spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

The transformation of biomedicine into Christian medicine fortified the power of medical
missionaries. Their strategy of moral sanitation, manipulation of the body, and the invention of
the African individual, are the pillars of missionary medicine's power regime that aimed at
establishing spiritual and physical transformation of the African patient. In other words, the
many forms of social and religious control exercised by medical practitioners largely defined the
discourse on missionary medicine. The ever present aspect of manipulation of African patients
by medical missionaries had a profound influence on the way missionary medicine was
perceived and evaluated at a later stage.
Over the course of time, after the era of colonization, the stereotype of European biomedicine’s
superiority over African indigenous healing systems became the subject of discussion and debate
about the relation between Western and African approaches to health, illness and healing. In the
process of re-assessing missionary medicine, Christian medicine was stripped of its assumed
superiority, and instead it was assigned a place among other healing systems in Africa on the
basis of its being different from indigenous healing systems. Its influence thus did not depend on
supremacy but on the potential to establish various kinds of transformation.
The various dimensions of the missionary medicine discourse itself all point towards the notion
of transformation as a crucial component of the discourse. Without the cluster of evangelism,
salvation and transformation, the whole discourse as such would not have existed. Its inception
history, the core features of Christian medicine (as biomedicine imbued with Christian notions
that have to do with reaching out to Africans and aiming for spiritual and social transformation),
the praxis — every dimension of the discourse points towards the ultimate goal of transforming
people through the gospel of the Great Physician.
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