Traditional healers

The lady in the picture is a sangoma, a South African traditional healer. That is a person who through communication with the ancestors tries to cure a person from both mental and physical ailments. Contact with the afterlife gets made by, for instance, making music or burning certain herbs. In the two pictures below you can see her cupboard full of herbs and other traditional medicine.
Sangomas are very important in African culture. 80% of the black people in South Africa don't go to a western docter, but to their local sangoma. In the battle against HIV/Aids this is not always a desirable state of affairs since most of them don't understand the concept of a virus, don't prescribe ARV's (antiretroviral drugs), and with certain herbs and unhygenic methods abound, only make the problem worse.
Ironically, they could play a critical role in the fight against The Pandemic because of their status in the community. A couple of months ago I visited a pilot project which was aimed at getting sangomas to participate in the struggle against this awful disease. The project leaders had a difficult time in explaining the nature of the virus and that it will never leave a person's body. Sangomas think that when the symptoms of a disease are gone, the disease itself is gone too. Therefore some of them have claimed to have cured Aids, because after they have treated an infected person, that person seemed healthy again.
The sangomas who participated in this project were very open to the 'western' way of fighting Aids. When I asked one of them why, she said " because our people are dying and I cannot help them".