• Healers and politics in African history
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Healers and politics in African history

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This edited volume focuses on the under-researched topic of specialist healers as political actors and agents of change in African history, privileging a multi-disciplinary perspective on the compl...
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  • 10 November 2026
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Specialist healers have been highly influential figures in African history from precolonial times to the present, but their political agency remains historically understudied. In this edited collection, the authors explore and analyse healers’ relations with states and regimes, their individual and collective agency, contests over different forms of healing, and healers’ roles as gatekeepers of knowledge and resources. Healers’ roles are frequently highlighted in the context of political, health and ecological crises and major transformations, including conflicts, colonization and deadly epidemics. Covering several periods of political transition and crisis, with emphasis on nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the chapters bring to the fore recent historical and anthropological research concerning West, East and Southern Africa.
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Price: £25.00
Pages: 392
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Social Histories of Medicine
Publication Date: 10 November 2026
ISBN: 9781526179180
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:

MEDICAL / History, History of medicine, HISTORY / Africa / General, HISTORY / Modern / 19th Century, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century, HISTORY / Modern / 21st Century, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Religion, Politics & State, Religion and politics
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Markku Hokkanen is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Oulu
Musa Sadock is Lecturer in History at the University of Dar es Salaam
Philip J. Havik is Senior Researcher at the Centre for Global Health and Tropical Medicine, Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Benson A. Mulemi is Research Associate at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria and Associate Professor of Anthropology

Introduction: Healers and politics in African history – Markku Hokkanen, Philip J. Havik, Benson Mulemi and Musa Sadock
Part I: Healers, politics and crises in the Great Lakes
1 Healers, politics and power struggles in the Great Lakes Region, c. 900-1900 — Jan Kuhanen
2 The micropolitics of healing: White Fathers and healers in the Great Lakes region, c. 1880-1910 — Emma Wild-Wood
Part II: Therapeutics, harming and fortune: healers in war and peace
3 Healers and politics in Malawi: Healing, harming and luck — Harvey Banda and Markku Hokkanen
4 Healing, divination, crises and conflict: Political entanglements in Guinea-Bissau — Philip J. Havik
Part III: Healers, biomedicine and the state
5 The politics of healers’ associations in Ghana since the 1930s: A historical analysis — Samuel Adu-Gyamfi
6 Confronting HIV and AIDS in Tanzania: 1980s–2005 — Musa Sadock
7 An interplay between healers and public health providers in contemporary Malawi – Msenga Mulungu and Harvey Banda
Part IV: Economies of ecology and well-being in contemporary Africa
8 Indigenous healers and forests in Ghana: Preserving Mfantse’s cultural heritage through roots and herbs — Samuel Adu-Gyamfi and Helena Osei-Egyir
9 Pastoralist healers in East Africa: Marginalisation, risks and sustainability – Benson Mulemi
Epilogue: A vibrant, mutating social category — Nancy Rose Hunt