ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the traditional healers as the pattern of consumption of traditional health care in representative sample groups of the rural population of Botswana. Developed within the Tswana culture in southern Africa, Tswana medicine has a number of culturally specific characteristics. However, these specific characteristics are few compared to the features identifying Tswana medicine as part of the universal paradigm of traditional medicine. Traditional medicine plays a prominent role in social control in the indigenous society. The traditional healer in the Tswana village – in common with healers in other parts of southern Africa – is not only a medicine man. The traditional Tswana religious beliefs were based on the existence of an omnipotent, transcendental principle called Modimo – the Great God. However the Badimo – the ancestral spirits – could act as mediators to Modimo and their role in the religious life of the tribe was central.
