The Kung Healing Ceremony

The Kung people of Southern Africa have shown that music suffices for more than easy listening, for the Kung people, music is essential to health, it is essential to survival. The Kung people use music and dance as mechanisms their sole of healing.

The Kung people "are a nomadic people of hunters and gathers who reside in Namibia and Botswana in Southern Africa." (37) They are also known as Bushmen. They are a group of people who depend on each other (As in community) for survival. The environment in which the Kung live is harsh, and when sickness forces itself upon a member of the community there are no cars to drive the sick to the nearest hospital, so the Kung rely on themselves to treat sickness. The Kung believe that sickness is brought on by "the will of the creator god who distributes the forces of good and evil through a secondary god and his messengers, the spirits of the dead." (37) The Kung perceive sickness as an act of supernatural powers and so the only way they can fully treat a sick person is by coming in to contact with these supernatural forces, and this is done by performing the Kung healing ceremony.

Music is what sets the basis for the healing ceremony. The community comes together as a whole and sits around; every member of the Kung community participates in the ceremony. Women sit around clapping and/or singing, "the men dance around the women in single file and sometimes sing." (38) The music made by the community is unlike anything ever heard, its tone is both consistent and prominent, and to the ear, it is a unique and stunning collaboration. As the music flows a medicine man (men) first draws the sickness out of the body and this is done when the medicine man goes into a trance and begins to "massage the sick person's body, anoints it with his own perspiration, and lays hands upon him drawing the illness out of the sick person's body into his own." (38)