A saying in the Chewa language of Malawi rightly states: “Fisi sasintha mawanga, amangosintha” mapiri. A hyena does not change its spots, it only changes hills. So, in towns or in villages, the mentality is the same. Africans understand sickness as aggression and intention. As an aggression, sickness is seen in terms of violence. The suffering of the sick person is analogous to the suffering caused by an injury. The sick person is at risk, he/she can die. Death threatens all the people who are involved in the violence, in one way or another, passively or actively.
As ‘intention’, sickness is believed to be one of the ways through which divinities or spirits manifest themselves to human beings: it could be a punishment or a sanction but it could also be what can be called a vocational sickness, i.e. a sickness whose appearance shows that the person is sick because he/she has been chosen to play an important religious role in his/her society. Intentional sickness can be manipulated by a human being, a sorcerer, a magician or a divinity (god). This is why sickness cannot be understood outside the cultural and religious context of the ethnic group in question. No diagnosis or even cure can be effective unless a chain of meanings and symbols belonging to the culture of the sick person have been deployed.
There are mainly three types of causes of sickness: first, is evil from a malignant person (sorcerer, witch or wizard, the evil eye, etc.); second, is a sanction from a neglected spirit or the love of a spiritual entity. In this latter case, when a spirit or divinity wants a certain person to be its priest or medium, it makes him/her go mad and when the person is initiated into its cult, the madness vanishes.
The third is the fault of the sick person whether conscious or not. It could be a broken taboo, misunderstanding or disorder in the family or clan, or refusal to offer sacrifices etc. It is also possible that an individual attracts attention to himself/herself by too much success or failure, provoking the vengeance of the divinities or the people. Here, sickness is seen as a sign or the consequence of a fault. You are sick not because you are guilty; you are guilty because you are sick! In this mentality, even an accident cannot happen unless there is an evil intention behind it. READ MORE
