the struggle Africans are having with their own cultures, M. P. Bekale has here given a very interesting text; a text written in the crucible of acculturation. The lutte qui s'y livre is as much as anything a battle between two systems of belief. It is a struggle of acculturation in which the Christian belief system and its emphasis on individual responsibility is at odds with an aspect of an African belief system, primarily its penchant for witchcraft and secretive individual aggrandizement. Out of this struggle we see elaborated a grandiose mythology of evil. No doubt this is, for the African, a satisfying compensatory drama canalizing, like sorcery itself, the frustration and tension he has undergone in the colonial and post-colonial world. But though this struggle seems to be here canted towards a European ethic and a European solution to social and cultural problems, the mythology itself, created under the stress of these acculturative pressures, is evidence that there is no simple imitation taking place. The African's own sense of tradition and of cultural autonomy is at work reinterpreting, syncretising, creating even when he seems to be