The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa

Until now our knowledge of African health and healing has been extensive but fragmented. Here in eighteen essays is the first comprehensive account of disease, health,and healing practices in the African continent. The contributors all emphasize the social conditions linked to ill health and the development of local healing traditions, from Morocco to South Africa and from the precolonial era to the present. Several chapters illustrate how the most basic facts of everyday life encourage the spread of disease and chape the possibilities of survival. Other discuss a variety of healing practices: drums of affliction in Bantu-speaking societies, Muslim humoral medicine, and biomedicine as practiced in hospitals and dispensaries. The editors provide introductory overviews explaining why and how health and disease are related to historical, economic, and political phenomena.

Steven Feierman is Professor of History at the University of Florida. His most recent book is Peasant Intellectuals (Wisconsin 1990). John M. Janzen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas. He won the Wellcome prize and the medal of the Royal Anthropological Institue for The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire (California 1978).

MAPS
FIGURES
TABLES
PREFACE

PART I • INTRODUCTION

PART II • THE DECLINE AND RISE OF AFRICAN
POPULATION: THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF HEALTH AND DISEASE

1. The Demographic Reproduction of Health and Disease:
Colonial Central African Republic and Contemporary Burkina Faso
Dennis D. Cordell, joel W. Gregory, and Victor Pichi

2. Famine Analysis and Family Relations: Nyasaland in 1949
A/egan Vaughan

3. Socioeconomic Change and Disease: Smallpox in Colonial Kenya,
1880-1920
Afarc H. Dawson

4. Industrialization, Rural Poverty, and Tuberculosis in South Africa,
1850-1950
Randall AI. Packard

5. Industrialization, Rural Health, and the 1944 National Health Services
Commission in South Africa
Shula A/arks and Neil Andersson

PART III· THERAPEUTIC TRADITIONS OF AFRICA:
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

PRECOLONIAL MEDICINE
6. Diffusion of Islamic Medicine into Hausaland
Ismail H. Abdalla

7. Ideologies and Institutions in Precolonial Western Equatorial
African Therapeutics
John M. Janzen

8. Public Health in Precolonial East-Central Africa
Gloria Waite

COLONIAL MEDICINE
9. Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Colonial Tropical Africa
Philip D. Curtin

10. Godly Medicine: The Ambiguities of Medical Mission in Southeastern Tanzania,
1900-1945
Terence 0. Ranger

TWENTIETH-CENTURY AFRICAN MEDICINE
11. Cold or Spirits? Ambiguity and Syncretism in Moroccan Therapeutics
Bernard Greenwood

12. Causality of Disease among the Senufo
Nicole Sindzingre and Andras Zemplini

13. A Modern History ofLozi Therapeutics
Gwyn Prins

14. Clinical Practice and Organization oflndigenous Healers in South Africa
HarrietNgubane

15. Kutambuwa Ugonjuwa: Concepts of Illness and Transformation among the
Tabwa of Zaire
Christopher Davis-Roberts

16. The Importance of Knowing about Not Knowing:
Observations from Hausaland
Murray Last

POSTCOLONIAL MEDICINE
17. The Social Production of Health in Kenya
F. M. Mhuru

18. Health Care and the Concept of Legitimacy in Sierra Leone
Carol P. MacCormack

BIBLIOGRAPHY