Alassane Cissé, journalist with Sud Quotidien, Dakar (Senegal)
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We don’t need to come up with some supertechnological secret weapon. The answers are already in Africa. Peter
Piot, |
‘In some areas, there’s one doctor for every 100,000 people and one traditional healer for every 1,000’
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HIV/Aids in Senegal Out of a population of 8.7 million, 75,000
live with HIV/Aids. Among adults in the 15-to-49 age group, 1.77% are HIV-infected,
along with 3,800 children under the age of 15. The number who have died of Aids since
the epidemic began is not known. Source: UNAIDS, 1998. |
Vastly outnumbering
standard doctors, traditional healers are destined to play a key role in the fight
against Aids in Africa. Senegal shows the way forward
“You could
see the bones sticking out under my skin and I was almost blind,” says Amadou Sow.
“I’d had Aids for 12 years when I decided to see the malango healers. Malango means
‘what is needed and is suitable.’ I came back feeling better. Since then, I have
recovered my sight and gained weight.” While Sow is a “miraculous” 50 years or so
old, he knows that he is not completely cured of Aids.
In Senegal’s Fatick region, 150 kilometres from the capital, Dakar, the Malango
Association, founded in 1983, has 450 members who are traditional healers (a fifth
of them women) and work in 264 villages. Starting from the belief that nature has
a cure for every ailment, they use mainly powders, potions and plant extracts. But
invoking the spirits is also part of traditional therapy. In the animist view of
the world, humans are considered a link in the cosmic chain who summon the lower
orders (minerals, plants and animals) to join the higher ones (spirits, ancestors
and gods). All of them must be called on in the hope of finding cures.
Unlike many of their counterparts in other countries, the association’s healers
don’t promise their patients they will be cured of Aids. They successfully treat
some of the symptoms (diarrhoea, vomiting and leukaemia) and ease suffering. When
the treatment is ineffective, they steer their patients towards health practitioners
who work with them. So far they have treated more than 10,000 people from Africa
(including Senegal), Europe and the United States.
The
first stop on the road
Three quarters of
all Senegalese go to traditional healers. “In some areas, there’s one doctor for
every 100,000 people and one traditional healer for every 1,000,” says Dr. Erick
Gbodoussou, head of the Malango Association’s experimental centre. Gbodoussou trained
in Western medical schools but is convinced traditional healers can not only effectively
fight some diseases, but can also play a useful role in prevention. “When I treat
someone with Aids, I discourage them from having sex with their partners,” says one
of the association’s healers, a man in his 70s. “I tell them they can infect their
partners if they don’t do what I say.”
In Dakar’s Tilène market, traditional healers have been interested in helping
to raise awareness about the disease. “Aids exists and we have to discuss it with
young people who are sexually active,” says Ibra Niokhobaye Diouf. Do the ill people
dare talk about their sex lives? “Ten out of the average 15 patients I see each day
raise the subject openly,” he says. “I use each occasion to make them understand
they have to protect themselves from this disease that everyone talks about so much.”
With more healers like Diouf, the message about Aids reaches the whole population
by word of mouth.
In the village of Sambé, in the Diourbel region, healers attended seminars
on Aids in 1998 organized by the NGOs Enda Tiers-Monde and Ndef Leng (“act together”).
The seminars featured information workshops, debates and documentary films which
convinced them of the prevention campaign’s worth. Unfortunately, there were only
35 healers present. “Healers aren’t very efficiently used in awareness campaigns,
yet they’re our first stop on the road,” says Dr. Moustapha Guèye, of Enda
Tiers-Monde. In our talks, African traditional structures always have pride of place.
It’s time to make use of them.”
The international conference on traditional medicine and HIV/Aids, held in Dakar
in March 1999, confirmed the key role of the healers. The conference, organized by
Prometra (a Senegalese NGO which promotes traditional medicine) and sponsored by
a dozen international organizations, attracted about 200 healers and 250 doctors
and scientists, as well as political decision-makers, journalists and people living
with HIV and Aids from about 30 countries around the globe. At the end of the discussions,
the traditional healers were invited to take part in UNAIDS programmes and attend
the next world conference on Aids, in Durban (South Africa) in July 2000.
