Based on the author’s fieldwork among the people of Zezuru, this study focuses on children as clients and as healers in training. In Reynolds’s ethnographic investigation of possession and healing, she pays particular attention to the way healers are identified and authenticated in communities, and how they are socialized in the use of medicinal plants, dreams, and ritual healing practices. Reynolds examines spiritual interpretation and remediation of children’s problems, including women’s roles in these activities, and the Zezuru concepts of trauma, evil, illness, and death. Because this study was undertaken just after the War of Liberation in Zimbabwe, it also documents the devastating effects of the war.

A graduate of Cape Town, Delhi, and Harvard universities, Dr. Pamela Reynolds has been a Research Fellow at the Universities of Zimbabwe and Cape Town. She is the author of several children’s books and of Growing up in a Divided Society: The Contexts of Childhood in South Africa and Children in Crossroads: Cognition and Society in South Africa.