spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

effects on the bodies of its subjects (though this was sometimes significant) but in its ability to
provide a ‘naturalized’ and pathologized account of those subjects”.
The main consequence of colonial biomedical constructions on African patients was the creation
of a stereotypical portrayal of ‘the African’ as backward, unhealthy, lazy, superstitious and
sexually deviant. This interpretive framework, derived from biomedical research ventures, was
now applied to nearly every dimension of colonial society. Poverty, disease, European authority
and African subordination were explained and justified against the backdrop of the obvious
disorders of Africans, which suggests, according to Vaughan, that “colonial medical discourse
was, without a doubt, preoccupied by difference” (1991:12). The fundamental otherness of
Africans had become the conventional perspective on African patients and their circumstances.
This cardinal concept of difference survived throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth century.
Colonial medicine’s pathologies perpetuate in the discourse on HIV/AIDS in Africa. Concepts of
difference and segregation continue to be the conventional perspective on African patients,
especially in those models and methods that have been developed according to the biomedical
paradigm.
4.2.2 Biomedical methods and the HIV epidemic
Biomedicine as the Western system of healing and interpretation of the body is a label that
embraces various disciplines (such as biology, pharmacology, virology, epidemiology), each
with their specific focus, assumptions and theories. These different biomedical disciplines
complement each other in their general aim: reducing national and global morbidity rates by
preventing, diagnosing and treating diseases. Generally speaking, biomedicine has been very
successful in addressing symptoms and minimizing lethal diseases and epidemics.
In relation to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, biomedicine has dominated in generating
understandings of the human immunodeficiency virus, its pathology and its trajectories. Reports
and policies for preventing and managing the HIV/AIDS epidemic have been written entirely on
the basis of information attained through biomedical research, at least during the first fifteen
years of the discourse. This means that most official or public accounts have dealt with an
interpretation of the body that reduces HIV to a phenomenon affecting the temporal organic
body (Kleinman 1995; Jain n.d.). Only in the past ten years or so has the biomedical discourse on
HIV/AIDS in Africa started to include an epidemiological perspective that considers the multiple
dimensions of an epidemic (such as politics, economy, social factors and healthcare).
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