There are many ‘traditional healers’ in South Africa. There are many healing traditions and indeed many different names and epithets for them, such as ‘witchdoctor’, ‘shaman’ or ‘rainmaker’. The term ‘sangoma’ is used here to refer to a specific set of healers who have undergone strict training, initiation and induction into a guild, college or lodge of such healers. Bungoma is the term used for the general practice and ‘philosophy’ or knowledge and expertise associated with this practice. Jo Wreford (2005, 2008), who, as an anthropologist, has not only studied the life and practices of the sangoma but has been initiated as a practising sangoma, also uses the South African English term ‘sangomas’ or the isiZulu form izangoma sinyanga. Here the focus is specifically on sangomas, or what John Janzen (1992) has called practitioners of the art and philosophy of ngoma, itself fairly pervasive in the Bantu-speaking areas of Africa south of the equator (Janzen 1992; Van Dijk, Reis and Spierenburg 2000). This book is based, as explained more fully below, on research in eastern Mpumalanga province, just north of Swaziland and near South Africa's border with Mozambique.

The sangomas’ public rituals of dancing and drumming, their peculiar dress styles, hairstyles and reliance on ‘magic’ or ‘medicine’ (muti) are generally well known (Hammond-Tooke 1989, 1994; Hammond-Tooke and Schapera 1974), especially in rural villages and the townships of small and rural towns in southern Africa. Most South Africans know at least this much about sangomas. But what I have called ‘healing’ is more than curing illness, even though illness is one of the primary concerns of healing.

When the sangomas I talk about here ‘heal’ (kwelapha), they think of this as ‘making life’ or ‘making to live’ (kuphila). The word for ‘life’, imphilo, also means ‘health’. The root word, -phil- or ‘life’/‘health’, connotes not so much a state of being as being itself. When one greets another in South African Nguni languages (isiZulu, siSwati, isiXhosa), one asks, ‘Uphila njane?’ (‘How are you living?’).