Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500–1850 by Kalle Kananoja (review)

Abstract

In the opening anecdote to Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa, Kalle Kananoja describes a meeting between a Kongolese father and a Mbundu healer in the spring of 1628. The man’s daughter was ill, and he sought out the healer for a cure. Kananoja includes details about the girl’s illness and its duration.We learn how far the healer lived from the girl and her parents. We even learn about the ingredients used in her treatment—parts of a takula tree—and how themedicine was prepared. This account, with its invaluable glimpse into the lives of Black healers and their patients in the seventeenth century, comes from Inquisition records which Kananoja has mined for evidence. Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa examines interactions between Black healers and white colonizers, arguing that healing traditions from Central and West Africa not only had power, held enduring respect, and possessed prevalence among African and African-descended people, but that these knowledge-systems were observed, drawn upon, and taken advantage of by non-African people. When white colonizers encountered healing systems on the African continent, they found much that felt familiar to them. As was the case in Western Europe, in Central and West Africa, patients were comfortable with the idea that they might need to travel long distances in order to receive a cure. They