Accounts of African ethnopsychiatry have typically emphasized suggestion and the placebo effect. In the following account of a Hehe traditional psychiatrist from Tanzania, these considerations are important, but of equal importance is his emphasis upon botanical and pharmacological empiricism. Despite the fact that his epistemology of mental illness is developed within a belief system that emphasizes witchcraft and moral magic, and although he has become expert in dealing with such supernatural considerations, he is primarily a pragmatic psychopharmacologist. His devotion to empiricism in botany and pharmacology, while unusual among his people, may nevertheless have historical antecedents among the Hehe, and may be more common throughout African ethnopsychiatry than has yet been recognized. This African psychiatrist--like so many of the men who built Western psychiatry--serves to remind us that even within a supernatural belief system the beginnings of science may emerge.