Literary perspectives of healing practices and approaches to medicine in Chinodya’s Strife

Abstract

This paper focuses on the dilemma in which some African societies are finding themselves, as the western approach to healing is applied as if all cultural groups are homogenous throughout. This western approach is usually applied with the intention of replacing the existing indigenous healing systems that are already in place and are functional. African cultural groups, like any other cultural groups around the world, have their own approaches to diagnosis and curing of diseases. However, it appears that western approaches are overriding the African approaches, and thereby engendering problems among some of the African cultural groups whose indigenous healing systems are rooted in the spiritual world. In Africa, there are spiritual problems that require spiritual remedies hence; a western approach applied to a spiritual problem could culminate in fatality. At times, the mixing of both African and western approaches may not yield positive and visible results. Strife exposes the dilemma resulting from applying western approaches in an African cultural group and the likely out-come of such a predicament. This paper adopted the African World View Theory as the sub-theory, since the primary text, Strife, is from Africa and written from an Afrocentric perspective, by an African author. Furthermore, the article looks at differing belief systems, herbalism and the role of spiritual mediums. It was found that often a duality in the approaches to healing exists, as illustrated by the characteristics of Dunge and Hilda Dolly.