Healing, civil society, and colonial conquest

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Democracy, Popular Precedents, Practice and Culture, 13-15 July, 1994

Biomedical colonialism or local autonomy?: local healers in the fight against tuberculosis

Analiza el papel de los agentes médicos autóctonos y sus conocimientos en las campañas antituberculosas contemporáneas en el África subsahariana. Sitúa la medicina contemporánea, llevada a cabo en África en la herencia cultural de la medicina colonial, para comprender el marco histórico en el que se desarrollaron, a partir de los años setenta del siglo XX, las estrategias de la Organización Mundial de la Salud de promoción y desarrollo de las medicinas 'tradicionales'. En los proyectos sanitarios analizados, se evalúan las prácticas médicas locales y se entrenan a los agentes autóctonos para integrarlos en actividades estrictamente biomédicas: identificación de síntomas, remisión a hospitales o supervisión de tratamientos farmacológicos.The article explores the role played by indigenous medical agents, and their knowledge, within contemporary tuberculosis campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa. To understand the historical framework within which the World Health Organization devised its strategies to promote and develop traditional medicine as of the 1970s, the article contextualizes contemporary medicine as a cultural legacy of colonial medicine. Under the public healthcare projects analyzed in the article, local medical practices were assessed and indigenous agents trained so they could take part in strictly biomedical activities, like symptom identification, referrals to hospitals, or supervision of drug treatments.Trabajo realizado para la obtención del Diploma de Estudios Avanzados (DEA) en el programa de doctorado Salud: Antropología e Historia, bajo la dirección de la profesora Rosa María Medina Doménech

Concepts of sovereignty among the Shambaa and their relation to political action

This thesis is a study of the political symbols and general political concepts of the Shambaa of north-eastern Tanzania, and of their relation to changing patterns of political action in the Shambaa kingdom as it existed before colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century. The thesis is based on research which was carried out between March 1966 and August 1968 in Tanzania, and in 1965-1966 in British and German archives. The work is an attempt to explore the relationship between two bodies of evidence on the political organization of the Shambaa. First, there are the configurations of symbols and sets of general concepts of the Shambaa view of politics. In these, linear non-reversible time is suppressed. History is seen by the Shambaa as an alternation between strong Kings who dominated the chiefs and thereby brought fertility to the entire land, and weak Kings who competed with the chiefs, in which cases there was famine. Secondly, there is the record of political action throughout the history of the kingdom. There were frequent changes not only in the distribution of power between King and chiefs, but also in the potential sources of support for competing leaders, it is shown that the patterns of action which are explained by the Shambaa in terms of the general concepts did indeed change. In Shambaa kingship the divergence between experience and an articulated system of cultural ideology was potentially great because the King was expected to provide leadership when new political or economic forces in the region impinged on the kingdom, and because the King often had the power to act in ways which were unexpected. For these reasons, the most important political concepts were general and ambiguous. They lacked precision in their classification of social groups, and in their specification of accepted behaviour. [Please see pdf. for full abstract.