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Kalle Kananoja, "Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
01:05:50
An interview with Kalle Kananoja
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- [00:01]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
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Marshall Poe
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Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Hello everyone and welcome to New Books in African Studies, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. My I am Esperanza Brisuela Garcia and today I will be talking to Dr. Kali Kananoya about his book Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Medical Encounters 1500-1850, published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Dr. Kananoya is Lecturer in Science and Ideas at the University of Owolo. Dr. Kananoya, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:22]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Thank you very much, Espinaza.
- [02:25]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
I wonder if you could begin. We could begin this interview by you telling us a little bit about yourself.
- [02:30]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah, sure. So I'm now based at the University of Oulu in Northern Finland, but I began my studies at the University of Helsinki in 1999. I went to major in African Studies, which in Helsinki is very much geared towards linguistic rather than cultural studies. So as part of my early training, I started learning Swahili, but began to drift towards African history very early in my studies. However, one of my teachers in Swahili was a former missionary and theologian named Pray Muhariulla, who had worked in Tanzania in the 1970s and had also worked on medical anthropology, conducting a study on an individual herbalist. So this was published as a book with the title Miral and his practice in 1980. And as a student I picked up this book and read it with curiosity, but it really sparked anything in me at that time. It was like my first exposure to medicine in Africa, So the topic might have been too foreign and difficult for me to really enjoy it. However, I think it probably planted some seeds within me. And gradually, as I drifted more towards studying African spiritual practices and their history, Harihla's work became quite a big influence for me. Another key piece of literature that inspired me after finishing my MA Studies was James Weed's Recreating Africa, which I remember reading when I was contemplating whether to continue for a PhD. So that book, along with Linda Haywood's edited volume on the Central African Diaspora, started me on a very different path and took me to study Central Africans in 18th century Brazil, very much focusing on ethnic identities and their transformations as well as religious practices. So as you can probably imagine, African history is a very marginal subject in Finland, although we have strong historical connections with Southwest Africa, with Namibia, and to a lesser extent with Tanzania. But the academic scene in African history is limited to about dozen or maybe 15 scholars, and that's already counting the current PhD students and postdocs. But I was very lucky to always have good teachers, good mentors now colleagues, people like Holger Weiss, Johann Koponen Harrisiiskonen and Marco Hokkonen, who showed me how African history is done and who all published at a high international level and pushed me to do the same, and who also continue to contribute to the relevant discussions in our field. So that was always very inspirational, very supportive, and also facilitated my work on the book we're going to talk about today, Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa.
- [06:17]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
So how specifically did you come to work in this book? When did it start taking shape first in your head and then how did it start to happen?
- [06:33]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Right. So I finished my PhD in 2012, so nine years ago, and then spent a year at the European University Institute in Florence in Italy. But then I received a three year grant from the Academy of Finland to work solely on this project and had another year of funding from the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Study, which of course, all this generous support helped me to conduct archival research and ended up spending several months in Portugal to research this book. So that was of course, the first step was to have that, the. That funding in place. But intellectually, I mean, I was very inspired, like I said, James Wheat, and inspired by this whole historiography on African healing practices in the Americas. And at the same time, I was very frustrated about how little all the scholarship had to say about Africa and medicine in Africa and how even some of the best studies that set out to write about these topics using an Atlantic history framework didn't really focus on Africa at all. There were exceptions, of course, and sure, I had read John Thornton's African Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, as well as James Weed's second book about Domingos Alvarez. But even those two books took the narrative out of Africa, whereas in my own book I wanted to the focus to remain only on the African continent. So partially, I was writing in reaction to the developments that were taking place in the much larger fields of American and Atlantic as well as African Diaspora history, and how healing and health and medicine were being taken seriously by scholars in these fields. At the same time, I was also going against Ukraine in pre colonial African history, where the narrative was always super focused on the Atlantic slave trade and enslavement of Africans. And now, of course, I'm not saying that slavery shouldn't be a focused area of African history, but personally, I wanted to experiment whether I can write about this period in global history and about these parts of the world without putting the African experiences of enslavement at the center. Also, already during my PhD research on slavery in Brazil, I had started gathering material on Angola and Congo in Portuguese archives. So mainly in the overseas archives Archivo Historico Ultramarino and the Portuguese National Archives in Toro de Tombo, where I worked mostly on the inquisitional records. So I had a hunch of the materials that I could expect defined there and that were needed for the study. And I had already transcribed or digitalized some sources that offered material for writing about health and medicine in African history. So that's how I was also Able to sell the project to the funding agencies, Although I couldn't be really sure that in the end I would end up with enough material for book length study. As I dug deeper in this topic, however, I also discovered that quite a few Portuguese scholars had also written about topics related to medicine and disease. So this appeared in obscure articles in all kinds of colonial journals and bulletins during the first half of the 20th century. And that helped me as well in locating more materials and build a bigger picture out of this very sporadic and sketchy documentation.
