Sangoma

A sangoma is a diviner and healer of the Nguni peoples of southern Africa who works through a relationship with the ancestral spirits.

Called by the ancestors

The sangoma is understood to be called to the office by the ancestral spirits, often through an illness or affliction that is recognised as the summons and is resolved only by accepting the calling and undergoing a long and demanding initiation and training under an established sangoma, so entry to the office is not by choice or appointment but by a call that must be answered. Once trained, the sangoma divines the causes of illness, misfortune and disturbance, communicates with the ancestors on behalf of clients, and prescribes the ritual and the remedies that will restore harmony.

Divination and its place

The divination is typically performed by throwing and reading a set of bones and other objects, or through dreams and possession by the ancestral spirits, so the sangoma works through a relationship with the ancestors rather than through herbal knowledge alone, which distinguishes the office from that of the inyanga, the herbalist, though the two roles often overlap in one person. The sangoma holds a respected and central place in the religious and medical life of the Nguni communities, and traditional healing of this kind remains widely practised alongside modern medicine in southern Africa. The office represents the diviner-healer who mediates between the living and the ancestors, and whose authority rests on the calling by the spirits and the training that follows it.

South Africa's Traditional Health Practitioners Act, passed in 2007 and brought into fuller operation in the years following, formally recognises sangomas and other traditional healers as a distinct category of health practitioner alongside registered medical doctors, establishing an official council intended to register practitioners, set standards and, in principle, issue medical certificates recognised for purposes such as sick leave, a level of state recognition few other traditional healing systems in Africa have achieved in law.

Implementation has been slower and more contested than the statute itself suggests, with disputes over how to verify a genuinely trained and called sangoma for registration purposes, and continuing tension between traditional healing and the biomedical health system over specific issues such as the treatment of HIV and other conditions where public health authorities have raised safety concerns about herbal treatments substituting for proven medical care. The law nonetheless marks a rare instance of a government formally writing traditional diviner-healers into its official health system rather than treating the practice as merely tolerated or entirely outside state structures.