Ace Bandages and Amnesia: The Political Erasure of African Medicinal Knowledges from African History

• In Event: The Wounds of White Supremacy and the Power to Heal: Restoring Africana Agency from the Trauma of the West

Abstract

There is a well touted African proverb, that states, “until the lion learns to speak, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”. History will always be a loyal servant of current political institutions, leaving out key facts, or falsifying past events, in an effort to legitimize the power or domination of one people by another. In respect to African medicinal knowledge, the European documentation of African history has notoriously treated the African as infant, and colonial and tropical medicine, as a salvationist and civilizing force. On the surface, tropical medicine was used as a means to study epidemiology, environmental pathogens, and prevention. However, at its core, tropical medicine existed as a political project of colonization. Medical researchers were well aware that the “future of imperialism law with the microscope”.
Through an investigation of European “exploration”, the invention of tropical medicine and development of colonial medicine, this presentation seeks to assert that the imperialist and colonialist efforts to supplant African medicinal history has made it difficult for the contemporary reclamation of the medicinal as political, locating African traditional healers as political agents of African collective memory and agency.

Author

• Jessica Hamilton, Temple University