Aids, Africa, Religion

It is natural for anyone facing a terminal disease to ask, Why me? This is an
exasperated, unanswerable cri de coeur in the rational West—one of the steps of
the grieving process, we are told, that we all just need to get through. But
many Africans have their own kind of answer to that question.
African tribes
are not a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, but the vast majority traditionally
held in common a worldview of causation very different from our own. With
reference to illness, it is called the personalistic theory of disease. Even
today, most Africans believe that any major occurrence, good or bad, has two
causes. The first might be called physical: for instance, that a retrovirus
causes AIDS by destroying the cells of the immune system. The second is a
spiritual, less tangible cause, but is perceived to be no less real. Edward
Evans-Pritchard, whose ethnography of the Nuer people of Sudan is a foundational
work of anthropology, put Africans’ cosmological outlook this way: One might
understand that a house collapsed because termites damaged it. But the more
important question is, Who sent the termites?

and

As an evangelical Christian, Dahlman believes that the witch doctor’s
powers may well be real but that Christ’s are potent above all others. “There
are powers for good and powers for harm,” he says. “Our Western, Hellenistic
view says that doesn’t exist, so we can safely put it off the map. But I can
bring you people who would tell you otherwise, for whom the spiritual world is a
real, day-to-day concern.” In his years in the field, Dahlman says he has seen
an exorcism that reversed the curse of a laibon—a powerful spiritual figure in
Masai culture—as well as a prayer session that healed a woman whose femur was
fractured by a cape buffalo. She could not walk and, because night had fallen,
could not be evacuated. But as daylight broke after an all-night vigil, “the
American, board-certified doctor who had diagnosed the fracture came to the
woman’s house, and she walked out and greeted them,” Dahlman says. “So you can
say there never was any break, contrary to what this physician said and saw,
with this lady unable to walk or bear any pressure on that leg. Do you mistrust
that easy diagnosis, or do you believe that something else happened?”

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/aids-relief-and-moral-myopia, as found on Rod Dreher's site.