Traditional Healing Research in West Africa: Respect, Appreciation, and Lessons Applied to Counselling

Abstract

I have been visiting West Africa for over a quarter of a century. I became interested in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Burkina Faso in the late Seventies. Several students from these and other African counties were enrolled in my graduate classes in counseling at George Washington University where I was a professor. Although they were excited about counseling and psychotherapy, the American way of helping, at the same time they were eager to tell me about traditional
healing which they and their families knew about first-hand. A student from Côte d’Ivoire invited me to visit his country, where the majority of the people use traditional healing for help when they have problems in living. After three or four years of library research preparing for field research on the topic, I visited Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Senegal. My graduate students put me in touch with their relatives and friends who helped me schedule interviews with people in cities and villages in West Africa. I visited families, dined with them, attended church services with them, and witnessed healers in consultation with their clients wherever and whenever possible. During my first trip to Côte d’Ivoire, I took my note pads and tape recorder with me. However, I soon discovered that the interview research methods I used in the United States often caused anxiety in my African interviewees. On subsequent trips, I left at home all such
paraphernalia. My interviewees were more comfortable talking with me without microphones in their face. I made my notes at the end of each day.