- [11:05]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
One thing that as I was reading through the book, I was wondering whether it was in those early sources, in those early inquisition sources, where you started to. I mean, the main argument in your book, you know, the existence of this crossover and ultimately this kind of hybridization of medical practices. In a way, it's also quite. I mean, it's not necessarily something that I think, as I was reading, I was thinking, well, I should have expected it, but I've never seen it actually written down or like demonstrated and illustrated in the way that you did it. And I was wondering whether it was reading those inquisition sources that you first started to get a sense that, you know, that this was the case in the first place, but also that you could be able to show it, you know, to write, if not even a whole book, but just to sustain an argument along those lines.
- [12:17]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah, yeah. It was very evident in those Inquisition sources that there was. And the same thing happened in Brazil, of course, that there were always these Portuguese men, because they were usually men who went as soldiers and. And officers to Angola. So very often it was the case that the Portuguese men were using the services, if we can say that the services of African healers. And there was always this cross cultural interaction. So in the rituals, you could see evidence that it was Europeans and Africans together who participated in these rituals. Yeah, so that kind of medical pluralism, not only in the sense that African healing practices themselves were plural. So you had many kinds of different kinds of specialists doing all sorts of healing, and then also sorts of European practitioners who fumbled around on the African continent and tried to figure out a way to help, so to speak. But of course, these, you know, the methodological issues were huge in trying to tease out the presence and the actual powers of African healers. I mean, for the most part, the Portuguese sources remain silent on issues of health and healing. Healers have an almost invisible presence in this creolized or hybridized landscapes of Angola. So they are usually present only when there's some sort of clash of cultures. So when someone judges them and they practice. And here, of course, the inconsistent trials and denunciations, which, paradoxically, despite all these biases, still remain the best sources we have on African healers and healing in the early modern world. This is, of course, a conceptual problem in that the Portuguese very rarely referred to African healers as healers, you know, using the. The Portuguese word grandeiro. So they are most mostly referred to as. As fetishedos, fetisheras, which do. The. Do. The English and the Dutch in West Africa would translate as the. The fetish man. So that is someone who uses power objects or harnesses these spiritual entities to either heal or to harm others. So the obvious issue here, the methodological issue here, is that Africans very rarely in these sources get to present their own point of view. They are usually presented in negative light by authorities who condemn their practice. Then there's also. I use a lot of the Italian capuchin materials which complement the Inquisition sources. And then we can see these glimpses of the internal pluralism of African medicine. Like I have in one of the chapters, I have a list of healer titles compiled by the Capuchin kavatsi in the 17th century. So we have healers such as the shingilas, who specialize in healing by spirit possession, then others who prepared and sold different types of talismans and medicines to ailing patients. So while it's still biased and judgmental, it's also, you know, the Capuchins were at least attempting to understand how the. How the medical marketplace, if we were to use that expression, functioned in Central Africa. And then we can go on to contrast that list by Kavatsi within another type of typology which was drawn up by the missionary Giuseppe Monari. So where he put this, the Central African healers into, you know, the three categories, the good, the wicked, and the bad. And the good are the ones who relied on, you know, the good healers rely only on herbal medicine and medicinal goods. And Monari also thinks that they are a little bit like the. The surgeons. He actually uses the word surgeon to describe these healers, you know, the herbalists. But then we have others who use not only herbs, but also rely on these superstitious. What monadicalls, the superstitious words, incantations, so mixed herbal and spiritual practice. And then we had the bad healers who only healed by spirit possession and, you know, tried to keep this ritual secret. So, you know, methodologically, again, this kind of moral taxonomy doesn't help us get very far. But I think it's Helpful for understanding that early modern observers who were outsiders to African societies also realized these, you know, that the basic divisions and the basic medical plurality, you know, that African societies were medically plural societies where different kinds of healers compete. You know, they competed with each other, but also complemented each other.
