Health care in sub-Saharan Africa is and will continue to be an issue of utmost importance in the twenty-first century. As the HIV/AIDS pandemic ravages the continent, the stakes heighten not only to provide effective and efficient health care to African communities, but also to disseminate knowledge about health-seeking behavior and to instill belief among people in the possibility of leading a healthy existence. Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa raises questions and offers analysis on many issues related to how health and illness are understood by communities in Africa, as well as how health knowledge and beliefs are disseminated and utilized to provide health services to African populations. The chapters in this book derive from many different disciplinary approaches and cover regions across sub-Saharan Africa, thus offering a holistic glimpse at the knowledge and belief systems functioning in Africa and the ways that these systems contribute to health care access and delivery in the world's most endangered continent. "This edited book of thirty-three chapters is an impressive update of scholarship on health concerns in Africa, as the new century begins. Divided into five parts, it presents multidisciplinary analyses from the perspectives of individuals, professionals, non-profit organizations, communities, and governments... This is a volume that has much to offer anyone interested in Africa's evolving health care system." -- The International Journal of African Historical Studies

This is the 2018 paperback printing of the hardback published in 2008. Health care in sub-Saharan Africa is and will continue to be an issue of utmost importance in the twenty-first century. As the HIV/AIDS pandemic ravages the continent, the stakes heighten not only to provide effective and efficient health care to African communities, but also to disseminate knowledge about health-seeking behavior and to instill belief among people in the possibility of leading a healthy existence. Health Knowledge and Belief Systems in Africa raises questions and offers analysis on many issues related to how health and illness are understood by communities in Africa, as well as how health knowledge and beliefs are disseminated and utilized to provide health services to African populations. The chapters in this book derive from many different disciplinary approaches and cover regions across sub-Saharan Africa, thus offering a holistic glimpse at the knowledge and belief systems functioning in Africa and the ways that these systems contribute to health care access and delivery in the world's most endangered continent. "This edited book of thirty-three chapters is an impressive update of scholarship on health concerns in Africa, as the new century begins. Divided into five parts, it presents multidisciplinary analyses from the perspectives of individuals, professionals, non-profit organizations, communities, and governments... This is a volume that has much to offer anyone interested in Africa's evolving health care system." -- The International Journal of African Historical Studies

This book connects traditional religions to the thriving religious activity in Africa today.

What social factors contribute to the tragic state of health care in Africa? Focussing on East African societies, this book is the first to investigate what role religion plays in health care in African cultures. Taking in to account the geopolitical and economic environments of the region, the authors examine the roles played by individual and group beliefs, government policies, and pressure from the Millennium Development Goals in affecting health outcomes. Informed by existing related studies, and on-the-ground interviews with individuals and organisations in Uganda, Mozambique and Ethiopia this interdisciplinary book will form an invaluable resource for scholars seeking to better understand the links between society, multi-level state instruments, and health care in East Africa.

Positing the notions of coloniality of ignorance and geopolitics of ignorance as central to coloniality and colonisation, this book examines how colonialists socially produced ignorance among colonised indigenous peoples so as to render them docile and manageable. Dismissing colonial descriptions of indigenous people as savages, illiterate, irrational, prelogical, mystical, primitive, barbaric and backward, the book argues that imperialists/colonialists contrived geopolitics of ignorance wherein indigenous regions were forced to become ignorant, hence containable and manageable in the imperial world. Questioning the provenance of modernist epistemologies, the book asks why Eurocentric scholars only contest the provenance of indigenous knowledges, artefacts and scientific collections. Interrogating why empire sponsors the decolonisation of universities/epistemologies in indigenous territories while resisting the repatriation/restitution of indigenous artefacts, the book also wonders why Westerners who still retain indigenous artefacts, skulls and skeletons in their museums, universities and private collections do not consider such artefacts and skulls to be colonising them as well. The book is valuable to scholars and activists in the fields of anthropology, museums and heritage studies, science and technology studies, decoloniality, policymaking, education, politics, sociology and development studies.

In Biomedical Hegemony and Democracy in South Africa Ngambouk Vitalis Pemunta and Tabi Chama-James Tabenyang unpack the contentious South African government’s post-apartheid policy framework of the ‘‘return to tradition policy’’. The conjuncture between deep sociopolitical crises, witchcraft, the ravaging HIV/AIDS pandemic and the government’s initial reluctance to adopt antiretroviral therapy turned away desperate HIV/AIDS patients to traditional healers. Drawing on historical sources, policy documents and ethnographic interviews, Pemunta and Tabenyang convincingly demonstrate that despite biomedical hegemony, patients and members of their therapy-seeking group often shuttle between modern and traditional medicine, thereby making both systems of healthcare complementary rather than alternatives. They draw the attention of policy-makers to the need to be aware of ‘‘subaltern health narratives’’ in designing health policy.

The Covid‑19 pandemic was global in its spread and reach, as well as in its medical, social and economic effects. In many respects, the global effort to “flatten the curve” produced a flattening of experience around the world and a striking coincidence of similar experiences in countries the world over. The identity, simultaneity and uniformity of experience were also manifest in common concerns at the intersection of law and religion in many nations around the world, including Africa. The lockdowns and closure of religious worship centres – churches, mosques and religious organisations of all sorts – raised questions of freedom of religion and the related concern for freedom of assembly, along with concerns about the relation of religion to science and public health, religious channels of communication and religious provision of social services. After all, health, communications and social services are all areas in which African religious organisations play key roles. Potential tensions around these issues raised further considerations about the nature of religion-state relations, the status of religious authority and whether religious and state actors would work together or at odds in addressing the Covid‑19 pandemic.