spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

The reconstruction of the African origins of HIV, and the persistent focus on African
promiscuity as the main vehicle of the spread of HIV, have contributed to the identification of
HIV as a mainly African issue: the origins and transmission of HIV are often viewed as
circumstances that have arisen due to the way Africans have acted upon, fueled and ignored the
presence of this disease. In other words, Africa is responsible for its own suffering from diseases
that accumulate on African soil. This perspective on disease in Africa is not new in the
continent’s history. During the era of colonialism, the theory that “Africans got sick (…) because
their societies were fundamentally sick” (Vaughan 1991:201) was firmly rooted in the minds of
administrators, missionaries, medical practitioners, and their supporters back home. They
perceived African people as primitive, ignorant and dirty, and their culture as the generator of
diseases. These strong views live on even in the current discussion on HIV/AIDS in Africa.
In response to the identification of HIV as an African problem, some studies draw attention to
the causal link between Africa’s colonial history and the development of the AIDS pandemic
(Packard 1989; Vaughan 1991:205f; Ford et.al. 2003:600; Kalipeni et.al. 2004:13; Schoepf
2004:15; Cloete 2007:389). They propose to break away from European stereotypical
constructions and racist theories, and to focus instead on the political and economic contexts in
Africa. Their main argument to shift away from the sexual behavior paradigms is that the socioeconomic
conditions of a society are the actual facilitators of the spread of HIV. And those
socio-economic conditions that are so conducive to HIV transmission have been established
largely under colonial rule, a rule that disrupted economic livelihoods, social practices and
community cohesion (Kalipeni et.al. 2004:13). According to these emerging voices in the
HIV/AIDS discourse, HIV should not be considered as an African problem, but it should be
understood as a complex and multifaceted epidemic that has its roots in colonialism.
4.2 BIOMEDICINE AND HIV/AIDS IN AFRICA
From the onset, the discourse of HIV/AIDS in Africa has been dominated by the system of
biomedicine (Kalipeni et.al. 2004:4; Denis 2006:15; Wenham et.al. 2009:289). The Western
biomedical approach has had a great impact on the HIV/AIDS discourse since it has defined and
determined the first and predominant response to the pandemic. Research, information
distribution, provision of medicines, policy development by governments as well as by NGO’s
— all these undertakings have been based on biomedicine. So basically every study on (the
history of) HIV/AIDS in Africa starts with a definition of HIV/AIDS from a Western
epidemiological perspective, and uses the Western biomedical paradigm as a frame of reference.
Most studies fully embrace biomedical premises, while others look to distance themselves from
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