spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

Protestant missionaries in Malawi and elsewhere in tropical Africa did not come from their
theological persuasiveness. Rather, strong impacts came from their uses of basic technology and
science, and their provision of elementary and religious education for willing Africans” (Good
2004:1). However, although the high status of medical science and technology produced and
fortified the position of the medical missionary, the application of the missionary’s knowledge
and healing skills were mainly determined by the conditions and facilities of the missionary
movement. The thinking and the actions of medical doctors in the African context were molded
by the frame of Western Christianity in an era of colonial expansion, which in turn created a
field of specialization within the discipline of Western medicine: the promising tropical
medicine 24 or Christian medicine (Hardiman 2006:25). Christian medicine refers to biomedicine
that is imbued with Christian notions as a result of the impact of the missionary movement. One
example of the influence of this nineteenth century combination of Christian faith and scientific
biomedicine is the language of biomedicine: “Although there have been persistent attempts to
revise (…) the language of medicine, the modern discipline still reveals rich traces of its
religious inheritance. Neurology is still permeated by Christian notions of order and hierarchy
whilst modern pathological concepts of viruses and germs remain rooted in the magical language
of agency” (Hayward 2004:58).
The inextricable connection between Christian beliefs and developing biomedical insights
characterizes the essence of Christian or missionary medicine. This distinct 25 nature of Christian
medicine revealed itself in ways in the African context.
3.2.1 Illness
One key element that characterized Christian medicine is the way in which illness was perceived
by those who reached out in order to bring healing among African peoples. In the missionary
discourse, illness etiology was a mixtum compositum of Christian beliefs and developing
24. During the colonial expansion, the colonies provided abundant areas and topics for medical research. At the end
of the nineteenth century tropical medicine was a popular and prestigious field of specialization because of the
abundant possibilities and discoveries that could lead to medical fame (Hardiman 2006:42). Moreover, medical
missionary work was perceived as “a saga of heroic science” (Comaroff & Comaroff 1997:357).
25. Vaughan (1991:56f) emphasizes that the division between ‘missionary’ and ‘secular’ medicine in colonial Africa
was never clear-cut, but that indeed there were important differences between the two. For example, secular
medicine regarded modernity and the disintegration of African ‘traditional’ societies as fundamental causes of
disease, while missionary medicine argued that disease could only be overcome by the advancement of Christian
morality, a sanitized modernity and ‘family life’. Despite the secular medical use of an ethnic model of collective
pathology, Christian medicine concentrated on individual Africans and the individual’s responsibility for sin and
disease (57).
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