Nganga and Public Health How to deal with the Ambiguities of Healing

In my long-term research on healers (nganga) in the forest area of Cameroon their difficult relationship with official health care emerges as a recurrent issue. As Ceriana Mayneri warned in his study of the Banda (CAR), ‘witchcraft’ has a long history of being ‘interpellated’ by Western medicine. This chapter focuses on the precarious struggle to separate ‘mala fide’ from ‘bona fide’ healers. It briefly discusses three situations: (1) nganga in the Maka villages, where people take for granted that nganga can only heal because they have an overly developed djambe (sorcellerie) in their belly; for them, the basic ambiguity of the djambe – which can kill but also heal – relativizes any distinction between good and evil (the Hippocratic oath, basic for Western medicine, can be read similarly); (2) the South African Ralushai committee and its 1996 ‘Proposed Draft Legislation to Control the Practice of Traditional Healers,’ struggling to formalize the distinction between trustworthy healers and witch-doctors; and (3) Éric de Rosny, a Jesuit initiated as a nganga in Douala, and his interdisciplinary working group – including academics and nganga – to combat witchcraft.