12/05/2025
African traditional medicine and its practices were prohibited under the pretext of witchcraft in South Africa by the British and later the apartheid government. This led to secrecy in the practice and a lack of infrastructural planning to support it.
As a result, traditional healthcare practices are largely informal and unregulated. This raises questions around accessibility and patient safety, as well as the accountability of healers. Traditional health practices make use of symbolic rituals and natural products, including local plants. They also follow certain cultural rules about privacy. And they require specific spatial qualities in terms of scale, sequencing, light and materials.
In 2007 the South African government gazetted the Traditional Health Practitioners Act to officially recognise the practice of traditional medicine. But little has been done to develop formal spaces for traditional healing practices – especially in an urban context. Most healers still practise in their houses where there is little privacy for patients and their families are exposed to ill people. Others use more private backrooms. But these spaces aren’t designed for the practice of traditional medicine.
The spaces where traditional medicine is practised are important because they assist with the healing process. These spaces play an indispensable role in helping patients get better. Different to biomedicine, African traditional healing is holistic: besides the patient’s symptoms it considers the person as a whole and their social relationships. During the consultation, landscapes, buildings and their elements, such as materials and plants, gain symbolic meaning to the patient, through their use by the healer. The setting, the herbal component and the dialogue with the healer provide a physical comfort and a sense of cultural belonging to the patient and all these components combined are responsible for the healing.
For this reason there’s a dire need for architectural design insight into the best qualities for spaces that could house these cultural rituals of healing. Guidelines are needed for the suitable design and construction of landscapes and buildings for traditional health practitioners in South Africa – in the same way as the country has guidelines for clinics and hospitals.
Proper facilities supported by well researched cultural principles for layout and design will go a long way to improving the image and perception of the practice of traditional medicine. Bringing together the perspectives of architectural design and the cultural use of medicinal plants, we are working on research which aims to develop guidelines for the design and construction of landscapes and spaces for traditional health practitioners in South Africa
Traditional healing in South Africa..
