spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

CHAPTER 3. MISSIONARY MEDICINE DISCOURSE
The medical missionary presence has had a profound influence on the health ideas and beliefs of
many people in Africa. One important aspect of missionary work was the provision of
healthcare, which emerged hand in hand with the development of an educational infrastructure.
Medical missionary organizations and medical missionaries themselves, initially itinerant and
later stationed in mission hospitals, are considered instrumental in introducing new ideas and
methods pertaining to health in Southern African countries. Therefore, since the end of the 19 th
century, missionaries have influenced the thinking and the actions taken with regard to health,
illness and healing in Southern Africa. Most African believers still rely heavily on missionary
hospitals and the medical services they provide. As such it can be said that contemporary ideas
of health and illness are informed by the legacy of medical missionaries.
In scholarly contributions the missionary medicine discourse is regarded as distinct from, for
example, the colonial medicine discourse (cf. Vaughan 1991:57). The former has certain
characteristics that allow missionary medicine to be given a separate position among medical
disciplines. Based on primary sources such as journals published by missionary organizations,
personal letters and propaganda material, supplemented with research publications, a discourse
arose that should also be included in the present study as well, since it sheds light on how
perceptions of healing by contemporary African believers are shaped by influential conceptions
and practices of medical missionaries.
This chapter deals with how these perceptions have evolved over time. In Africa, the
development of missionary medicine has often been described with an emphasis on the major
changes and differences brought about by the introduction of Western biomedicine to the world
of indigenous medicine. In the same vein, the missionary presence has been portrayed as a
dominant power that (intentionally or unintentionally) subjected Africans to a religious and
social regime. Under the influence of processes of secularism and social relativism, the Western
missionary enterprise was subjected to legitimate, but often one-sided, criticism. Lately,
however, a new kind of approach has developed within African and mission studies, classified
by Dana Robert (2008:3) as ‘new mission histories’. This interdisciplinary genre within the
missionary medicine discourse responds to the one-sided, negative characterization of the work
of (medical) missionaries by seeking an honest portrayal of the motives and actions of
missionaries. Moreover, at the same time attention is also directed to the experiences and
responses of indigenous peoples, including their strategies of accommodation, cooptation and
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