The healing powers of music unite cultures and communities across the globe. Africa’s connection to music goes to a deep spiritual level. Yamkela Ntshakaza, a Master’s music candidate at Rhodes University, is researching music and African spirituality as a way of healing for a new Africa, writes ELAINE WABWIRE.
Yamkela Ntshakaza was six years old when Michael Jackson’s Invincible album captured his soul. Today, Ntshakaza is a Master’s candidate at Rhodes University researching why and how traditional healers use music in their healing methods and how music facilitates healing.
“The past has seen Africans stripped of who they are and their relationship with music,” he said. Some of that relationship relates to healing. Western medicine traditionally focuses on a narrow path of healing, whereas African spirituality offers a more holistic approach to treating illnesses. Music activates a host of different areas of the brain, and science has proved that music can influence mood by releasing doses of dopamine.
In African spirituality – Xhosa culture in particular – music in the form of repetition of chants, hand clapping and feet stomping is performed as prayer and as a way of appeasing ancestors. It forms deep connections of not only healing but giving clarity and purpose in life.
Ingulo, a spiritual awakening in which the ancestors demand one’s attention and alignment with the ancestors, often manifests in periods of difficulty, strife and illness. Western psychologists misdiagnose this as depression, anxiety etc., when, in reality, the individual has a spiritual calling. “The root of African illnesses comes from different spaces,” said Ntshakaza.
As Africa becomes one with the western world, the “living embodied knowledge that exists within the minds of the people” competes with western influences. Traditional healers, from bone-throwers to herbalists, understand these illnesses to embrace a person’s spiritual aspect. But, said Ntshakaza, “no psychologist is going to ask you who your ancestors are”.
Ntshakaza, who has just been awarded a Mandela Rhodes scholarship, explores these links between people, nature and ancestors. To quote Michael Jackson, he is working to heal the world.
See also: https://djembemuziki.wordpress.com/
