Relying on donor funding means that the funder ultimately determines the health priorities. This is one reason why many programmes in Africa focus on a single disease such as HIV.
Medical volunteers have been a common sight in African countries like Zambia since the colonial era.
Engraving from The Illustrated London News, volume 96, No 2654, March 1, 1890/Getty Images
These medical volunteers have been closely associated with several kinds of non-human actors, whose behaviour is worth examining in more detail.
Mona Market in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa operates on the third week of every month when traders set up temporary dwellings for the four days.
Gary Stafford
Most healers still practice in their houses where there is little privacy. Others use more private backrooms. But these spaces were not designed for the practice of traditional medicine.
Empatheatre’s latest production is more than a play about three characters who live near the sea. It’s a model for collective consultation on how to save the ocean.
His life’s work was asserting the humanity and history of the Bantu people, while proposing that the soul was able to bring knowledge of the past and of the future into the present.
People most at risk from snakebite are often from the most impoverished populations.
Andre Coetzer/Shutterstock
Joseph Shabalala would grow world famous for his music. But it is shaped by the spiritual aspects of his life as much as it is by the hardships of black life - and by his dreams.
Traditional medicines sold at a South African market.
Rebecca and William Beinart
In the 1950s, the African yam was exploited by drugs firm Boots to produce cortisone. But South Africans fought back against the plundering of a plant that they used for traditional healing.
Fresco depicting the healer María Sabina with her mushrooms.
DR
Arnaud Exbalin, Université Paris Nanterre – Université Paris Lumières
Before being qualified as “magic”, certain mushrooms were considered sacred by the ancient peoples of Mexico. We explore their history and relationship to Mesoamerican religion and medicine.
In the medical culture of the Bugis and Makassar peoples in Indonesia the word koroq
means that the penis is actually shrinking, or retracting, but the Dutch in the 19th-century East Indies did not believe it was real.
shutterstock
Koro is widely believed to be a culturally localised delusion. But a theory that it’s a fight-or-flight reflex might be corroborated by studying traditional healing treatments in Indonesia.
Health systems rarely consider that patients switch between hospitals or primary health care centres and indigenous medicine for their health issues.
Direct Relief/Tobin Greensweig
Connie Nshemereirwe, The Partnership for African Social and Governance Research (PASGR)
Africa’s complex and seemingly insurmountable social and economic problems are a golden opportunity to demonstrate the value that research can bring. Scientists need to rise to the challenge.
Until recently, traditional healers in South Africa have operated relatively freely from government interference.
Reuters/Rogan Ward