ZULU TRADITIONAL HEALER.

Traditional healers are practitioners of traditional African medicines in the country, they use their medicine to heal people who are sick and do not believe in the western medicine. There are different types of traditional healers, and they are Isangoma, Inyanga, and Umthandazi.

All these types of traditional healers play different roles in helping people, using different kinds of mutis/traditional medicines to heal people’s sicknesses. Isangoma is healer who believes in ancestors to help them with their work of helping people of their illness and spiritual difficulties. Traditional healers use traditional huts and they keep all their staff there and this room is called isigodlo. Not everyone is allowed in that room and there are certain rules one need to follow when entering isigodlo, one of those rules is to take off your shoes and a woman cannot enter with their trousers on they must show some respect for abantu abadala.

Isangoma uses bones and impepho (incense) when talking with their spiritual ancestors and when someone came to them for assistance and guidance, there are different ways that the izangoma take when they are initiating or ukuthwasa, some they do it in the waters and some they do it in the wild. Being a sangoma is a special gift one gets from okhokho (ancestors) and one must obey their ancestors (amadlozi) because they can get angry if their orders are not followed. Every now then a sangoma needs to make umqombothi (a Zulu traditional beer) and slaughter a chicken to please their ancestors. They get names from their mothers who initiates them like Makhosi or gogo or thwasa. In their wrists they wear skins of a cow or goat and traditional beads and they have their own clothes that they wear. They carry with them ishoba that they use every time the spirits talk to them.