UKZN Co-Hosts Workshop for Traditional Healers

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UKZN and the Department of Science and Innovation hosted a week-long induction workshop for traditional healers who are part of a steering committee appointed by the Minister of Higher Education, Science and Technology, Dr Blade Nzimande.

The 13-member steering committee will focus on Piloting the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) of Indigenous Knowledge Practitioners, particularly the Accreditation of Assessors and Certification of Indigenous Knowledge practitioners. 

Speaking before the launch, Nzimande said: ‘The establishment of mechanisms to recognise areas of indigenous knowledge as professional disciplines with their own institutions, governance structures and approaches to quality assurance, is an important step towards affirming indigenous knowledge as a knowledge domain in its own right.’

Chairperson of the Provincial House of Traditional Leaders Inkosi Phathisizwe Chiliza said there was a need to do a cleansing ritual after 1994.

Chiliza said people who fought on the battlefields needed assistance from the traditional leaders as they were able to engage in the spiritual realm. Inkosi Chiliza said xenophobic attacks were a sign that something was wrong, he said, and emphasised that the initiatives started by the steering committee would help heal the nation and the land.

The Department of Science and Technology’s Science Missions Chief Director, Professor Yonah Seleti, said the historical Protection, Promotion, Development and Management of Indigenous Knowledge Act No.6 of 2019, which was signed by President Cyril Ramaphosa in August 2019, would redress ‘the inequalities and injustices that have been inflicted on us in this country over the years’.

The appointed Steering Committee will facilitate the implementation of a Discipline of Competence (DoC) for the Traditional Health Practice domain in a form of a pilot programme to test the developed competence norms and standards in a real life-setting environment.

Competency norms and standards were developed in the Traditional Health Practitioners’ (THPs) categories of diviners, herbalists, traditional birth attendants and traditional surgeons in KwaZulu-Natal, North West and Limpopo provinces. The work produced in KwaZulu-Natal was the most complete in terms of the scoped competency norms and standards that were developed by the THPs.

The pilot will run for three years and will then be rolled out in other provinces.

Words: Raylene Captain-Hasthibeer

Photograph: Itumeleng Masa