Why Traditional Healing is Central to South African Heritage

Why Traditional Healing is Central to South African Heritage – Our traditions are woven into our communal power to shape the worlds of tomorrow. They are the breath in our present and the compass for where we are going, not echoes of the past.

When I say our traditions are alive, I mean they walk with us, they show up even in the ways we greet each other and commune. They hold us steady in our cultural identities, when the ground shifts, and remind us that healing goes beyond renewing strength in the body; it’s about restoring balancing in the spirit, mending the lineage, being in service to the community and the land.

This is why when I speak of traditional healing, I refer to a living practice, a process of preserving ancient knowledge systems, honouring time and space.

As traditional healers, we engage this truth daily. In consultations, we become conduits for clients to traverse through time. Gathering intel that allows them to heal perceptions of themselves that may lead them to destruction or manifest as physical ailments. We practice rituals and plant medicine that reinforces ancestral connection and restores balance in people’s modern lives, reshaping their visions for the future and reinventing how they show up in community.

Heritage Month – Traditional healing is a living heritage

This Heritage Month, I want to see traditional healing framed as part of that living heritage. Not just a symbol, but a practice that keeps us connected to who we are. Helping us face the challenges of today and the prospects of the future.

My journey as a healer wasn’t a choice. It began with a calling that was insistent and pushed until it could not be ignored. So, in my practice, being a healer is more of a responsibility than a career or title. It is my duty to use this gift that I have been entrusted with. To serve people when they are in need, in a way that shows humility and patience.

And this is why I’d like us to be reminded that the ancestral practices we inherit are living ways of keeping our people whole, not just cultural markers.

Healing is not just treating symptoms but restoring wholeness

In all the years that I have walked this path, I have seen that healing is never just about treating symptoms. It’s about restoring wholeness. Weaving spirit, body, mind and community back together.

For instance, the whole world was shaken when the pandemic broke out. Hospitals filled beyond capacity, fear spread, and people searched for protection and respite in places they would have previously considered unconventional.

Many returned to traditional ways. Using herbs, steaming, drinking teas that strengthen the body, adopting rituals that calm the mind and saying prayers to connect to spirit under impossible circumstances.

That moment drove home one important point. When systems are under strain, people return to ways that they intrinsically trust. We saw this with the number of people who sought out the wisdom of the land and the guidance of the ancestors.

For once, traditional healing stood beside Western medicine as a counterpart, not a competing ideology. Filling the gaps, holding people steady in a time of absolute uncertainty.

The future includes Ancestral and modern Medicine

The take-home: The time for traditional medicine being pushed to the periphery is over. The future of wellness will be built by inclusive approaches that honour both the ancestral and the modern, the natural and the scientific.

Traditional healing continues to address issues that are often overlooked or compartmentalised in Western approaches. Like, belonging, traditional healing is communal and gathers people. It restores families through joint efforts that strengthen bonds that make us whole. Identity is also central to traditional healing practices. Rituals are rooted in the unique history of each lineage, which is the key objective when reconnecting with ancestors. In ways that affirm the dignity that has been established in the bloodline and in turn our own. Traditional healing practices centre health as a holistic concept. We make recommendations that are cognisant of peace for the mind as well as balance for the body and spirit. It’s in these ways that we become custodians of ancient intelligence. Safeguarding knowledge of plants, rituals, oral history and story, lore we cannot afford to lose.

The legitimacy of traditional healing is still highly contested in modern South Africa. There are a lot of stigmas because much is misunderstood. Practices are dismissed as superstition, rather than being recognised as a discipline.

We are losing elders, and with them, vast libraries of wisdom. Our environment is under threat, and with that, plants and places that hold medicine. As a society, we are still working out how to undo colonial programming. To find sustainable ways for traditional healing and modern medicine to coexist.

But these are not hurdles that should make us cower. They can be conquered with clarity, courage and holding the knowledge that healing is an integral part of our heritage.

Young people must claim their ancestral legacies with pride

I see a future where no person must choose between the clinic and the healer. Where both are respected and both operate for the betterment of community. We’ve seen that a fully integrated society where young people claim their ancestral legacies with pride is possible. Carrying forward the songs, the herbs and the teachings forward without shame. We need to get to a place where it is widely understood that traditional healing is about land as much as it is about people. When rivers dry and forests vanish, medicine disappears too. How traditional healing combines physical and spiritual health, restoration of cultural identities and connections and honouring the earth can be a crucial part of social progress.

Our future societies should be built on inclusive wellness and spaces where knowledge systems meet. Where everyone can access care that honours both their body and their identity.

Written By: Dr Malala Phezulu

If you enjoyed reading Why Traditional Healing is Central to South African Heritage check out more African leaders here