Wade Nobles: The Intellectual as Healer

Verbum et Ecclesia, 2016

There are different streams of healing praxis in Africa today, namely African traditional healing, biomedical healing and spiritual healing (which includes the more recent �touch your TV screen� healing method) among others. These streams offer contemporary African people diverse alternatives with regard to healing. As much as the hegemony of Western biomedicine, as endorsed by missionaries in the past, can no longer serve as a norm in the area of healing, we can also not use the African traditional healing methods and or any other alternative presented to Africa without discernment. This suggests therefore that Reformed mission ecclesiology and missionary practitioners should critically engage the African context, worldview and culture on the matter of healing. It should also engage other forms of spiritual healing methods on offer in the African soil.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The use of an indigenous knowledge system when coming to healing in the Afr...

2018

How people of a culture conceive of human nature is informed by the worldview of that culture. Within each culture are knowledge systems regarding human nature including how humans respond to their environment and to diseases and restoring health. The chapter describes African cultural worldview, with its two most important aspects of Collectivism and Spiritualism as these relate to human nature. From Africa perspectives, human nature is socially constructed, the self is considered as a product emerging from relational experiences. Health is also socially constructed and considered multidimensional incorporating physical, social, psychological, spiritual, career and familial aspects of life. Healthcare delivery is holistic involving biomedical and psycho-social treatments. The chapter concludes with drawing parallels between African traditional healing practices and existential counselling intervention.

2019

Most of African Christian Churches place a lot of emphasize on healing practices as a response to the teaching of Jesus Christ. This explains why churches or crusades that practice healing in Africa are very popular and command the greatest numbers of adherents. According to these churches, the Lord commanded them to heal, and so they heal. Although some of these churches do not discourage the use of modern medicine, they are convinced that spiritual healing is a higher method than the effort to compete with God and yet there are others that completely discourage the use of modern medicine. Seen from the modern Kenya where science is understood to be the foundation of development and progress and religion as an important stand. This paper assesses African Christian Church believe on the relationship between religion and science. It also explores African Christian Church’s attitude spirituality has had on African Christian Church healing practices.

2020

Measures of Humanity [1] Suffering and the alleviation of suffering -healing -have long been at the forefront of religious and scholarly attention. The study of suffering and healing in Africa has proven particularly rich, because of the health challenges to this vast continent and the creativity of its experts in the healing of diseases and social ills. In this article, based on a keynote lecture to the 2010 Kripke Center conference on Religion, Health, and Healing, I present broad themes that characterize not only the unique perspectives of health and healing drawn from African traditions, but also the perspectives of classical and religious Western traditions that have taken their place alongside, or have blended with, these African traditions. African suffering and healing -as suffering and healing everywhere -occur in a historical, ever

Curare, 2011

In Africa as in other parts of the world, research in medical anthropology has, over some time now, recorded the emergence of new forms of healing practice that are marked by a recombination of elements taken from Western medicine, Christian faith healing, or other contexts. In applying the concept of (social) institutions, this paper uses the example of a specific Malawian healer in order to outline the analytic limitations posed by thinking of such an arrangement exclusively in terms of medical pluralism comprised of separate institutions of healing, and their subsequent syncretisation. Inspired by Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘field’, I suggest distinguishing between different levels of analysis on which the different institutions of healing play, both empirically and analytically, very different roles. In so doing, this paper means to support ongoing claims to put agency and dynamic processes of social transformation into focus of medical anthropology.

In the book The invention of tradition historian Eric Hobsbawm claims that the process of the invention of tradition serves the formation of group cohesion. The different versions of the life story of the founder bishop of the Corinthian Church of South Africa (AIC), as documented during many years of conducting qualitative field work in this church, are used in this article as a case study in this regard. The article unpacks the way in which the invention of tradition as a process is in this particular AIC currently a work in progress contributing to the formation of a particular type of group cohesion that stretches over racial, religious and denominational boundaries especially by means of the unique liturgical rituals that were influenced by the life story of the founder. The group cohesion that this process fosters is in essence aimed at healing in all its multifaceted dimensions, which includes healing from physical ailments, ‘healing’ from barrenness, healing from spirit possession to healing as (re-)incorporation of an individual into the larger group, the healing of a nation as well as healing from a dualistic spirit-matter worldview.