Sangomas with ring lights: Zimbabwe’s traditional healers take to TikTok
Al Jazeera
As a new generation of healers shares African spiritual practices on social media, critics say the two cannot mix.
Harare, Zimbabwe – Wearing a stylish black leather jacket and a red blouse, a denim sun hat covering her dreadlocked head, Gogo Mafirakureva goes live on TikTok.
In just the first few minutes of her livestream, almost 1,000 people join in.
A traditional song plays from a stereo while she puts on colourful beads and sniffs tobacco snuff – a grounded African tobacco that sangomas, or Southern African traditional healers like her, regularly use.
“Gogo, I have a problem,” a guest on the livestream says.
In Zimbabwe’s Shona culture, when a person gets a spiritual calling from their ancestors to be a healer and accepts, they are initiated as a sangoma, taking on the honorific “Gogo” (grandmother) if they are female, or “Sekuru” (grandfather) if they are male.
