spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

parts of the world where, as in the West, healing and religion could be mentally separated with
relative ease.” So the enforcement of the body/soul dichotomy included some intricate tactics in
the medical treatment. The question is whether this kind of strategic thinking deliberately
accompanied the treatment (cf. Hardiman 2006:25) or whether it was coincidentally effective in
the treatment of Africans (cf. Grundmann 1990).
Exclusive therapy
Although missionary medicine was used to reaching out to as many people as possible, the
reality was quite different, for, in general, African patients could only be admitted when they
were willing to isolate themselves from everything that obstructed the effectiveness of the
Western therapy (Vaughan 1991:61). Thus, health-seekers had to do away with charms and
‘African medicine’ and even had to leave their family if that family did not support the new
Western therapy. In a sense, they were forced to give up their African identity in order to be
allowed to enter the world of civilization and salvation, since conversion did not only entail
religious transformation, but also cultural and social rearrangements (Ekechi 1993:293). Terence
Ranger, a prominent scholar in African studies and African history, points out that missionaries
did not understand much about African religion (2005:2) and acknowledges that they were
criticized for their negative and often racist responses. He even quotes the emphatic comments
made by anthropologist Jon Kirby, who states that “with few exceptions, missionaries saw
African traditional religions as a ‘morass of bizarre beliefs and practices’… As a general
principle we can say that before 1960 all mission-founded churches insisted that their converts
abandon all contact with African Traditional religions and cultures” (1994:61). Amanda
Porterfield elaborates on the missionaries’ urge to create a clear separation between Christian
practice and heathen superstition by explaining that most Protestants were focused on
demonstrations of individual responsibility as proof of conversion, and that they were more
insistent on separation from indigenous culture as the price of individual admission to church
fellowship (2005:123). In a more creative way, Paul Landau contends the same issue when he
says that the missionaries’ antipathy to African healers is firmly rooted in their desire to make
converts and build communities (1996:266). According to him, the medical missionary was both
a social and bodily surgeon, whose therapeutic practices separated the African patient from the
kinship setting and subsequently offered reintegration facilities and a new community, even if it
was temporary. Particularly in the hospital environment, all potential converts were cut off from
their ‘old’ life and set apart until they were ready to receive a ‘new’ life: “treatment was seen to
put people in a receptive frame of mind to the message of the Gospel” (Hardiman 2006:25, who
also refers to a report by Lankester and Browne in Mercy and Truth in 1897). With their
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