Illness and Medicine

Therapeutic System of the Chewa in Eastern Zambia

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe the therapeutic activity of the Chewa and to elucidate its characteristics and logic.
The Chewa attribute slight illness to God, and severe illness to the act of sorcerers. Illness which is caused by the dead or the ancestral spirits is quite rare. This tendency may well be ascribed to the existence of a masked society “Nyau”, whose function is to transfer the dead into the ancestral spirits, and to prevent them from doing harm to the living people.
Traditional healers of the Chewa attach great importance to medicine, made mainly from plants and animals. In the case of illness caused by sorcery, healers connect symptoms of the illness and the attributes of a certain plant or animal, a part of which, they suppose, the sorcerer has sent into the body of the patient. Thus, the cure consists of giving the same substance to the patient, chanting a spell “the substance must go back to the sender”. In the case of illness caused by God, healers try to treat them using symbolic attributes of plants and animals: for example, trees which have white drops can wash the illness away, a tree whose name is “msolo” can pull out (u-solela) the illness, and the like. In both cases, healing is explained through the metaphorical association between symptoms and attributes of natural objects. This kind of treatment can visualize the healing process of the illness. In consequence, patient can not only imagine but also believe his recovery. It is no exaggeration to say that the Chewa's therapeutic system, which ascribes most of severe illness to sorcery and cure them through its counterwork, visualizes the process of outbreak and healing of illness to the extreme degree.