Traditional Hausa medicine

The Hausa people are an African tribe originating from what is modern-day Nigeria. Their medicine is heavily characterized by Islamic influence from the East as well as traditional African style herbology and religious practices which are still prevalent today. Many traditional healing methods such as religious and spiritual healing are often used alongside more modern scientific medicine among Hausa villages and cities.

The bokaye and the yan bori are the most commonly known practitioners in Hausa society before the arrival of Islamic culture. The bokaye was an herbologist and subsisted on collecting and selling medical herbs and advice. It was common for the bokaye to be a farmer of his own medicinal herbs. The practices and philosophies of the bokaye open a proverbial window into the Hausa past before the influence of Islam became the norm amongst the African tribe. The bokaye was not a spiritual healer; medicine relied on herbs and was only used for minor ailments such as headaches or upset stomachs. Spiritual healing was carried out by a yan bori or a dan bornu, a practice which did not continue after Islam took root in Hausa society. The herbs that the bokaye used, and likely still use, are kept secret from the buyer. To this day it is difficult to determine just how well the herbs work as a healing agent due to the bokaye not revealing the ingredients of their medicines. The secrecy of the bokaye creates an inability to determine the effectiveness of Hausa traditional medicine. The herbology used by the bokaye, however, was very well developed for its time, as the healer would have known exactly how to use specific parts of a plant, its seasons and harvesting conditions, and where it grew in the wild as well as how to farm it. They even knew how to detoxify certain plants by controlling their pollination, or by cross-pollinating them with less potent plants in order to attain a more usable medicine.

The yan bori, which also survived into the Islamic societal shift, is another window into the Hausa past, but is a spiritual rather than an herbal healing practitioner. The yan bori were pagans, as were the Hausa. The spirits which the yan bori, as well as the Hausa people, worshipped before Islamic religion was adapted by Hausa society, were representative of certain aspects of Hausa life. Examples of these spirits include Dogon Daji, the Tall One of the Forest; Sarkin Rafi, the Chief of the River, Kure the Hyena; and Gajjimare, the God of Rain and Storm. The yan bori would pray and perform rituals to spirits based on the patient’s ailment. The yan bori believed in spiritual possession and though they had many named spirits to govern over the world, they also believed in nameless spirits which could possess a man and must be cleansed from his body. This faith healing would not uncommonly be accompanied by herbal medicine from a bokaye, assuming the patient could afford to visit both. The yan bori’s survival into the Hausa society’s adaptation of Islam was facilitated by their willingness to adopt more contemporary, and Muslim, spirits as the societal shift began to occur.

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Wikipedia