spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

The common stereotype of Western medicine’s superiority over African traditional healing
systems is generally recognized as outdated, and has been modified after studies confirm the
existence of a more complicated reality. Contrary to the often formulated reproaches of Western
medicine’s dominance (see for example Chepkwony 2006:42f), a number of studies dismiss the
statement that missionary and colonial medical systems overruled African traditional therapeutic
systems. Rasmussen asserts that “(t)he introduction of European allopathic medicine conveyed
Post-Enlightenment western science and biomedical ideas to Africa, but did not supplant or
overturn indigenous or other healing. All these perspectives now coexist, sometimes
harmoniously, sometimes in uneasy tension” (2008:4). Ranger (1975, 1981) already pointed out
the various ways that indigenous African and European Christian systems of religion and healing
encountered and confronted one another, emphasizing that African beliefs and practices did not
appear to be so inflexible and antagonistic towards medical missions as was previously assumed.
One can even say that it was precisely the flexibility of African traditional religion and healthrelated
practices that contributed to a situation in which the impact of medical missions was of
relative importance in the African context. Good (2004:27f) explains that “probably the most
remarkable feature about the cultural and territorial confrontations provoked by missionaries and
other colonial Europeans was the resilience of African religious belief systems against this
unprecedented incursion of outside influence”. This flexibility of the traditional religious system
in accepting therapeutic practices alongside them made it generally impossible for missionary
and secular medical authorities to neutralize or eliminate African traditional concepts of health
and illness.
Foreign and indigenous medicine thus co-existed in a way that has been described as the
acceptance-rejection syndrome (Ekechi 1993:298). The presence of Western medicine implied a
choice for Africans, that is, depending on the illness and the treatment, one could choose to visit
the traditional healers and religious specialists, or go to a clinic or hospital, where injections and
surgery take place. In the perspective of many Africans it was impossible to make an absolute
choice, since some illnesses could not be cured by Western medicine. Some situations simply
required traditional medicine (Ranger 1981:267; Ekechi 1993:298; cf. Twumasi 1981:147). The
dominance of Western medicine, or even the replacement of African traditional medical systems
by Western medicine, did not prevail as often as was thought, since “Western medicine had to
compete with indigenous health care systems” because “there was ample pragmatic evidence that
‘traditional’ remedies worked” (Patterson 1981:28).
The revisiting of missionary medicine’s impact on African medicine and religion has become
part of what Dana Robert (2008) calls the ‘new missions history’. This latest genre within the
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