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Traditional Healers Of Southern Africa
Traditional healers of Southern Africa are practitioners of traditional African medicine in Southern Africa. They fulfill different social and political roles in the community, including divination, healing physical, emotional and spiritual illnesses, directing birth or death rituals, finding lost cattle, protecting warriors, counteracting witchcraft, and narrating the history, cosmology, and concepts of their tradition. There are two main types of traditional healers within the Nguni, Sotho-Tswana, and Tsonga societies of Southern Africa: the diviner (''sangoma''), and the herbalist (''inyanga''). These healers are effectively South African shamans who are highly revered and respected in a society where illness is thought to be caused by witchcraft, pollution (contact with impure objects or occurrences) or through neglect of the ancestors. It is estimated that there are as many as 200,000 traditional healers in South Africa compared to 25,000 doctors trained in bio-medic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Helichrysum Petiolare
''Helichrysum petiolare'', the licorice-plant or liquorice plant, is a species of flowering plant in the family Asteraceae, native to South Africa — where it is known as ''imphepho'' — and naturalized in parts of Portugal and the United States. Growing to about high and broad, it is a trailing evergreen subshrub with furry grey-green leaves and small white flowers. Other common names include silver-bush everlastingflower, trailing dusty miller and ''kooigoed''. The foliage has a faint licorice aroma, but ''Helichrysum petiolare'' is not closely related to the true liquorice plant, ''Glycyrrhiza glabra''. Cultivation It is cultivated for its foliage and as groundcover. This plant prefers sun to partial shade with well drained soil, being susceptible to root rot. It is hardy to zones 9-11, in mild or coastal areas where temperatures do not fall below freezing for extended periods. It requires a sheltered position in full sun. Numerous cultivars have been developed, of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Venda People
The Venḓa (VhaVenḓa or Vhangona) are a Southern African Bantu people living mostly near the South African-Zimbabwean border. The history of the Venda starts from the Kingdom of Mapungubwe (9th Century) where King Shiriyadenga was the first king of Venda and Mapungubwe. The Mapungubwe Kingdom stretched from the Soutpansberg in the south, across the Limpopo River to the Matopos in the north. The Kingdom declined from 1240, and power moved north to the Great Zimbabwe Kingdom. The first Venda settlement in the Soutpansberg was that of the legendary chief Thoho-ya-Ndou (Head of the Elephant). His royal kraal was called D’zata; its remains have been declared a National Monument. The Mapungubwe Collection is a museum collection of artefacts found at the archaeological site and is housed in the Mapungubwe Museum in Pretoria. Venda people share ancestry with Lobedu people and Kalanga people. They are also related to Sotho-Tswana peoples Sotho-Tswana and Shona groups. All these t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sotho Language
Sotho () or Sesotho () or Southern Sotho is a Southern Bantu language of the Sotho–Tswana ("S.30") group, spoken primarily by the Basotho in Lesotho, where it is the national and official language; South Africa (particularly the Free State), where it is one of the 11 official languages; and in Zimbabwe where it is one of 16 official languages. Like all Bantu languages, Sesotho is an agglutinative language, which uses numerous affixes and derivational and inflexional rules to build complete words. Classification Sotho is a Southern Bantu language, belonging to the Niger–Congo language family within the Sotho-Tswana branch of Zone S (S.30). Although Southern Sotho shares the name ''Sotho'' with Northern Sotho, the two groups have less in common with each other than they have with Setswana. "Sotho" is also the name given to the entire Sotho-Tswana group, in which case Sesotho proper is called "Southern Sotho". Within the Sotho-Tswana group, Southern Sotho is most ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northern Sotho Language
Northern Sotho, or as an endonym, is a Sotho-Tswana language spoken in the northeastern provinces of South Africa. It is sometimes referred to as or , its main dialect, through synecdoche. According to the South African National Census of 2011, it is the first language of over 4.6 million (9.1%) people, making it the 5th most spoken language in South Africa. The Sepedi language is spoken most commonly in Mpumalanga, Gauteng and the Limpopo provinces. Name The Northern Sotho written language was based largely on the Sepedi dialect. Missionaries studied this dialect the most closely and first developed the orthography in 1860 by Alexander Merensky, Grutzner and Gerlachshoop. This subsequently provided a common writing system for 20 or more varieties of the Sotho-Tswana languages spoken in the former Transvaal, and also helped lead to "Sepedi" being used as the umbrella term for the entire language family. However, there are objections to this synecdoche by other Norther ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Xhosa People
The Xhosa people, or Xhosa language, Xhosa-speaking people (; ) are African people who are direct kinsmen of Tswana people, Sotho people and Twa people, yet are narrowly sub grouped by European as Nguni people, Nguni ethnic group whose traditional homeland is primarily the Cape Provinces, Cape Provinces of South Africa, however the skulls from Mapungubwe empire shows that they have always been in Southern Africa like their kinsmen and had developed a sophisticated culture as well as civilization. They were the second largest racial group in apartheid Southern Africa and are native speakers of the Xhosa language, IsiXhosa language. Presently, approximately eight million Xhosa speaking African people are distributed across the country, and the Xhosa language is South Africa's second-most-populous home language, after the Zulu, again we must qualify the former statement as in great countries like China, Xhosa and Zulu language would not be classified as different languages, rather ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transculturation
