This fascinating, multi-disciplinary collection examines how public health interventions in postcolonial Africa mirror wider manifestations of power in the region. Beyond the role of public health intervention in tackling disease and prolonging life, the book measures the social and political determinant of health which continue to exist in the postcolonial era. The volume features contributions from scholars across both the social sciences and humanities, exploring ongoing debates across a broad range of themes, including: - Infopolitics, biopolitics and healthcare; - Emerging infectious diseases, environment and food cultures; - Health interventions and economic security; - Church administration and healthcare; - Livelihood, sex, sexuality and HIV/AIDS; Offering a fresh and insightful understanding of health issues in this important global region, and including chapters on issues around the Covid-19 pandemic, the book will interest students and researchers across a range of disciplines, including Global Health, Politics and African Studies.

A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices--from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment--help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices--from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference--play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492. Deploying a range of rhetorical tools and drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, Richardson concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.

This fascinating, multi-disciplinary collection examines how public health interventions in postcolonial Africa mirror wider manifestations of power in the region. Beyond the role of public health intervention in tackling disease and prolonging life, the book measures the social and political determinant of health which continue to exist in the postcolonial era. The volume features contributions from scholars across both the social sciences and humanities, exploring ongoing debates across a broad range of themes, including: - Infopolitics, biopolitics and healthcare; - Emerging infectious diseases, environment and food cultures; - Health interventions and economic security; - Church administration and healthcare; - Livelihood, sex, sexuality and HIV/AIDS; Offering a fresh and insightful understanding of health issues in this important global region, and including chapters on issues around the Covid-19 pandemic, the book will interest students and researchers across a range of disciplines, including Global Health, Politics and African Studies.

This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.

This book examines the evolution of post-colonial African Studies through the eyes of Africanists from the Anabaptist (Mennonite and Church of the Brethren) community. The book chronicles the lives of twenty-two academics and practitioners whose work spans from the immediate post-colonial period in the 1960s to the present day, a period in which decolonization and development have dominated scholarly and practitioner debate. Reflecting the values and perspectives they shared with the Mennonite Central Committee and other church-sponsored organizations, the authors consider their own personal journeys and professional careers, the power of the prevailing scholarly paradigms they encountered, and the realities of post-colonial Africa. Coming initially from Anabaptist service programs, the authors ultimately made wider contributions to comparative religion, church leadership, literature, music, political science, history, anthropology, economics and banking, health and healing, public health, extension education, and community development. The personal histories and reflections of the authors provide an important glimpse into the intellectual and cultural perspectives that shaped the work of Africanist scholars and practitioners in the post-colonial period. The book reminds us that the work of every Africanist is shaped by their own life stories.

The contributors not only study state breakdown but compare the consequences of post-communism with those of post-colonialism.

These essays are an account of disease, health and healing practices on the African continent. The contributors all emphasize the social conditions linked to ill health and the development of local healing traditions, from Morocco to South Africa and from the precolonial era to the present.