Sangoma — Healers of the Ancestors

The sangoma does not choose the calling — the ancestors choose them, usually through illness that cannot be cured by ordinary means. After training that can last years under an established sangoma, the healer becomes a bridge between the living and the dead, able to diagnose spiritual causes of illness, communicate with ancestral spirits, and prescribe both physical and spiritual remedies. In Zulu culture, physical illness and spiritual illness are not separate categories — they are the same illness at different levels. The sangoma treats all of it. An estimated sixty percent of South Africans consult a sangoma before or alongside Western medicine.

These signs carry the sangoma's beads, the divining bones, the protective muti pouch, and the white clay of the healer's initiation.