Healers who practise under a mandate of traditional legitimacy
derive their legitimacy from membership in a congregation, sodality
or lineage, not necessarily an organisation of the type envisaged by
the WHO. Their office in that group and the entire corporate group’s
role in the local society, must be allowed for in health planning which
seeks to achieve health for all through community participation.
Plucking the practitioners, or the chemicals from their herbal reme-
dies, out of the context of healing and transferring them to the
university, is a gesture of goodwill but it is not truly a collaborative
association of plural medical systems.A similar concern has been expressed by Bodeker et al.^31 as an ‘emerging
trend for certain elements of traditional healthcare to be removed from their
original context and subsequently incorporated into formal health care
systems, or developed as part of a parallel complementary and alternative
medicine (CAM) sector’. Iwu^23 noted that ‘the African medical system does
Traditional medical practice in Africa | 99Figure 5.5 Africa: indigenous languages/ethnic groups. Published with the permission of the
Africa Institute of South Africa.