Johannesburg- Whenever we think about rape survivors we never think critically about methods of healing for them as victims. Someone with a different approach to healing for rape survivors is Dr Palesa Makhale-Mahlangu, a clinical psychologist in private practice who’s written a book.
Phekolo: Afro-centric Healing Modality for Rape Survivors is a book based on Makhale-Mahlangu’s 2022 thesis which focuses particularly on the rape of African women within the South African context. It is based on an African treatment modality when working with rape survivors.
It identifies that in the African perspective, the rape abuse that is inflicted on African women survivors is not limited to their physical being, but rather transcends to other multiple dimensions of their being; including the spiritual, emotional, cultural and social levels of their beingness.
Phekolo (which means healing) is a book written primarily for psychologists, counsellors, therapists and related professionals who are trained and licensed to provide interventions for African women rape survivors. Makhale-Mahlangu said psychologists had always been taught to desensitise rape survivors from environments that may trigger them.
“Having been in the line of work that I’ve been, I’ve come across a lot of rape survivors and I realised that in my Eurocentric training, we are taught to desensitise them to re-enter a certain space they have difficulty entering. In working with African rape survivors, I realised that the fixation to wash continued. This then was an indication that there was something missing in the healing process. Rape survivors always try to make sense of why this has happened to them.”
She said she found that there was a need for healing in the African persona that was not tapped into by the Eurocentric practices. The six-chaptered body of work is intended to raise awareness of an enduring service gap that has neglected the violated spiritual dimensions of clients.
Exploring the concepts and theories on rape, the book is presented as an academic work of reference which enables the reader to dip in and out of it and not read it as a novel.
On how rape has always been dealt with in African communities, Makhale-Mahlangu said: “We are Africans and sometimes our worldview and how we understand certain things have to be in the context of who we are and not in the context of what we have learned or who we assimilated into.
“An Afrocentric way of healing acknowledges the presence of the superpower, ancestral world and God as our creator.”
For a copy of Phekolo: Afro-centric Healing Modality for Rape Survivors, readers can get in touch with the author via email at [email protected]