Health and illness in Mozambique

Abstract

Based on a long process of direct observation and interviews, this article states that the main barrier to the unfruitful attempts of dialog between biomedicine and "traditional healers", in Mozambique, is the ignorance and/or undervaluation of the local notions about illness, the social aspects of its aetiology, and their implications for the notion and process of cure. Therefore, together with the characterization of the tinyanga (healers putatively possessed by spirits) and their therapies, the article presents the locally dominant system of misfortune interpretation, in which the material causes (how it happened) are combined with social and spiritual factors (why it happened to that person). As a consequence, the cure is not only the healing of the illness; it includes and demands as well the resolution of the social problem that caused it - and this second aspect of the cure is one of the tinyanga's expertises. For that reason, consulting such healers seldom results from the absence of health care alternatives, and they cannot accept the idea of being limited to their herbalist expertise, in order to be integrated into the official health care system. However, the debate and negotiation about their space, role and status in future general health care systems should not be made through sympathetic "cultural translators". The tinyanga have the abilities to do it with their own voice, as far as they have available interlocutors.