- [18:51]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
And I mean, you spend your first chapter sort of like detailing this plurality. And in a way, like you said, it also helps us understand sort of like the conception of disease. You make this general distinction between diseases of the body, physical diseases, and the ones that were dealt with more specifically, or diseases of human or men, or social diseases that tended to be dealt more like with the spiritual healers or. There wasn't always a clear distinction. But it's interesting how that through the understanding of the different. Of this pluralism, it also gives us a sense, gives an entry, gives us an entry into how they understood ailments and different kinds of ailments among Africans. But what I think is particularly insightful in your study is as you follow it through, you start showing how partly one of the reasons why the Portuguese, especially in Central Africa, were able to perceive this is because this was not so alien to them. You know, they themselves, in early modern Europe itself, this conceptualization of disease was not so far out from what they had experienced themselves. Could you start tell us a little bit about how you came to that insight and how that became apparent to you?
- [20:35]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah, of course. I'm not the first one to success it.
- [20:39]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Yeah, I know.
- [20:41]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
So others before me have written about, you know, the Portuguese, you know, and of course the Portuguese themselves, you know, in Portugal already had Inquisition and, you know, you have, you know, the same kind of medical pluralism also in Portugal. So. So I think it was only natural. And I think in that sense, it's also very important that for pre colonial Africa that we also try to connect it to historiographies in other fields, like it's being done in Atlantic history now. But you also have to be aware of this developments in American and European history. And that's really what I was trying to do throughout the book, that I was trying to combine all these different historiographies and see whether to me, it often seems that Finnish society or. Or, you know, not only early modern Africa and early modern Finland are similar in many ways, but, you know, also for later periods and, you know, how these. How the development of human societies goes through these stages. And, you know, sometimes, you know, one society is 20 or 30 years before the others, but, you know, it seems to be that many of these lines can be found throughout the world.
- [22:28]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Yeah. No, and again, I think one of the interesting, I mean, sort of emphasis, I think in the book is a more balanced approach between difference and common ground in the sense that there's an attempt to understand, not only a lot of times, like you said, the cross cultural encounter focuses in areas of conflict in which the emphasis is on what make these two groups or what made these two cultures different. And obviously there's some of that, especially in the Inquisition. In the inquisition cases, of course. But what I liked about your book is that you balance it really well with very compelling arguments about the existence of this common ground and in some ways why. And also the historicity of this common ground in the sense, like in your second chapter, for instance, you move into just the specificity of this. Of the materials that were used, the remedies, the specific things that were used, and how some of them were adopted by Portuguese, how Africans themselves were curious about European remedies, et cetera. There was this pragmatism about what each of them could use. But of course, in both cases, there was experimentation that was trying things out. Again, it sort of shows that even this level of communication could not have taken place without a sense of both cultures or all these different cultures giving a certain amount of value to this particular type of materials and knowledge. I think that's, again, that's a balance that we often do not find in a lot of studies that look at cross cultural encounters.
- [24:40]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah, I. I think it's very interesting, you know, in the, in the second chapter, when we turn to questions of materiality, of medicine, so that, you know, the sources I use, the, the overall tone is much more positive, you know, in a way that there's much less condemnation and, and it shows more the curiosity of, of the different sides of these exchanges. So the principal issue here, of course, is that Africans and Europeans both had to find ways to survive somehow. So what do you do when your own medicine fails or isn't available to you to start with? So you always turn to the local ingredients, local resources. At first, this is a matter of. Of survival. And in, in Atlantic Africa, it doesn't really, or didn't really develop into an economic alternative until in, until in the 20th century. But the Portuguese started to envision this, this medicinal trade as an alternative to the slave trade already in the late 18th century. So then we can also go on to ask why the African medicinals didn't arouse the same excitement in. In Europe in the 17th and 18th century, but remain Very marginal compared to the interest in Asian and American medicines. And I think the simple answer here is that there's, there's a lack of direct contact between Africa, you know, going from Africa directly to. To Europe in this period. So we don't, we. We have all the ships are sailing from Africa to the Americas and also taking part of this medicinal knowledge from Africa to the Americas, but not to Europe. So they are. African medicinals were constantly becoming more popular as, as London sheep in Canada and others have shown, so more popular in the Americas than in Europe. And then this, another Atlantic crossing from America to Europe wasn't happening systematically, or the African medicinals from the Americas did not go to Europe. And then there's also, as I demonstrate there, that the lack of overall scientific interest in Africa in the early modern period. So all the people who made these early modern collections of African medicinal materials compiled this knowledge into manuscripts. So they were, at best, they were amateur botanists. We have very good listings of Central African medicines that I showed there in the second chapter. One of these soldiers was a Portuguese soldier, afonso Mendes, around 1650, compiled this knowledge without explaining how he gathered it. So I would speculate that he learned about it, maybe bought it from African soldiers, possibly healers in the interior of Angola, many other similar listings from the Capuchin missionaries. What I found very interesting when looking at all these lists over time from the late 16th through the 70s to the 18th century, was that certain medicinal plants were repeated over and over again. We have stuff like plants like takula, kikongo, engaria, that remained in very popular use in Central Africa throughout the period, had a strong continuities and sometimes, you know, the specific uses changed. But. So they might have been used for different diseases and ailments at different times. But we can be positive that there was a constant market for these materials, right? It was not necessarily an export market that we can trace statistically, but certainly these local networks, regional networks were highly organized. And medicinals also moved around the place in these trading networks.
