spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

determined the course of missionary medicine. The Western preoccupation with health and
healing through hygiene resulted in fixed mindsets from which it was difficult to escape: most
(medical) missionaries “could not accept the fact that missionary medicine had to compete
against African ideas and practices” (Good 2004:10). This basic inability to communicate and
comprehend African healing beliefs, ideas and practices maneuvered the relationship between
Christian medicine and African medicine into an ongoing competition.
The discourse of Christian medicine had become a battle against Africa itself, whereby the
advocates of missionary medicine regarded the Africans “as the merest adjuncts to the central
conflict with the continent” (Hammond & Jablow 1992:169). With such a demeaning and
depersonalized perspective of Africa, it was not difficult to accept the idea that the African
condition (dark, disease-ridden, filthy, evil, suffering) was “the sweat of sin in Adam”
(Beidelman 1982:110). In essence, the whole missionary venture was saturated with this kind of
thinking about suffering and sin: there was a close relationship between disease and ungodly
living, and Africa was the proof of it. On the other hand, health was the result of inner salvation,
and the presence of (medical) missionaries would facilitate this kind of moral redemption
(Vaughan 1991:66; Good 2004:43). The connection between physical condition and spiritual
state was not new in the Protestant tradition; however, in relation to Africa the fine balance
between body and soul had been distorted by the drastic and zealous approach of the missionary
movement: the subjection of the body to the soul was the key to missionary success in
evangelism.
This section on illness etiologies and perceptions of most medical missionaries touches on the
missionaries’ double vision which Anna Johnston elaborated on in her study of the publications
of the London Missionary Society (2003). On the one hand, the missionaries were struggling
with the pathological elements of African heathenism, as they perceived it in terms that could not
be misunderstood. On the other hand, the missionaries were convinced that ultimately the
differences between Western and African people could be solved in the love and the grace of the
God who heals.
3.2.2 Treatment
The rearrangement of the Cartesian division of body and soul was a central tenet of Christian
therapeutic practices. The body had become the site for spiritual outcomes. Obviously, the
practical consequences of this body/soul division were not well received by African patients,
since this dichotomy was essentially alien to the African concept of religion and healing. Walls
(1996:219) affirms that “medical missions were earlier, stronger, and far more numerous in those
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