Medicine As A Weapon In The Struggle For Namibian Liberation (original) (raw)

Entrenched Colonial Influences and the Dislocation of Healthcare in Africa

Journal of Black and African Arts and Civilization , 2011

This paper argues that Africa's colonial experience which mediated contact with Western medicine brought about a confrontation of values in the sphere of health, and that this offers some explanation for why the outlook of practitioners and, indeed, the practice of health care in Africa remains riddled with subtle colonial trappings. It attempts an analytic and systematic examination of this state of affairs and seeks a critical exploration of where, how and why contemporary medicine in Africa remains largely immune to her endogenous cosmological systems. Since colonialism was also the wheel through which Western medicine gained entry into America, the paper probes why American practitioners were able to incorporate a Western theoretical framework about disease while at the same time maintaining their cultural uniqueness. Ultimately, it suggests feasible ways to amend and address the African situation.

Beyond the State: The Colonial Medical Service in British Africa

Manchester University Press, 2016

A collection of essays about the Colonial Medical Service of Africa in which a group of distinguished colonial historians illustrate the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies in a series of essays covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zanzibar. These studies reveal many new insights into the enactments of colonial policy and the ways in which colonial doctors negotiated the day-to-day reality during the height of Imperial rule in Africa. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of colonial history, medical history and colonial administration.

Medicine and public health at the end of empire

Critical Public Health, 2015

"The impact of US imperialism on health care is one of the most pressing and pervasive problems facing global public health today. So now is a good time to read Howard Waitzkin’s latest book, a scathing critique of US neocolonialism from a medical perspective." Medicine and public health at the end of empire, by Howard Waitzkin, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, Pluto Press, 2011, 256 pp. $24.61 (paperback), ISBN 978-1- 59451-952-9

Promoting Health, Protecting Empire: Inter-Colonial Medical Cooperation in Postwar Africa

2015

This article explores the way that anti-colonialism at the UN shaped international health cooperation in Africa after 1945. By focusing on two organizations–the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa and the International Children’s Centre–it argues that colonial empires pursued inter-colonial technical cooperation as a means to respond to critiques at the United Nations and to prevent the involvement of UN agencies on the African continent. Comment l’anticolonialisme à l’ONU a-t-il influencé la coopération en matière de santé en Afrique après 1945 ? À travers deux organisations – la Commission de coopération technique en Afrique et le Centre international de l’enfance – cet article montre comment les empires coloniaux ont poursuivi la coopération technique inter-coloniale dans leur manière de répondre aux critiques de l’ONU et de prévenir l’ingérence des institutions internationales en Afrique.

African Therapeutic Practices, Colonial Medicine and Global Health: The Global History of Health and Healing in Africa

2019

From the colonial era until the HIV and Ebola epidemics of today, Africa has often been perceived as a ‘diseased continent’ – as a continent whose population and development has suffered greatly from a particularly heavy disease burden. In this course, which aims to introduce students to the social and cultural history of medicine in Africa from a global perspective, we will trace the origins and the impact of this perception. We will explore how both Africans and foreign actors in Africa dealt with disease and ill-health from precolonial times into the postcolonial era. We will look at African health concepts and healing systems and analyse how Africans dealt with western biomedical concepts and practices introduced and often violently imposed by colonial and missionary doctors, experts in tropical medicine and international organizations such as the WHO. These interactions were shaped by manifold forms of resistance and led to different forms of accomodation, hybridization and medical pluralism. We will also analyse the global dimensions of health and healing in Africa, by exploring not only how biomedical knowledge and practices circulated between empires and continents, but also how African healing ‘traditions’ and drugs travelled across oceans.