Traditional healers and modern medicine in Madagascar

August 01, 2016 No Comments

Officials and NGOs hope to work with healers, who thrive in remote areas, in order to reach underserved communities.

Mbola Tohamana is a traditional healer and a pillar of his community in Madagascar [Tom Maguire/Al Jazeera]

By 

William Worley

Ambondro, Madagascar - In Ambondro village in the remote south of Madagascar, it is said that the man whom people seek out to cure their sickness was trained by a ghost. Sixty-year-old Mbola Tohamana is a traditional healer and claims his potions and spells can treat diseases and psychiatric disorders - and even make people fall in love.

He is the sole inhabitant of a wooden house - a rare luxury in a region where many families cram a dozen people into one small living space. Inside, a brown and yellow tapestry emblazoned with depictions of butterflies and vines hangs across a wall. Pinned to it is a 2016 calendar and a weekly timetable. Tools, boxes and a bicycle are neatly stacked around a sizeable bed.

Sitting on the thatched floor, Mbola explains how the knowledge of his craft came to him. "In 1975, I fell sick," he says. "I had to drink Zebu blood [the blood of the local humped cattle]. Soon after, a ghost came from the sea and taught me everything I know."
Another 4,860 ghosts followed, Mbola says, and they always sit on his shoulders - even as he speaks. "I take them as gods, they guide me." They are his counsel in healing and advise him on how to treat people, he says.
He is one of many healers practising his craft in Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world, where 80 percent of people live in extreme poverty.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines traditional healing as "the knowledge, skill, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures". Mbola provides a face to an issue present in many developing countries - across Africa an estimated 80 percent of the population use traditional medicine to treat ailments, according to the World Bank.

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The community pillar

Mbola's remedies and solutions are at odds with modern medicine, but he is a pillar of the community in a remote place which feels forgotten by modern institutions owing to the lack of infrastructure and services.
From his small shack in Ambondro, Mbola diagnoses patients and prescribes "treatments". "There are two kinds of diseases, those that need hospital and those that don't need hospital," Mbola says.
"The only thing that I cannot heal is something which has to be done by surgery, but the tools of how I do it change every six months."
Delivering babies is not something Mbola defines as needing hospitalisation, but for cases of tuberculosis - the leading infectious killer in Madagascar - Mbola gives patients a plant and then sends them to hospital. He also admits that he cannot treat HIV.