Signes therapeutiques et prose de la vie en Afrique noire

In the first part of this interpretation of African therapy inspiration is drawn from Michel Foucault's description of the progress of the human sciences in Europe to understand in depth the meaning and practice of African therapeutics through the use of four universal categories of resemblance: harmony, emulation, analogy and sympathy. Harmony, in the African tradition, is a required major link between persons and things. Emulation as a principle in the medicine of the healers is the key to the coherence of a complicated play of forces that can provocate or annul sickness and disease. Analogy, the third type of resemblance, transcends harmony and emulation. It is at once source and code of all resemblances, establishing a cohesion and an interdependence between all kingdoms of the earth and the universe: mineral, vegetable, animal, human, ancestral, celestial. Finally, sympathy, the last resemblance, can only be defined in terms of its opposite, antipathy. It enhances analogy and gives it its meaning and value. It is characterization and calling of African healers.

In the second part this conception of life grounded in the antagonism between sympathy and antipathy. which embodies the relationship of healer to sorcerer, is shown to be dominant today, in urban as well as rural areas. Its distribution as well as its presence are far more than sociological facts, they engage the very life of man.

However the practice of African therapy opens up to another issue: the significance of the therapeutic act. Compared to scientific medicine, the medicine of the healers is very dependent on natural myths of origin concerning the fate of the species, whereas modern medicine tends to address the fate of the individual.