From an Agency of Cultural Destruction to an Agency of Public Health

Abstract

Most medical histories maintain that missionary doctors in imperial Africa were agents of Western cultural imperialism. This scholarship, informed by the writings of Michel Foucault, projects mission-based healers as agents of imperial power who played a major role in emasculating African therapeutic systems and in reinforcing colonial hegemony. This scholarship partly derives its support from the fact that across Africa, mission doctors and nurses cast themselves as cultural conquistadors whose ultimate goal was no less to undermine local medical culture than to supplant it with biomed ical comprehensions of disease, healing and medicine. Convincing as this scholarship may be, it over-simplistically locks Christian medical missions in a distant/static past, erroneously portraying them as monolithic entities, and largely obscuring how mis sionary discourses and praxis surrounding disease and medicine metamorphosed in the aftermath of colonialism. This paper may be read as a corrective to such scholar ship. The paper insists that, in conformity with the expectations and demands of the post-colonial regime in Zambia, Catholic medics reconfigured their medical discourse and practice. Consequently, their medicine lost its imperial/hegemonic pretensions and became an agency through which the newly-independent Zambian state imple mented its public health reforms.

Catholicism as a lived religion in Africa

“…But again historical and missiological studies get the lion's share at the expenses of social sciences. This holds true also for the Journal (Fancello, 2007;Kalusa, 2014;Langewishe, 2012). Its underlying definition of mission recognizes the global transformation of the religious landscape and of North-South relationships, the international circulation of religious actors and the growing increasing role of the Global South in missionary activities.…”

“…Nevertheless, a substantial shift occurred when the journal ‘ Le Fait Missionnaire ’ started in 1995 was renamed Social Sciences and Mission in 2003 to promote the social scientific study of missions (Morier‐Genoud, 2015). It features a number of articles on mission churches in Africa including Catholicism (Fancello, 2007; Kalusa, 2014; Langewishe, 2012). Its underlying definition of mission recognizes the global transformation of the religious landscape and of North–South relationships, the international circulation of religious actors and the growing increasing role of the Global South in missionary activities.…”