Towards a Theoretical Framework for African Music Therapy: Integrating Indigenous Healing Traditions and Clinical Practice in Nigeria

This research develops an original theoretical framework for African music therapy that systematically integrates indigenous Nigerian healing traditions with evidence-based clinical music therapy practice. Existing music therapy theory is predominantly derived from Western psychological and psychoanalytic traditions, which often fail to account for the collective, spiritual, and cosmological dimensions of healing in African cultural systems. This study argues that a culturally grounded African music therapy framework is both theoretically necessary and practically urgent for contextually valid therapeutic practice across Nigerian healthcare and community settings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted across healing traditions in Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Ijaw communities spanning all six geopolitical zones, alongside systematic review of clinical music therapy literature and African philosophy of health and wellbeing, this research employs grounded theory methodology to generate theory from field data. Key theoretical constructs including communal resonance, ancestral sound invocation, and rhythmic reintegration are developed and tested through case vignettes from pilot therapeutic sessions. The resulting framework is subjected to expert validation through a multi-round Delphi process involving Nigerian clinicians, traditional healers, and music therapy scholars. This study makes an original theoretical contribution to music therapy, African psychology, and decolonial health sciences, offering a replicable methodological model for culturally adaptive therapeutic practice development across Africa. Keywords: African music therapy, theoretical framework, indigenous healing, decolonial practice, Nigeria.