At the Fireside of Knowledge: Reflections from the Traditional Medicines Indaba

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 heartbeat of the Indaba truly emerged.

Commission 3: Governance, Innovation & Integration

I had the extraordinary honour of facilitating and serving as rapporteur for Commission 3: Institutionalise Through Inclusive Governance, Innovation, and Health System Integration.

Our commission confronted the reality of epistemicide—the historic and ongoing erasure of African knowledge systems. Epistemicide is not only an academic concept; it is lived every day when healers’ work is dismissed, when policies reduce traditional medicine to commodified extracts, and when curricula silence African cosmologies.

We recognised that resisting epistemicide requires systemic responses:

  • Defining Our Own Frameworks: Naming our paradigms, ontology, epistemology, axiology, methodologies, and approaches—so that our practices cannot be misrepresented or appropriated.
  • Competency-Based Frameworks: Developing structures that recognise knowledge, skills, ethics, and applications of African traditional medicine, culminating in a knowledge hub mapping scope of practice and scope of knowledge.
  • Inclusive Governance: Envisioning a Council of Elders (healers) that advises the statutory council, alongside committees involving SAQA, CHE, QCTO, and HWSETA.
  • Structural Integration: Advocating for a Department of Indigenous Health Knowledge Systems outside the Department of Health, to ensure institutional parity, dedicated resources, and independent policymaking.

This was not abstract policy talk. It was a bold articulation of what epistemic justice might look like in practice.

Between Movements and Relationships

The Indaba also reminded me that political advocacy is inseparable from human connection.
I had the privilege of meeting Chairperson of the Interim Traditional Health Practitioners Council of South Africa (ITHPCSA), Gogo Sheila Mbele-Khama, whose leadership continues to carve space for traditional healers in national governance structures.

Equally profound was reconnecting with Mhlekazi Bhanekazi Mpumlwana - my dearest colleague, friend, sister, and mother. In her wisdom I find both anchor and compass; in our shared struggle, a reminder that this is not a solitary journey but a collective march.

Why This Matters for C20 & Equitable Health for All

Within C20 South Africa’s EHA Priority 4, our work insists that traditional medicine is not marginal—it is central to equitable health responses. Communities have long relied on traditional healing not only for clinical care but also for spiritual, ecological, and psychosocial well-being.

To ignore this is to ignore the lived realities of millions. To integrate it authentically is to advance equity, resilience, and justice in global health.

The Indaba therefore contributes directly to shaping C20’s advocacy towards the G20 - positioning Indigenous knowledge systems not as heritage to be safeguarded alone, but as living systems of health governance that demand institutional recognition, financing, and protection.

Closing Reflections

As I left the Indaba, I carried two truths:

  • The work of institutionalisation and governance is complex and heavy.
  • The spirit of our collective - elders, scholars, healers, allies - makes the burden lighter and the vision clearer.

Traditional medicine is not an “add-on” to health systems. It is health. It is dignity, survival, community resilience, and a future worth fighting for.

As AfroSpiritual-Ink, I will continue to document this journey; because storytelling is itself a form of resistance against epistemicide.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Revitalising Traditional Health Practice Education in South Africa: Three Years After My PhD

Image
  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...
Read more

When Knowledge Lives in Silence: The Crisis Facing African Indigenous Medicine

Image
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...
Read more