This study examines the status of indigenous medicine in South Africa and those who practice it, investigating how historical and colonial narratives form the legal landscape of medicine and the ways that resurgent representations of authentic medicine are mobilized in the present, in both policy and practice. In colonial South Africa the relationship between indigenous and biomedicine was strained as colonial officials regulated how indigenous people could practice medicine. Indigenous healers were limited to using only local natural products, such as herbs, to heal and only white medical doctors could legally use European medicines and treatments; the African use of such tools was banned, and legal divisions developed between "indigenous", "natural", and "biomedical" practice. Today South African officials debating treatments for HIV similarly argue for the use of "traditional" natural materials such as beetroot and garlic to cure illness, raising issues surprisingly familiar to those from the colonial era. This research asks: to what degree do colonial conceptions manifest themselves within current representations and struggles around medicine with the advent of new diseases and treatments such as HIV/AIDS? Specifically, how do the narratives found in South African policy around HIV/AIDS medicines create, reproduce or alter the narratives found in colonial medical policy? How does the use of medicines by practitioners vary from or reflect narratives about indigenous medicine? Using archival data to uncover colonial discourses, plus interviews with current day clinicians, local practitioners, and decision-makers to understand contemporary debates, is to be followed by narrative policy analysis to examine the current policy structure. This research seeks to determine whether and how the current debate is not just about HIV/AIDS and South Africa's treatment policies, but is in part an articulation of set of structured conditions emerging from social history.
Understanding the struggles between biomedicine and indigenous medicine has important implications in South Africa today, where the debate surround the contemporary health crisis of HIV/AIDS, which infects an estimated 29 percent of the adult population. By understanding the social assumptions embedded in the use and regulation of "indigenous" treatments, "natural" cures, and "biomedicine", we can better anticipate and mediate current conflicts in understanding and treating HIV in South Africa. A clearer understanding of medical policies and discourses, and their historical roots, can be used to uncover biases against effective treatments (whether local or "western" biomedical) and this knowledge can be used to devise more effective clinical and education programs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. In addition, understanding how colonial narratives reassert themselves in current policy and practice can help undo the pernicious idea that those practicing medicine outside of the biomedical norm are doing so merely out of ignorance of modern biomedicine's benefits. Indigenous medicine might instead be viewed as a complex configuration of the traditional as well as the modern, which together may be useful to those suffering from illness, allowing more objective analysis of its limitations and benefits for public health. This project is jointly supported by the Geography and Regional Science Program and the Office of International Science and Engineering.
