Properties of (Dis)Possession

Late colonial efforts to articulate witchcraft and herbalism intervened in the precolonial categories of practice through which East Africans differentiated healing (uganga) and harming (uchawi). Taking these interventions as critical points in the genealogy of traditional medicine in Tanzania enables an account of how and why plants have become central to contemporary debates over indigenous knowledge. Developing, promoting, and protecting traditional medicine today requires articulating the properties of plants elucidated by science with the properties of ownership prescribed by modern law. This essay traces the practices of knowing and unknowing that forged traditional medicine in Tanzania and their role in constituting the terms, objects, and institutions through which struggles for justice have been imagined. I argue that the dynamism of traditional medicine as a modern category of knowledge and practice lay in its ability to solve (first colonial and then postcolonial) problems of knowledge and politics simultaneously. Twenty-first-century Tanzanian scientists, healers, herbal producers, policy makers, and patients grapple with these colonial legacies. Yet, traditional medicine has never fully captured the wide range of practices that strive to catalyze growth, fullness, maturation, extension, strength, and fertility. Healing remains unruly, and the friction this creates holds open the possibility of generating alternative forms of the therapeutic value of plants and rendering visible the ongoing forms of (dis)possession that shape notions of justice in late liberalism.