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Role of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) in managing HIV/AIDS in Tanzania
Tanzania Global Development Centre (TGDLC) has organized constructive dialogue on the role of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) in managing HIV/AIDS. Our Traditional Healers take health as a state of social wholeness. Disease does not simply involve the malfunction of one or a collection of bodily organs. Rather it is a rupture in life's harmony.
By NYASIGO KORNEL
Ole Kip Sayore, a certified Masai traditional healer in Dar es Salaam, does not claim to cure HIV but said the 203 plants he uses to create powdered treatments do help AIDS patients. The 65 year-old former teacher retired four years ago after his daughters death from AIDS and is now following his parents vocation. If I knew then what I know now, she would have lived longer, he said.
Ole Kip Sayore lectures his patients on HIV prevention and explains that, in the absence of drugs, good nutrition and traditional herbs can help people live normal lives. He makes sure, however, that they understand he is not curing them. Unlike AIDS medicines, which can cost up to Tsh. 3,000 a day in a country where most live on less than Tsh. 1,000 a day, Ole Kip Sayore treatments cost five hundred shillings only.
Without access to AIDS drugs, increasing numbers of HIV-infected Tanzanians are turning to traditional healers seeking treatment for everything from stomach aches to tuberculosis.
With the longest history of healing in Tanzania, traditional health knowledge has spread through time, space and cultures maintaining a unique and distinctive character. For centuries, and even today, these traditional systems of health continue to provide effective health care to the vast majority of people of Tanzania.
In rural Tanzania, there are no indications that government and Drug Companies pledge to provide HIV treatment that will soon result in improved care.
Tanzanian government will certify traditional healers who demonstrate basic health-care skills and knowledge of their craft. However, the countrys physicians remain highly skeptical. Dr. S Mtullu, Project Manager of Tanga AIDS Working Group (TAWG), in his presentation at TGDLC, said there is lack of cooperation between the traditional health system and modern health system.
What roles can traditional medical health knowledge play in addressing issues of health disparity and inequity, both at home and abroad, and how can these roles be enhanced?
The term "traditional medicine" refers to practices and knowledge that existed before the arrival of modern conventional medicine which were used to promote, maintain and restore health and well-being. People developed unique indigenous healing traditions adapted and defined by their culture, beliefs and environment, which satisfied the health needs of communities over centuries.
Uganda is a country that only ten years ago had the highest HIV/ AIDS infection rate in the world. Today they are one of the greatest success stories in the fight against AIDS. Traditional Medicine played a significant part in their recovery when it was integrated into primary health care policy.
In a country where eighty percent of citizens use traditional healers as their first line of health care, it was through the education and blending of these healers with biomedicine that the crisis was curbed.
For those who studied African Traditional Religion (ATR), especially on the writings of the popular scholar John S. Mbiti will agree that with increasing evidence that large proportions of medical problems are psychosomatic it seems imperative that doctors treat not only the body but also the mind.
Mbiti says that by acknowledging these feelings and focusing on healing both the body and mind, as is the practice with traditional Africa healing, patients are empowered with positivism and the opportunity to live normal and healthy lives.
Our Traditional Healers take health as a state of social wholeness. Disease does not simply involve the malfunction of one or a collection of bodily organs. Rather it is a rupture in life's harmony. Material manifestations need to be treated on both physical and mental levels. While many Traditional Healers mix this philosophy with a lot of superstition there are some clear parallels between their approach and contemporary systemic psychology.
There are also those practitioners who have moved beyond the superstition and yet still take special interest in their patients as individuals. Possibly due largely to the family or community-centric nature of so many African cultures, Traditional Healers tend to involve the entire family in the process of familiarizing the patient with the disease. This has two clear advantages.
Firstly the AIDS sufferer is more likely to be supported by their family if they are made aware of the non-contagious nature of the virus. Secondly HIV/ AIDS sufferers in Tanzania tend to suffer a lot of alienation. Mental attitudes of the AIDS carrier have a significant effect on their physical health.
Through psycho-social support, patients are often able to maintain or regain control of their lives and health. Hundreds of people, who, according to Tanga AIDS Working Group (TAWG) research, would otherwise have deteriorated rapidly, have managed to remain totally asymptomatic and others have regained health and recovered from serious risks like super-infected herpes, tuberculosis and pneumonia, simply by being supported and taught to think positively.
Nyasigo Kornel is a Communication Officer of Health and Poverty Resource Centre and he is an experienced journalist
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