Transculturation is a term coined by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in 1940 (from the article Our America by José Martí) to describe the phenomenon of merging and converging cultures. Transculturation encompasses more than transition from one culture to another; it does not consist merely of acquiring another culture (acculturation) or of losing or uprooting a previous culture (deculturation). Rather, it merges these concepts and instead carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena ( neoculturation) in which the blending of cultures is understood as producing something entirely new. Although transculturation is somewhat inevitable, cultural hegemony has historically shaped this process. Particularly, Ortiz referred to the devastating effects of Spanish colonialism on Cuba's indigenous peoples as a "failed transculturation". Further, he affirmed "that when cultures encounter each other, each of the parties invariably exerts a strong influence on th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apartheid
Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was characterised by an authoritarian political culture based on ''baasskap'' (boss-hood or boss-ship), which ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population. According to this system of social stratification, white citizens had the highest status, followed by Indians and Coloureds, then black Africans. The economic legacy and social effects of apartheid continue to the present day. Broadly speaking, apartheid was delineated into ''petty apartheid'', which entailed the segregation of public facilities and social events, and ''grand apartheid'', which dictated housing and employment opportunities by race. The first apartheid law was the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Urbanisation
Urbanization (or urbanisation) refers to the population shift from rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. It is predominantly the process by which towns and cities are formed and become larger as more people begin living and working in central areas. Although the two concepts are sometimes used interchangeably, urbanization should be distinguished from urban growth. Urbanization refers to the ''proportion'' of the total national population living in areas classified as urban, whereas urban growth strictly refers to the ''absolute'' number of people living in those areas. It is predicted that by 2050 about 64% of the developing world and 86% of the developed world will be urbanized. That is equivalent to approximately 3 billion urbanites by 2050, much of which will occur in Africa and Asia. Notably, the United Nations has also recently projected that nearly all globa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colonialism
Colonialism is a practice or policy of control by one people or power over other people or areas, often by establishing colonies and generally with the aim of economic dominance. In the process of colonisation, colonisers may impose their religion, language, economics, and other cultural practices. The foreign administrators rule the territory in pursuit of their interests, seeking to benefit from the colonised region's people and resources. It is associated with but distinct from imperialism. Though colonialism has existed since ancient times, the concept is most strongly associated with the European colonial period starting with the 15th century when some European states established colonising empires. At first, European colonising countries followed policies of mercantilism, aiming to strengthen the home-country economy, so agreements usually restricted the colony to trading only with the metropole (mother country). By the mid-19th century, the British Empire gave up me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fortune-telling
Fortune telling is the practice of predicting information about a person's life. Melton, J. Gordon. (2008). ''The Encyclopedia of Religious Phenomena''. Visible Ink Press. pp. 115-116. The scope of fortune telling is in principle identical with the practice of divination. The difference is that divination is the term used for predictions considered part of a religious ritual, invoking deities or spirits, while the term fortune telling implies a less serious or formal setting, even one of popular culture, where belief in occult workings behind the prediction is less prominent than the concept of suggestion, spiritual or practical advisory or affirmation. Historically, Pliny the Elder describes use of the crystal ball in the 1st century CE by soothsayers (''"crystallum orbis"'', later written in Medieval Latin by scribes as ''orbuculum''). Contemporary Western images of fortune telling grow out of folkloristic reception of Renaissance magic, specifically associated with R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zulu People
Zulu people (; zu, amaZulu) are a Nguni ethnic group native to Southern Africa. The Zulu people are the largest ethnic group and nation in South Africa, with an estimated 10–12 million people, living mainly in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. They originated from Nguni communities who took part in the Bantu migrations over millennia. As the clans integrated together, the rulership of Shaka brought success to the Zulu nation due to his improved military tactics and organization. Zulus take pride in their ceremonies such as the Umhlanga, or Reed Dance, and their various forms of beadwork. The art and skill of beadwork takes part in the identification of Zulu people and acts as a form of communication and dedication to the tribe and specific traditions. The men and women both serve different purposes in society in order to function as a whole. Today the Zulu people predominantly believe in Christianity, but have created a syncretic religion that is combined with the Zulu's pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
