While Kikongo and Kimbundu-speaking healers prospected for novel min’kisi, such as statues of Our Lady of Conception, Portuguese and Italian-speaking missionaries and soldiers sought takula, enkasa, seahorse genitalia and other drugs in medical exchanges throughout West Central Africa. Pluralism and curiosity over medicine, anatomy and the salubrity or noxiousness of diverse environments shaped interactions between Atlantic Africans and Europeans between the first decades of the sixteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. Kalle Kananoja explores how practices and ideas blended in West Central and West Africa as individuals combined and remade medicine from multiple cultural traditions. Kananoja argues that African creativity and inquiry drove these creolised therapeutic mixtures as much as European concerns arising from the overwhelming problem of disease and death that settlers and others faced on the continent. Kananoja makes use of manuscripts, particularly drug lists, printed materials and historical linguistics to analyse how people in both regions entered into highly pluralistic encounters. The book moves between chapters focussed on West Central Africa – primarily the Kingdom of Kongo and Portuguese Angola – and West Africa.
Banganga ia nzumbi, xinguilas, Kimpasi societies and other healers who used animal drugs like jaguar nails and antelope claws, plants and mineral medicines including pemba clay, appear in Inquisition records and the accounts of Capuchin missionaries like Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi. Europeans understood these figures to be similar to popular folk doctors and ritualists in Europe. Kimbanda healers – such as Sebastião/Sebastiana, a non-binary person who appears to have identified themselves as neither a man or woman – drew on spirits and natural materials in therapeutic practices that disturbed and intrigued foreign observers. Portuguese clergy and soldiers sought out indigenous cures and tools like cupping horns to treat illnesses that beleaguered European physicians. Enslaved healers like João Inácio attended to slaves, free people and priests of the Jesuit college in Luanda. Inácio himself consulted other slaves, such as Hieronimo, during difficult cases. Soldiers purchased slave healers to care for them during their time in Angola, including Victoria, a Mbundu woman known as a ‘master of divination’ and surgery (48).
Political, military and ecclesiastic networks facilitated the movement of plants from West Central Africa to Europe. In 1565, a Ndongo ruler forwarded specimens of kikongo wood to King Sebastião of Portugal, aiming to impress his fellow monarch with botanical diplomatic gifts. Soldiers collected numerous medicinals in Angola including mutututu tree, mubango tree and Kisama salt. Sergeant-Major Francisco de Buitrago produced a manuscript book, Arvore da vida, detailing the virtues of enkasa bark, a plant he promoted as the ‘sister of the tree from which the cross of the crucified Christ has been made’ (62).
Medical hybridities also proliferated across West Africa and into the Atlantic world. In 1657, Ambassador Bans of the Kingdom of Arda travelled to Cartagena de Indias in part to obtain Spanish medical expertise. In the early eighteenth century, the director-general of Cape Coast Castle preferred the protective fetishes made by his multiracial partner over the advice of English surgeons. Dutch and Danish officers on the Gold Coast learned medicine from their marriages with Akan women. Others, such as Hans Christian Monrad, paid nearby healers to acquire medical secrets involving indigenous herbs and roots.
Atlantic Africa played a further role in the facilitation of global medical exchanges between Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia. Kananoja discusses the career of a Malaccan healer in early seventeenth-century Bañun who later traveled to Angola. Buitrago collected Asian medicines including Maldivian coconuts, tobacco from São Domingos and ‘Root of thousand men’ from Bahia. European naturalists, especially those sent by Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks, relied on the skill and labor of Temne-speaking collectors like Amarah, Peter and Duffa, whose botanical collections made up the bulk of plant shipments sent from Sierra Leone to Sweden and England. Slavers likewise contributed to eighteenth-century botany, including Betsy Heard, a multiracial Susu-speaker in Freetown who instructed Europeans such as Adam Afzelius and Thomas Winterbottom in medicinal plants. Numerous plant specimens later appeared in European herbaria with their autochthonous names, such as a plant Kru-speakers termed ‘Sassara Winghee’ (111).
Academic, ecclesiastic and popular healing converged in urban spaces around Benguela and Luanda. Building on David Gentilcore’s framework of medical pluralism, Kananoja demonstrates how disparate kinds of healers interacted and competed for authority in city infirmaries, markets and other public spaces. Patients turned to Portuguese hospitals and African barber surgeons for bloodletting, or to obtain drugs like cinchona bark, opium and Água de Inglaterra from druggists.
Atlantic Africa entered into global histories of health in the early modern period as writers like Leonhard Ludwig Finke assembled new medical geographies. European and African health concepts were not incommensurable, as ideas such as a hot/cold binary, bodily humors and imbalances, and the power of spiritual forces existed in both medical cultures. Ideas about mental illness further linked Europe and Africa as diagnoses of banzar – the psychological affliction of longing for home, derived from the Kimbundu word banza – emerged from the dungeons of the Atlantic slave trade and middle passage voyages during which many enslaved people suffered intense depression and committed suicide.
Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa pushes historians of medicine to consider Atlantic Africa as a dynamic intellectual zone within the early modern globe. Franciso Buitrago’s list of herbal remedies from Arvore da vida is included as an appendix, and is a valuable text for appreciating the commingling of medical traditions in early eighteenth-century Angola. Kananoja’s discussion of individuals like Peter, Duffa and Betsy Heard provides an opportunity for scholars to consider the Atlantic African foundations of early modern science. Kananoja’s narrative engages a considerable archive of manuscript and printed materials, as well as material culture. One wonders to what extent their primarily textual research might link up to investigations into the colonialist histories of institutional repositories like academic herbaria, gardens and seed vaults. Kananoja’s book is a valuable addition to early modern histories of Atlantic African medicine, and will be of particular interest to scholars of West and West Central Africa, Atlantic history and global histories of scientific exchange.
