PORTRAIT 8 -TRADITIONAL HEALING SYSTEMS PROGRAMME SIX

To the older writers from Europe, the traditional healer is “a Witch doctor,” and even to most Nigerian Western medical doctors, his practice is still viewed as unscientific and unacceptable.

The programme lays bare the traditional concept of health care as it operates on the physical, social and spiritual levels. It embraces in this field the ancient arts of divination and illustrates the basic similarities in the concept and methods of Traditional Healing systems. It also examines how various levels of the society – rural, urban literate, illiterate, Christian, Muslim – relate to traditional healing and what impact foreign cultures and modernity have exerted on it, in different Nigerian Cultures.