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2 Witchcraft, Oracles, and Native Medicine In 1999, the district commissioner of Newala—feeling a little guilty, I believe, that the “district archives” to which I had requested access were a heap of termite-eaten, mouse-inhabited papers in a warehouse that was partially open to the elements—invited me to read the current files in his office on traditional medicine. Healers’ appeals to work in the district dominated these files. The Tanzanian government mandates that all healers in the country register with the Ministry of Health and requires that healers declare on the record, in any and every district they intend to work, that their therapies do not involve “witchcraft .” As healers sought permission from the district office to sell medicine in Newala, they declared that their trade was different from divination and from the practice of mass distribution of medicine to identify witches or protect whole communities from witchcraft. A common letter giving healers permission to sell their medicines reads: The District Commissioner has consented that this comrade mentioned by name above has been given permission to sell traditional medicine here in the town of Newala, and not to divine or to give all people medicine to drink . . . [Period for which permission has been granted is stated] . . . S/he will sell medicine to those who want it, not make it obligatory.1 In these official letters, the practices legally prosecutable under the 1928 Witchcraft Ordinance, which is still in effect in Tanzania today, are made explicit.2 The prohibitions against divination and the practice of distributing medicine to whole communities are artifacts of colonial efforts to separate witchcraft (uchawi) from healing (uganga) in ways that mapped over European understandings of medicine and magic and in ways that supported colonial governance.3 The British, all too aware of the political nature of African medicine, introduced a witchcraft ordinance into each of their colonial territories. The task of translating imperial policy on the ground fell to provincial and district officers. In colonial Tanganyika, revisions of the witchcraft ordinance and companion A Short Genealogy of Traditional Medicine 40 policies concerning native medicine divided African therapeutics into practices to be disciplined by law and those to be disciplined by science. These legal statutes cast witchcraft as fraud and witches (as well as the healers that combated them) as charlatans, while leaving open the possibility that herbalism was a protoscience and that herbalists were custodians of knowledge obtained over the centuries by trial and error. These attempts to separate African therapeutics into witchcraft and herbalism generated the forms of skepticism and kinds of evidence that continue to shape debates about traditional medicine in Africa today. Colonial violence against healers and the legal statutes that altered the status of witchcraft (uchawi) in the colonies delegitimated entities and persons central to the material life and social organization of much of Sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, biological and medical sciences introduced new forms of expertise in the colonies and new ways of articulating bodies and the matters of affliction. By privileging certain forms of evidence, colonial courts and laboratories authorized some threats and afflictions and declared others illicit. In short, colonialism transformed who and what had the right to exist in Africa. It made existence itself a political question. Courts and laboratories became central sites for generating colonial ontologies. This chapter’s account of the birth of traditional medicine as a coherent category of knowledge and practice calls particular attention to debates and policies that established law and science as the languages through which existence of particular bodies and bodily threats could be justified in the colonies. Legal solutions to the problem of witchcraft and scientific answers to the questions of African medicine were also solutions to problems of imperial governance . At times, debates over what sorts of legal and scientific solutions would be most politically efficacious were explicit. In colonial Tanganyika, such moments emerged during the translation of witchcraft ordinances and native medicine policies passed down from the metropole. Debates about which forms of being healers and healing practices should be allowed to address became the ground for larger political debates over how the British government could control its African subjects. Colonial administrators intervened into the substance of affliction and the reality of threats with policies and laws that aimed to disrupt notions of cure based on obligations to kin, to community, or to indigenous sovereigns. They displaced forms of justice founded on practices to eliminate evil with forms of justice founded on...

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