Traditional Health Practitioners Act, No. 22 of 2007

The Traditional Health Practitioners Act, No. 22 of 2007, published in the Republic of South Africa's Government Gazette in 2008, is the actual statutory text establishing formal legal recognition and a regulatory council for traditional healers, diviners and herbalists in South Africa, the country's own legislative response to traditional healing's continued central role in the health and religious life of much of its population. Its strength is that it is the primary legal text itself, verifiable against the Government Gazette. Its limit is that it is the statute alone, describing the regulatory framework Parliament created, not a study of what traditional healers actually do or of the religious cosmology underlying their practice, so a claim about the content or efficacy of traditional healing itself needs an ethnographic or medical anthropological source rather than this legal instrument.