5. CONCEPT OF ILLNESS AND DISEASE


In African traditional setting, there was always an explanation as to why someone was suffering from a certain disease at a particular time. According to Ayodele, (2017) diseases mostly revolve around witchcraft/sorcery, gods or ancestors, natural, as well as inherited. Illness in the African society is different from the allopathic Western medicine point of view. Illness is believed to be of natural, cultural, or social origin. Cultural or social illness is thought to be related to supernatural causes such as angered spirits, witchcraft, or alien/evil spirits, even for conditions now known to be well understood in modern medicine such as hypertension, sickle-cell anemia, cardiomyopathies, and diabetes. African traditional beliefs consider the human being as being made up of physical, spiritual, moral, and social aspects.