- [29:34]
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- [30:50]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
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- [30:53]
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- [31:02]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Massachusetts Chapters the next couple of chapters I was interested in how you tried to sort of like move away from or try to sort of see if you could generalize test your thesis into other areas of Atlantic Africa. And so in the first chapter you talk about the Gold coast and then in three and then in four you look at Sierra Leone and in some ways they do of course, you know, add other dimensions to the story that you're telling. And particularly in the case of Sierra Leone, it's not even just a geographic thing, but it's also like it advances the story a little bit further chronologically and it does help illustrate sort of how and when the changing attitudes of Europeans towards Africans in general also have an impact in the way in which this medicinals are seen by Europeans. Could you tell us a little bit how is it that how did you decide that you wanted or needed to find examples in other parts of Atlantic Africa? Was this very hard? Did you have any idea that these materials existed? And then how did you go about integrating your findings into the book?
- [32:35]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah, so the chapters on the Gold coast and Sierra Leone, I wrote them originally as one chapter and then decided to split them when I was finishing the book. And really poor chapter started with a very good question at a conference by Mariana Candido. So who asked me that? You know, Carlif, at the end of the day, were the Portuguese really any different from other Europeans who were active in West Africa and you know, in especially in medical matters. And of course at the time I didn't have an answer, but I decided to go go for it and look for a at least some kind of tentative answer. And overall I think it's a question that historians of pre, you know, that type of question is something that historians of pre colonial Africa need to ask More often, of course, we have this, you know, between regions, we. We have all kinds of political and. And religious differences. You know, the dynamics of colonization were not identical in Angola and the Gold coast and Sierra Leone. But in matters of health and medicine, I think, you know, it boiled down to these very basic questions of daily survival. And as was the case in Angola, I think African women played very important roles not only as. As providers of care and providers of simple herbal medicines, but also as go betweens in facilitating Europeans access to more established healers in more serious cases of illness. So, you know, in this chapter, I also wanted to push against this idea of history as a nationalistic science. And I think that for Atlantic Africa, you know, our source base needs to represent the various groups that were present on the coast. So that's why I decided to bring not only the British, but also, you know, Dutch and Danish materials from the Gold coast, as well as bits of Swedish material for Sierra Dayon. And I'm not saying that I do this exhaustively, and I'm sure others can take this forward and study the archives in much more detail than I did for West Africa. And if anything, I hope that the chapters will inspire others to work on these topics for West Africa.
- [35:39]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Do you. In terms of how they. Like you're saying, in a way, in answer to that original question that was posed to you, again, it sort of shows that regardless of the particular nation or company that was supporting each of these colonization ventures, the ultimate need to survive in this environment was important. I mean, was more prominent and was really behind the interest in this medical findings. And ultimately, I think what was also very interesting here and is the use of sort of these interpreters, like either in the case of the gold. Cause when you talk about like, women and the clear presence of women. And in the case of Sierra Leone, this particular interpreters. Sorry, yeah. Informants that. That you mentioned sort of mysterious figures that we hear some names for them, but we don't actually know who they are. It's. Again, it's such an interesting way or I think it adds a lot to this understanding that there. Even though there's. All of these sources come from European. From Europeans, if we read them carefully. And the way that read them is to understand that they're somehow transcribing these voices, these African voices. And in that regard, like the understanding of the differences of these different Europeans interlocutors also helps us be more careful readers of these African voices. And I was wondering how you navigated that. Obviously, you've spent many years Deep in the Portuguese sources did you find having to change, how difficult was it to change to all of a sudden having to read the Swedish or Dutch or English sources as a means to try to understand what these African voices were, you know, the tone or the information that these African sources were providing?
