Negotiating a hybrid medical culture: African healers in southeastern Africa from the 1820s to the 1940s

This dissertation focuses on medicine as a site of power, contestation, and cultural exchange. Between the 1820s and 1940s, African healers transformed themselves from politically powerful women and men who threatened to undermine colonial rule and law into successful venture capitalists who competed for turf and patients with biomedical doctors and pharmacists in the major urban areas of Natal, South Africa. Situated at the intersection of cultural, social, and medical history, this study documents the transformation of African healers and therapeutics during a Period when Africans encountered mounting social, political and economic pressures imposed by European colonialism. More specifically, it is located in the province now known as KwaZulu-Natal from the 1820s to the 1940s, an area with three medical traditions—African, European, and Indian—and unique for its licensing of African herbalists. The 1820s mark the early years of interaction between African healers and white traders, while the 1940s signify the height and decline of African healing associations and their struggle for legal recognition earlier this century.; Not only does this dissertation document historical changes in African therapeutics, but it aims to problematize current ideas of biomedicine's colonial hegemony. Biomedicine became dominant in South Africa as a result of a complex historical process that began in the mid-19th century and eventually led to competition between biomedical practitioners and indigenous healers. White biomedical practitioners worked hard to create and promote a unique form of medical authority that rested as much on racial difference as it did on rationality and science. Such assertions were instrumental in winning biomedical practitioners legislative protection in the 20th century. This study shows that medicine was not only a site of contestation, but an important arena for cultural exchange. It does this by illuminating the hybridity of African therapeutics during the early twentieth century and by demonstrating how biomedicine attempted to appeal to African notions of health and what constituted “proper” medical care.