Illness, Healing and the Dynamics of Reciprocal Exchange on the Upper Guinea Coast

On the blog today we have a guest post from Philip Havik which introduces us to his recent Medical History article ‘Hybridising Medicine: Illness, Healing and the Dynamics of Reciprocal Exchange on the Upper Guinea Coast (West Africa)’ https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2016.3. Including travel accounts, missionary reports and documents produced by the Portuguese Inquisition, Philip's article shows how forms of medical knowledge shifted and circulated between littoral areas and their hinterland, as well as between the coast, the Atlantic and beyond.

Although currently knowledge of tropical medicine, vaccinations and medical care for ailments generally associated with the tropics such as malaria, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, dengue fever, cholera, yaws, etc. has greatly advanced, at the time of European expansion in the fifteenth century little was known about them. Without the benefit of modern medical science, travellers were faced with unknown and unseen threats to their health and lives. As the risks of succumbing to tropical fevers became commonly known, the doubtful reputation these regions gained was associated with high morbidity and mortality rates. West Africa, which formed the earliest region of contact as Europeans advanced southwards, was eventually dubbed ‘the white man’s tomb’ in the early 1800s, on account of its fierce tropical climate and disease environment. However, but for rare exceptions, the question of health in pre-or proto-colonial formations has tended to be overshadowed in academic studies by economic and political issues. This despite the key role it played in conditioning strategies towards imperial expansion and settlement.

My article seeks to bring health related considerations back into the equation by focusing on the early period of Euro-African encounters, and fill a number of lacuna by mapping exchanges of knowledge taking place from the fifteenth and to the eighteenth centuries. Centring on the West African Senegambian/Guinea region, which became an important area for slave and commodity exports from the sixteenth century, it shows that European and local African actors and communities were actively involved in the search for remedies that could cure or prevent certain ailments common in the tropics. It confirms the importance attached to the information circulated by and among traders, settlers and missionaries on the one hand, and local communities on the other, on a variety of medical techniques, compounds and cures. Thus, different elements from Galenic medicine, as well as from Oriental medical practice and local African phyto-therapeutical methods came to be used by an increasingly heterogeneous population in coastal areas.

This shows that the social, cultural and economic encounters occurring in this contact zone would lead to a progressive entanglement between different bodies of medical knowledge against the background of a globalising world. Over time, this intense cross-cultural interaction and borrowing would result in a progressive hybridisation of knowledge and practice assembled in the form of ‘cultural kits’ which could be accessed by incoming and local actors, illustrating the fluidity of boundaries. Based upon data extracted from Portuguese, English and French published and archival sources, my article presents evidence of the dissemination and evolution of biophysical and spiritual healing techniques in some coastal locations. These ‘cultural transfers’ based upon a relational approach to health, would operate in a multi-centred fashion in the Senegambia/Guinea region, producing innovative complementary and competing healing narratives and practices.

Philip J. Havik