- [38:10]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah, that part wasn't so difficult. I remember one of the courses I took as a student in Helsinki was. So we had a course on the Nordic or the Scandinavian presence in Africa. So I was already a little bit familiar with the context and also with some of the sources. It was very difficult to find. And as you said, the African, African voice in those European sources is very difficult. So we have this, for example, in the Cold coast in the Danish sources, I found this mentions that Africans were acquiring European medical techniques or they were acquiring medicines from the slave ports and ships. But these are very, very sketchy mentions. And what was interesting was that, you know, at times it seemed that the Africans were more interested in experimenting with the European than the Europeans were using their own medicine in a way that, you know, this many of these, in many of these sources, you know, so the Europeans are very skeptical about, about their own surgeons and about their own barbers. But Africans then for one reason or another decide that it might be a good idea to. And again, it boils down to the idea of pluralism, that if something doesn't work, then you try to find something else that might work, something else that might offer the cure. Again, comparatively speaking, we don't have the same kind of rich botanical descriptions for, for West Africa that, that the Capuchins were producing in the Kingdom of Congo. And we also don't have the same, same kind of, of this amateur pharmacopoeias which, which can provide information on Angolan medicinals. But even for the Cold Coast, I found that I can take the material approach. And I'm sure that if anyone follows these trails in the British archives, for example, they will find much more evidence than I was able to cover. And the key sub zero level, again interesting from the comparative perspective because as you said about the chronology, it's a major development and we can see these synchronous developments in Angola. So when it comes to scientific and natural historical interest of Africa, and of course this has to do with the linear systematization and the linear networks that sought to catalog the, the natural resources and the animals and the plants on a global scale. So we have, so we have all these Linnaeus disciples, Linnaeus apostles roaming these extra European landscapes. We have people like Sparman, Andersparman, in South Africa and Sullenberg in the Far East. And finally Adam of Celius in Sierra Leone, who's actually part of the Banksian networks, you know, part of the English or the British networks, and working for and sponsored by the. By the company in Sierra Leone. So mostly, you know, Afzalius in Freetown, he, what he does, he sits, you know, when you read his journal, it seems that Afzelius sits in a hut in Freetown and he has all these local assistants. You know, the locals are bringing him specimen and he, he does the classifying. He sits there and proceeds to classify these plants and goes on to document their local uses and local names, if the informants can tell them. And he shows that, you know, the journal shows that two of these assistants, especially two, which I focus more on, of our trusted servants, do most of the collecting. And we only know them by their servant names. So Peter and Ufa. And despite, you know, this constant, you know, daily interactions, Arcelius doesn't, or at least the part of the journal that survives doesn't give any clues to their identity, you know, African identities of these, of these men. So, for example, we don't know their original names. I suspect the names that are used were given by perhaps by Auselius himself. Nevertheless, combining all these descriptions, we can again see the widespread and. And very common reliance on African sources of healing, African healing practices in the Atlantic spaces.
- [43:45]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
I mean, now that you, when you just recently just mentioned that you started your training in linguistics, it sort of explains also a lot that the use that you make of, of just words, you know, the linguistic, it just provides like a nice sort of grounding source for some of the work that you do. And I figured it also might have helped like, in grounding the ideas of change in pluralism into this area. And I imagine, like you also said, the, the reading of all these different diverse sources, even in European languages. And moving a little bit more to that, your next couple chapters deal precisely with sort of like the European side, the introduction of Portuguese or European pluralism in Africa. And what are some of the examples that we see of this? And in these chapters, I felt that it was interesting to think about your idea of African. You mentioned that it is not easy to trace changes in African medical practice precisely because the sources are not as rich as we would like them to be. But despite that, I think you're able to suggest that these are not. And I like that often in the book you talk about, you use the word traditional and quotation marks so as to say let's not think about this something as a closed system. This was obviously a dynamic system. So can you tell us a little bit about how in these two chapters you now fit in European practices or practices that were coming from the Atlantic world, try to fit in and modify or affect African medical practice as you describe it?
