African healing traditions approach mental distress within a relational and ancestral framework: illness is understood as disruption in the web of connections linking the individual to community, to ancestors, to the spirit world, and to the land. Healing is correspondingly communal — ceremony, song, dance, and ritual restore the broken connections and reintegrate the person into their web of relationships. Ubuntu — I am because we are — is not merely philosophy but the diagnostic and therapeutic framework within which individual healing becomes possible.
Patan