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  • Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948
  • Abena Dove Osseo-Asare
Karen E. Flint . Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948. New African Histories. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xiv + 274 pp. Ill. $55.00 (cloth, 978-0-8214-1849-9), $26.95 (paperbound, 978-0-8214-1850-5).

Karen E. Flint takes a sympathetic view of traditional medicine in this thorough survey of Zulu healing in Natal, South Africa. She shows how British colonialism curtailed healing practices among Zulu speakers that threatened both the political and the medical authority of European immigrants. She laments the long-lasting implications of such policies as isangomas (spiritual healers) and inyangas (herbalists) battle discrimination in the new South Africa.

In the introductory chapter, she considers the book's central question, "What is Traditional about Traditional Medicine?" While Flint argues that tradition is a malleable, changing construct, she acknowledges how traditional healers in South Africa reclaim the continuity of their practice since earlier times. In this way, Flint manages the slippery terrain between a social constructivist argument out of step with everyday concerns of real people, and a clear pragmatism of value even to the subjects of her study.

Works on the history of medicine in Africa have slowly blossomed since the late 1980s, yet this book is the first to give serious attention to shifts in traditional medical beliefs and practices. In her clear use of language, Flint announces that we may be past the Foucault-driven, semiotic studies that provided a necessary foil for her research in the late 1990s. In the first section of the book, she provides a compelling overview of healing in the Zulu Empire during the nineteenth century, mining missionary sources. First, she argues that early Zulu healers treated physical bodies, indicating how names for healers changed over time. Second, she shows how healers shaped the political body. Whereas previous studies of the rise of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka by the 1820s emphasized geographic or military factors, Flint uses oral testimonies from the 1890s and early 1900s to underscore the key role healers played in aligning spiritual forces.

The book's second half will be particularly interesting to people invested in the history of white governance. It shows how the political power of healers in Natal threatened white religious and government authority, leading to discriminatory policies focused on the role of healers as "witch finders." A fascinating section describes a "Witches" tea party staged between European guests and invited healers, highlighting racial anxieties. Then, the book turns to a chapter about healers who refashioned themselves as acceptable medical professionals, further threatening white doctors. Natal was the only part of South Africa under the British where healers could apply for government licenses, and Zulu healing suffered when this allowance was removed by the 1930s. In the final chapter, Flint explores a history of greater syncretism in Natal between Zulu healing and Ayurveda, introduced through indentured workers from India. Here, the argument is that Zulu speakers more seamlessly adopted practices of a group that was to be classified as Asian under apartheid, perhaps due to parallels in religious views. [End Page 136]

This is a landmark study that will serve as a model for further histories of medicine, especially with respect to traditional and alternative therapies. Flint judiciously focuses on the concerns of major ethnic groups in Natal, yet a chapter on inter-African healing practices would avoid the implication that different racial classes were the agents of change for Zulu healing. Similarly, the periodization of the book allows her to evade the controversies surrounding health policies that take traditional medicine as the singular solution to maternal mortality or HIV/AIDS. At points, she glosses the complexities of biomedicine's rise and risks a preoccupation with the indigenous, even as she critiques this obsession. Flint tempts us to forget that all people in the world have a right to pharmaceutical and hospital access, just as we seek ways to regenerate traditions that faced ridicule and near collapse.

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare
University of California, Berkeley
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