Africa’s original psychologists

Cultural prejudices persist despite two centuries of scholarly study of Africa’s natural philosophy

A lovely surprise popped up last week when my publisher offered to redesign the cover of a book I wrote ten years ago and relaunch it. Called African Magic: Traditional ideas that heal a continent, the book contains four years’ of research to explain why many Africans understand the relationship between people and unfortunate events not through chance in the case of accidents, or germ theory in the case of illness, but through belief in the invisible intelligence or “magic” of ancestor worship, divination and witchcraft.
Having just re-read African Magic while mindful of a recent report by psychology professionals suggesting that only 15% of South Africans with mental health disorders receive treatment, I’m indignant at how blithely some of us underestimate the role of sangomas - whose contribution to mental health in South Africa is clearly not reflected in this statistic.
Far from dispensing mumbo-jumbo, as many outsiders believe, traditional healers are the psychologists of Africa. Like their Western counterparts, sangomas’ treatment of debilitating illnesses like depression enable millions of people to make sense of their traumas and moral dilemmas.
The psychologists’ report claiming that 85% of South Africans don’t have access to Western-trained therapists and are therefore deprived of relief from mental illness is arrogant in its disregard for traditional healers and their widely-supported beliefs. So many Westerners are convinced that their own worldview is the only valid one that they reflexively reject what they fail to understand as superstition.
Although religion can be studied in terms of its ceremonies and rituals, the philosophy which informs religious activity - the why in people’s beliefs – is not easy to discern. Philosophy of some sort lies behind the thoughts and actions of all people everywhere. To study it in Africa as outsiders requires us to interpret the information before us, and interpretation is never free of subjective judgment.
I believe, however, that journalists like me are uniquely placed to extend the boundaries of conventional research - outside the pre-conceived frameworks that inhibit academia - by seeing things which others cannot readily see, and helping to demystify important social issues. (That is why I embarked in 1986 on my first book, The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress, at a time when the ANC was a banned organization in South Africa. And yes, this is an opportunistic dig at the ruling party – which benefitted hugely from media support on its journey to power - as it seeks to introduce the euphemistically-named Protection of Information Bill along with a scary instrument of repression, the proposed media tribunal.)
I was born in Africa and have lived here all my life. Spoonfed racism with my daily cornflakes throughout my childhood, I have struggled throughout my adult life to see beyond prejudice and ignorance. At a personal as well as professional level, looking beyond “witchdoctor” images of traditional beliefs in African Magic made sense of some of the nonsense I absorbed as a white person on this continent.
Cultural prejudices persist worldwide despite two centuries of systematic scholarly study of Africa’s natural philosophy. Towards the end of the twentieth century British art historian Lord Kenneth Clark, for example, began his widely-acclaimed investigation of Western art with a comparison between a Greek statue of Apollo and an African ceremonial mask. The latter, he said, reflected a lower state of “civilization” in its representation of “fear and darkness”, while the Apollo figure embodied a higher state of “light and confidence”. This inverted and negative perspective continues to characterize Africa as the opposite of the Western world.
In fact, African society is in some respects spiritually superior to the secular West, notably in its respectful attitude towards the elderly.
Africa’s traditional beliefs – like all religions – seek to endorse morality, making people kinder to each other. The system is based on the existential idea that hell is not a mystical place but other people (as is heaven, presumably).
No religion in the world offers a universal logic. If Roman Catholicism is compatible with reason, so is ancestor worship to those who reason differently. Catholicism upholds a god who is three in one, divine and human. Both belief systems offer passionate insight into the nature of the supernatural and human experience, fusing these with the rational and critical faculties of their believers.
Ordinary people living under stress everywhere resort to some form of magic as part of their coping philosophies. A random mix of common sense, prescription drugs and mystical thought usually does it for Westerners, enabling them to struggle through bad times without recourse to murder and mayhem.
(Ever heard of a movie called The Secret, which represents the West’s current way of resorting to mystical thought? It boils down to the notion that bad thoughts attract bad luck and good ones good luck. It’s called “the law of attraction”, as if it was on a par with Newton’s Second Law of Motion. I dare everybody who pooh-poohs Africa’s so-called primitive belief that your aunt’s jealousy can make you sick to explain the enormous popularity of The Secret among the Oprah set.)
Indeed, if the Western antidepressant Prozac were available to Africans beset by poverty and its attendant ills, the drug would be welcomed as magic by those with no knowledge of science. Our own ancestors, if unlucky enough to have endured shock treatment as the antidote to depression, might well regard Prozac as a magical substance, too.
Which brings me to Paul the Octopus, a creature so accurate in predicting Germany’s World Cup results that it acquired god-like status in some of the European communities that consider themselves well beyond superstition. Could it be that the Western world, though dependant on scientifically-driven technology, is not in the end as committed to a secular rationale, or as distant from the African belief system, as we think?
And finally, may I suggest that the Western-trained psychologists who believe their clients are alone in receiving therapy in South Africa get out and about more.