- [46:09]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah, it's. Again, I think it's a very interesting question because then we go to another type of source and we can. What I used a lot in the book were these. Or in these chapters were the, you know, the Portuguese censuses for West Central Africa. So all these, for example, all the. And, you know, statistics for medicinals that were traded into Luanda. So I show there that, you know, the cinchona bark was arriving from Brazil throughout the 18th century and in more extensive numbers in the early 19th century. So we have that very long history of these materials, American materials being used also in Africa, which hasn't really been paid attention to before. And then in the censuses we have the. I showed the presence of these African barbers, you know, trained by the Portuguese, really, barber surgeons who are not only present in the, you know, on the coast in Luanda and in Benguela, but also practice, you know, European medical practice that was also spreading to the interior. And, and, you know, we can, we can see traces of that in the 19th century, you know, when, when European or when Portuguese travelers go to the interior of Africa, they, they realize that, you know, these, these barbers are already here. You know, they, they. They can offer us something that we are familiar with. But I, I also want to say another thing, one more thing about the, the linguistic sources and the linguistic materials or, or the, you know, this kind of tracing a word. And, And I have in. I think it's in the sixth chapter, maybe I talk about this African melancholy or this, you know, that the disease of Bunzo.
- [48:29]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Yes.
- [48:30]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Which is very intriguing because, you know, it. Often I would only have the one word. You know, I, I would have. I would have the word, but I would have no explanation in the sources. And, you know, the. So the explanations for the word or the medical. Like, you know, the, you know, the medical idea. An explanation emerged much later in the sources than. Than the. The idea of this disease. So it has a, you know, all the. It seems that all the people who are using the word know exactly what I. What it means already, you know, already in the late 70th century. But then the first physician, the write about the. The Bonzo disease comes in the 1760s or so. And it seems that this. The. This. The idea of this disease was very, very common, you know, in. And it was shared by Central Africans and the Portuguese. You know, the. The word comes from. From the Bandu word banza, meaning home or village. So we don't have a description of how this disease concept emerged, but I would speculate that it was coined when the. When the slaves were marched to the coast and taken the slave ships and they were crying out this word banza, and the Portuguese take it and they make a verb out of it. So they. They start calling this ailment banzar. So they are saying that someone is banzando, literally someone is suffering from panzer, suffering from this intense longing for home. And we can use the modern word depression, we can talk about melancholia. But if you want to find out what the people in the 70s or the 18th century thought about it, we also need to think about this etymology and understand that at the root of this word is homesickness. And that, of course, is something that anyone can suffer from. You know, black or white can suffer from bonsa. And the Portuguese did also suffer from it recording. You know, sometimes they. They write that someone is ill because they have the bunzo. But what happens when. When the physician Dami Algosme writes about this in the 1760s, then we can see that this concept has really. It has become racialized in the sense that all of a sudden it's. It's not the. The. The white people anymore who suffer from it, but now it's only the blacks who. Who have. The. Who can have this illness begins to be classified as a disease of blacks. Right? The concept gets racialized, and from this time onward, medical doctors also begin to pay more attention to Ponzo and similar mental ailments not only in Africa, but also among slave populations in the New World. And I think that's one of the most important examples of why this kind of, you know, why we need to pay attention to the linguistic sides and, you know, the historical linguistic. I wish I could do more of it and would have the, you know, the proper. You know, the time and the proper skills to do it in a much, much greater detail.
- [52:23]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Yeah, well, I mean, I think, like I said, I found it very grounding, and I thought it was a good place to start in the places where you used it. And you finished with the last chapter talking about medical geography, and you have started from the very start. One of the recurrent characteristics of. Of this pluralism, particularly the African pluralism, is that it's very mobile and it's sort of that these medical healers and professionals, basically they just move around quite significantly. But in this chapter you sort of. In a little bit, it's a little bit of a follow up to the sex where you talk about the limitations of the humorous system of medicine. In a way, the importance that was eventually given to this notion of the environment as being the most important determinant of the ability to stay healthy or to cure disease, etc. Etc. But in a way also this chapter I felt helps finally find what was the final place that was given to all this knowledge that was accumulated about Africa and this kind of sort of tension between how in some ways this knowledge proved to be so useful even when it came to be known in sort of European circles, but in a way also retain this level of being useful in a specific locality. Can you tell us a little bit about how this chapter came to be conclude basically encapsulate your conclusions from the rest of the book.
