Much has been said and written about the Pan-Africanist agenda for Africa to find and follow its own path and in particular, to explore the rich, virgin gold fields of African knowledge bases. The controversial and renowned Afrocentric scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop in his Towards the African Renaissance: Essays in Culture and Development 1946-1960 declared that "the development of [… African …] indigenous languages is the prerequisite for a real African renaissance" (p.35) and Aimé Césaire eloquently noted at the First International Congress of Black Writes and Artists, "La voie la plus courte vers l'avenir est qui passe par l'approfondissement du passé." The deeper you look into the past, the shorter your way to the future (1956).

Dare I propose then that, whether inadvertently or not, the recent policy by the health ministry has created a unique opportunity for the kind of fundamental cultural innovation that the pan-African movement's founding fathers could only dream of in 1956? One hopes that the open acceptance of the authority and knowledge of traditional healers might create space for a candid dialogue between ancient healing techniques and spirituality with the mainstream western modes. I am under no allusion though about the controversy and difficulty of such a step. I remember as a curious child attending a few traditional ceremonies in which various “ancestors� where summoned into spirit mediums through dance and song. I remember the terror that would haunt me for weeks afterwards. While westerners and the westernized might find it easy to scoff at the elaborate rituals and knowledge of witchdoctors, it takes being a witness to appreciate why the institutions have survived for so long and the awe and fear they still command even over the well educated. The price of survival has been the creation of complex exclusion mechanisms that wall in the knowledge to a select number of initiates and also make it taboo to conduct public discussions about the inner secrets. To make matters worse, well documented cases of fraud by tricksters pretending to be powerful witchdoctors without any corresponding documentation of the successes of the genuine ones set extremely unfavorable terms for any dialogue.

It should never be forgotten that there have been attempts to heal diseases probably for as long as people have been around. For the complex institutions of traditional healers and witchdoctors to have survived for so many centuries, there has to have been a reasonably high success rate. It would be to our detriment to allow such knowledge to die out -- or to dismiss the opportunity to engage it because it is percieved to have come about as politically motivated "window dressing".