Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture and Globalization in the Age of Empire by Jeremy Best (review)

Abstract

Kananoja demonstrates, it was also sometimes an uneven and unpredictable one. It would be interesting to learn more about how some of these ingredients, especially as the author is able to trace them to specific, named plants and animals, may or may not have travelled around the diverse biospheres of the African continent as well as in trans-oceanic contexts. But on the whole these findings make significant contributions to the study of diasporic ingredient circulation. Evidence like this, which Kananoja offers throughout the book, has the potential to lead to truly field-changing insights. The book would have benefitted frommore analysis of the moments in which Black healers and knowledge-keepers showed resilience, perseverance, and autonomy in the midst of the trauma of colonization and enslavement. The example of three Black medical practitioners, named in the records of an eighteenth-century Swedish botanist as Little Andrew, Duffa, and Peter, offers just one such opportunity to imagine these interactions from the perspectives of the Black men themselves. Rather than simply calling the men “loyal” (p. 113) the author might consider how these Black practitioners worked to maintain their own senses of power and control when they were asked or made to share their knowledge with white colonizers. This is especially relevant when it comes to evidence surrounding poisoning accusations (p. 110), which many scholars have shown to be rich sources for understanding the complex and difficult power dynamics between white enslavers and the Black women and men who were forced to cook and care for them. On the whole, Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa offers exciting new ranges of archival evidence, which, when remixed, reassembled, and read against the grain, provide key perspectives into Black experiences of health and wellness in the African diaspora.