Paper long abstract:

While the need for decolonising counselling in Africa has been an academic subject for some time now, counselling in the context of death as so far not been addressed. Counselling -theories, -methods, and -models that are used for training and providing counselling services in Africa often originate from Europe and America, this poses challenges of relevance and appropriateness and effectiveness in an African context. In Africa particular attention must be drawn to what can be called "special deaths"; these include deaths of (one of) twins/twin, traditional doctor people with albinism etc. Special deaths often involve special rituals and convictions. Providing effective counselling in such cases demands specific knowledge and understanding of associated rituals, imaginaries and their meaning, and the question is how are grief-counselling services in Botswana currently dealing with these special deaths? Developing a qualitative-auto-ethnographic study on this level of knowledge in counselling-practices this study aims to explore the death rituals relating to the passing away of one of twins, and to examine the cultural knowledge of psycho-social support systems available to surviving twins in North East Botswana. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with twin less twins, parents of twin less twins, local counsellors (social workers and pastors) and traditional ritual specialists. The study found out that many twin-less twins have not sought professional counselling; this is because counsellors do not engage with (local) knowledge and understanding of the twin rituals and their implications in grief counselling; these include a number of cultural practices convictions such as no mourning no burial rituals a surviving twin's death is immanent) and no contact with corpse of the deceased twin, exchange of clothes between the living and dead twin; 'burial' of the live-twin. Yet, these practices are strongly maintained by the local community and the bereaved. As such the data reveal an important contestation between the Euro-centric orientation of the available grief-counselling practices and the local cultural practices of dealing with special deaths. The paper will argue that, while there is a mis-match between available grief-counselling services, and while these counselling practices display a counter-cultural orientation, these counselling services also seem to resist an idea of decolonisation. The paper will seek to provide an answer to the question as to why such counselling especially in the situation of special deaths demonstrates a profound resilience against the inclusion of understandings of the local cultural meanings and practices that revolve around these situations.