Ibibio Traditional Medicine - Theory, Practice, Training and Retrospect

Abstract

The average Ibibio believes that everything, animate or inanimate, has a kind of spirit or force (energy or being) within it. This spirit or force is the quintessence of the thing itself. Each has its own personality, specific and, more or less, limited in definite ways and resembling the tangible or observable object in which it resides. Sometimes “knowledgeable” (clairvoyant) persons are said to speak to such spirits and are, in turn, spoken to by them. Some of these spirits are far more powerful than the human spirit and consequently man himself. But man, by his higher intelligence, can control them all, to his own purpose, if he only knows how to go about it. This, in a way, is akin to the belief of the Mano people of Liberia (Harley, 1941, p. 9).