ABSTRACT
The issue worth clarifying before going into the substance of the matter is what African psychiatry is, what Western psychiatry is, and what the temporal context is. In this context African psychiatry refers to traditional psychiatry practised by indigenous non-Western-trained specialists. Western psychiatry in the middle Ages was perhaps no different from African psychiatry last century. Since psychiatry is usually based on the concept of mental health and mental illness, and also on the cosmic view and the position of the individual within this, the differences in these areas could determine the difference in psychiatry. The concept of mental illness has gone through the stage of demon possession, the four different humours of the body, to the interaction between the individual and his genetic endowment on one hand and his social and physical environment on the other.
