The use of knowldge and perceptions of malaria for improved control and elimination of malaria in the community of Dan, Limpopo Province, South Africa

Abstract

This exploratory study is based on the philosophically and metatheoretically sound epistemic position that to avoid category mistakes and transubstantive error in comprehending African phenomena, it is abserlutely necessary to jettison Caucasian paradigms and locate epistemologically in African-centredness. African people have been the “most written about” and yet the “least known and understood” of all the world’s people due to category mistakes and transubstantive error which arise from the hegemonic practice and tendency of valuating and evaluating African phenomena with Caucasian paragigms whose essence is anti-African. To avoid such mistakes and error, the Afrocentric paradigm was deployed to make sense of the pivotal necessity and need of utilising AIK and perceptions in the effective control and elimination of malaria in Dan Village which is racially and culturally African. To this end ten (10) African diviners and herbalists and fifteen (15) elderly African women and men were carefully and purposively selected to participate in the exploratory study. An Afrocentric research methodology based on the African spiritual principles of Maat and Nommo was deployed to collect, analyse and interpret data. Deploying the Thematic Content Analysis (TCA) tradition framed epistemologically by the Afrocentric paradigm rooted in the deep structureof African culture, significant African-centred themes were distilled from the data. A significant overarching theme which subsumed all other themes was that the effective control and elimination of malaria can only be realised if programmes for such control and elimination are rooted in and derive from the irrefragable African worldview and survival thrust. This African worldview, it must be noted, derives from African biogenetics and phylogeny. The upshot of this position, which itself is based on epistemologic centering in the reality structure of African people, is that a model for the control and elimination of the pernicious disease of malaria in Dan Village must derive from the deep thought and practice of the Ba-Pedi and Va-Tsonga ethnic groups. It is on this basis that the basic principles required for the construction of a tentative African-centred model for the control and elimination of malaria were identified and elaborated. This exploratory study thus sought to effect a dicisive break with Eurocentric discourses on the control and elimination of malaria.