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  • Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948
  • Jonathan Roberts (bio)
Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948. By Karen E. Flint. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv+274. $55/26.95.

Karen Flint's Healing Traditions is an intriguing story of the customs and practices of healing at the cultural crossroads of South Africa. The product of several years of primary research, the book is based on voluminous archival data, supplemented by oral testimonies from healers. Flint knows her topic intimately, having cultivated relationships with informants from both the rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal and the urban medicine shops of Durban.

The book is divided chronologically into two parts, the first covering the Zulu Kingdom during the nineteenth century. Flint demonstrates how diverse healing ideas of the izAngoma (diviners) and iziNyanga (herbalists) from around Natal were amalgamated under Zulu rule, and how royal medicines (muthi) were deployed as a means of challenging rivals to the throne. This was a period when Zulu medical thought dominated southern Africa, and when white settlers were beholden to the interests of indigenous [End Page 533] healers and priests. The Zulu polity, from Flint's perspective, was overtly medicalized, a place where healing power intertwined with royal authority.

The second part of Healing Traditions opens in 1876, with a tea party at the farmhouse of Lady Barker, a British settler in Natal. To entertain her guests, Barker invited a group of healers to dance, perform rituals, and divine the whereabouts of the missing pipe stem of one of her white guests. This is a snapshot of a time when whites regarded Zulu medicine with an exoticized respect, a status that rapidly diminished as African healers were vilified by white doctors. At the turn of the century, the British colonial government passed a series of laws restricting witchfinding and outlawing practices of spirit possession (which subsequently went underground, maintained largely by women). In the independent Union of South Africa, only registered native herbalists were permitted to practice medicine.

But as Flint carefully notes, the narrative of state medical hegemony belies the healing syncretism that developed during this period. By the early twentieth century, the medical landscape of Natal was crowded with African, Western, Ayarvedic, and Islamic healing ideas. This was a period of leakage between cultural boundaries, a time when whites sought out African herbal remedies, Indians hired African diviners to cure spiritual illnesses, and Africans used Indian medicines to guard against witchcraft. From this polycultural setting emerged a number of prominent Indian and African healers, whose biographies form a key part of Flint's book. Highlighted is the life of Mafavuke Ngcobo, a wealthy herbalist in Durban who owned five muthi shops and operated a lucrative mail-order medicine business. Ngcobo ran afoul of the white medical authorities who patrolled medical traditions in Natal when he advertised himself as a "doctor." For blurring the boundaries between Western and African medicine, Ngcobo was fined £25. In protest, Ngcobo and other vendors formed the Natal Native Medical Association to define their right to practice, but, as Flint notes, the African-ness of the organization served to increase distinctions between black and white medicines. This is one example of the way Flint historicizes the promiscuous concept of the "traditional," exposing it as a discursive tool of racial ideology.

The closing chapter of the book addresses some contemporary issues, including the licensing of traditional healers by the African National Congress and the story of bioprospecting for hoodia gordonii (an appetite sup-pressant) in the Kalahari Desert. These issues are somewhat tangential to the specific history of medicines in Natal. An incident that is mentioned but begs further coverage is the establishment of "Freedom Hospital" in Durban in 1996, a center for divination and herbalism founded by isangoma Queen Ntuli. Intriguingly, the clinic closed down after two years because, in Ntuli's paradoxical words, its services were "too new" (p. 196). It would be interesting to know whether Durban is becoming more or less medically hybrid in post-apartheid South Africa. [End Page 534]

Flint might also have provided a more precise chronology of the...

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