Modernisation of traditional healing in South Africa

This PhD project, now completed, dealt with the modernisation of traditional healing in South Africa. Julia Zenker explored how traditional healers in Port Elizabeth perceive and negotiate their relations with a changing social world and how they actively position themselves in the arena of South African health policy. She showed how three rationalising trajectories – professionalisation, standardisation, and legalisation – impacted their practice and ultimately defined their experience of modernisation.

The starting point for the research was the arena of health seeking and the therapeutic options patients had in Port Elisabeth. Central to the project were encounters between healers and biomedical professionals during workshops that aimed at bringing about change in the practice of traditional healers but also other forms of interaction such as conferences on health related topics, a medicinal garden, and pharmaceutical research on healers’ plants. The project shows that the process of legalising traditional healing can be depicted as part of a search for an independent, South African way of healing linked to the concept of the African Renaissance and part of a nation-building process focussed on the creation of a post-apartheid identity. Through this valorisation (which also involved scepticism toward biomedical concepts of AIDS treatment expressed by the former president and his health minister), the concept of an African Renaissance had been translated into real political consequences.

The use of Weber’s concept of rationalisation was central to the analytical part of the project. In this vein, the practice of traditional healing has to be subject to legislation in a democratic South Africa. This has to acknowledge the principle of equal treatment before the law, to ensure certain rights – such as protection against quackery – and to enforce accountability for all those involved in the production of a public good like health. Linked to the process of legalisation is the unavoidable standardisation of elements of traditional healing, which makes them legible to both the sciences and the state. Hence, the main argument of the project is that a modern state, which is guided by the rule of law and the principle of equality before the law, has no alternative but to subject the profession of healing to juridification and thereby standardise some of its aspects according to bureaucratic logic. Only in the standardised form of law can traditional healing, which was formerly illegal and excluded from the realm of the (apartheid) state, be made legible and ‘known’ for its final transference into the arena of the new democratic state of South Africa.