AfroSpiritual Ink

Jacobsdal may be a small town on the Free State map, but it is here, in this roll, that I find both my grounding and my voice. For many, Jacobsdal is just farmland and history; for me, it is soil that remembers, soil that speaks. This is where my work as a Traditional Health Practitioner (THP-SA) and autodidact scholar unfolds - not in silence, but in conversation with my ancestors, my community, and the land itself.  Carrying My Calling When I accepted my calling, I also accepted the weight of misconception. Too often, traditional healers are boxed into stereotypes - whispered about as dangerous, dismissed as unscientific, or romanticized without depth. I knew early on that I could not allow myself to be trapped in those false images. For me, being a ngaka ya setso is not about fear, secrecy, or shame. It is about service. It is about standing between the living and the ancestors, listening, interpreting, healing, and guiding. It is about restoring dignity to a people whose wisdom...

On 6 September 2025, I joined colleagues, elders, and allies at the Traditional Medicines Indaba—a gathering convened under the banner of C20 South Africa’s Equitable Health for All (EHA) process. Within EHA, our specific stream focuses on traditional medicine as a community health response—not as a parallel or alternative, but as a living health system with legitimacy, depth, and global relevance. This Indaba was therefore more than a meeting. It was a moment of positioning: how do we, as healers, scholars, and policy advocates, articulate the role of Indigenous Health Knowledge Systems (IHKS) in the fight for equitable health for all? A Day of Collective Visioning The agenda was as alive as the conversations themselves. From morning welcomes and fireside chats—where themes of regional perspective, gender and health, and current research took centre stage—to afternoon commissions, the day oscillated between intimacy and institution-building. It was in the commissions that the heartbea...

I was recently asked on LinkedIn: “Where can I read more about African Indigenous Medicinal Systems in detail?” The truth is, you can’t. Not easily, anyway. Not because the knowledge doesn’t exist, but because it was never written down. Why Our Knowledge Is Missing from the Page Traditional Health Practice and Indigenous Knowledge Systems are underdeveloped, under-documented, and under-researched. This isn’t an accident; it is history. The practitioners who carried this wisdom before us often could not write. And when writing was possible, they avoided it. Why? Because to record was to risk theft. Knowledge was guarded jealously, kept oral, transmitted in ceremony, in practice, in apprenticeship. They were right to be cautious. Too often, our people have had their medicines studied, renamed, patented, and sold back to us. What remained sacred became commodity. But this caution had consequences: today we stand on the edge of losing practices not because they failed, but because they wer...

  When I completed my PhD three years ago, my focus was on a question that remains both urgent and unresolved: how do we recognise and legitimise the education of Traditional Health Practitioners (THPs) in South Africa within the national system of qualifications? Traditional healers have always stood at the heart of African communities. Research consistently shows that between 70–80% of South Africans consult a THP as a first or complementary source of healthcare. For many, this is not only about medical treatment but also about spiritual grounding, cultural continuity, and community trust. And yet, despite their central role, THPs continue to exist at the margins of formal recognition in our education and health systems. In this post, I revisit the findings of my doctoral research and reflect on where South Africa now stands—three years later—in bridging the gap between indigenous apprenticeship-based systems of training and the requirements of the National Qualifications Frame...

  The question of what it means to be a healer in contemporary Southern Africa is inseparable from questions of lineage, belonging, and ancestral coherence. For those of us born out of wedlock, the matter is not abstract but profoundly personal. Our very lives are entangled with ancestral negotiations, contested rights, and the spiritual re-ordering of kinship. My own positioning as a healer must therefore be situated within this paradoxical space: a life born of fractured genealogies, yet consecrated through early initiation into the sacred work of ukwelapha kwesintu . My maternal line carries both Sotho and Tswana ancestry. My mother herself was born out of wedlock, which meant that the full ritual authority over her life was retained by her maternal family. My maternal grandfather, though Sotho by origin, did not transmit ritual custodianship because he had not ritually integrated my mother into his lineage. Her mother’s family, Tswana by heritage, therefore bore the primary res...