Radical healing in communities: A decolonial reading

The colonial wound signifies the contemporary societal structures which undermine, maim, and destroy the humanity of colonised subjects. In South Africa, the colonial wound manifests in different ways. We see the colonial wound at work in the country’s disproportionately high rates of racialised poverty and State violence, Afrophobia, and ongoing land dispossession. Addressing the colonial wound demands a kind of decolonial healing that transcends bio-psycho-social models. We understand such healing as radical healing. Although several scholarly conceptions of radical healing have been advanced, there have been few attempts to engage with how marginalised communities conceptualise and enact healing in relation to coloniality. As such, relatively few studies have explored the complexities of practicing and conceptualising radical healing within a decolonial framework. The present study aims to speak to this gap. In this study, we engaged with three marginalised South African communities, facilitating six group discussions on radical healing. In bringing the southern African concept of lekgotla (a collective process of deliberation) to bear on critical discourse analysis, we examined the discourses upon which participants drew in the group discussions to construct radical healing. Although several discourses were identified in the data, two were most pertinent to the objectives of this study. The first discourse, Contested Signification , spoke to the inherent variability within radical healing conceptualisations and practices, where the second discourse, Healing Practicalities , evoked the pragmatic struggles inherent to practicing radical healing through a collective and community-led process. In our concluding reflections, we consider what participants’ discursive constructions of radical healing might teach us about the colonial wound and, against this, what it means to take up decolonial radical healing practices in and beyond the discipline of psychology.