- [54:27]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah. So how geographical space, environment and health were conceptualized not only in Central Africa, but also in the Portuguese. I tried to write about how it's conceptualized in the Portuguese Atlantic at large. And maybe conceptualization is not even a good word here. I think it's more about imagination. In the end, it's more about imagination and images that became attached to certain locations and certain regions over the centuries. And this was the part where it was the most hardest to discover if these images, to what extent these images were shared between Africans and the Portuguese. So in contrast to the sharing of medicinals and disease concepts here, the Europeans might have been building up their own set of rules in a way, instead of eagerly going to local informants to learn about healthy and healing versus diseased and dangerous environments. And we have, well, we have to factor all these adaptations and migrations that, you know, for the African side that had already taken place. You know, they, you know, the popular, the local population had been there for centuries and millennia before the, before the Europeans arrived. So this probably was very developed, you know, had already been developed. More locals and the Europeans with the different background had to. Had to go through those adaptations and in the end adapted very poorly to the new environment that they. They encountered. I think the basic or the important point here to. To note is that there emerged this clear division of the. Of the land or the environment. So, so we have this idea of. Of the healthy coast or the littoral. And then the very dangerous and disease written Interior, you know, interior was always more. More harmful and more dangerous. And if you wanted to recuperate from illness, you had to seek treatment on the coast. And as I, as I conclude that, you know, the Europeans often didn't have any other option but to go away from Angola, you know, seek out a cure in. In Brazil or go travel back to Europe. And this type of, you know, again, talking about these continuities in the Long Durer, it's very interesting to note that this type of traveling for health causes, of course, was also very typical for Europeans in colonial Africa, you know, in. In a later period. So one of the questions for further research would be to look at this, you know, to what extent these early modern imaginations carried on until later times.
- [57:59]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Well, I mean, in some ways, even at really later times, I mean, I mean, it's. It is still a common trope. I mean, I remember at least in Mexico, you know, that my grandmother saying things like that, you know, it's like, oh, what you need is some time at the beach and you'll be fine. Or, you know, like always, the coastal areas were more, you know, maybe not necessarily salubrious, but at least that the sea, the sea, the air of the sea and the water. The sea water was always had some kind of healing qualities as opposed to wherever you happen to be. So I thought that that was. Yeah, it's like you said, it's like these things that we don't necessarily know where they come from, but somehow they persist. So you conclude. The conclusion is really interesting because, you know, you spend quite a bit of time talking about all the methodological challenges that you basically want to make sure we all are aware of. And regardless of. Not regardless, but in light of those, I seem to feel like you feel like there's a lot of, like you said, what you said about those two chapters that you still feel there's quite a bit of work that can be done with regards to some of these problems, not just in the Gold coast or Sierra Leone, in regards with this question, but more importantly, I think your concept of pluralism and the importance of realizing the contributions of both Europeans and Africans to this world of medical intervention and medical ideas in this world is something that yet needs. Despite the challenges in the documentation, there's still a lot of room to think about these questions. Can you tell us a little bit, how do you see things moving forward, whether in your own research or where do you see valuable avenues for people to explore in this arena?
- [60:41]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah, what I really didn't do in the book, which I think is a really important question, is I end the story in the first half of the 19th century. And I think it's really important to look what comes next. I mean, I think a lot of the, and the historiography has already shown that, you know, a lot of things changed, you know, as medical technologies developed in the, in the 19th and the 20th century. So I think it's very, it would be very important to carry, and I would like to also do it for Angola, you know, to carry this research further in time, you know, closer to our day and see what happened after 1850 and how all these ideas of, you know, like the idea of the, of the witch doctor in, in colonial Africa emerged and you know, all these discourses on, on the other continue to develop. And you know, took this also, I think take this story that I was trying to tell. They also take it to another direction. So I mentioned in the, in the beginning about this, the, the Finnish connection in, in Namibia. And that's something I began to work on, particularly the, the Finnish medical mission in southwest Africa in the, in the early 20th century. And of course coronavirus messed with my plans to travel to Namibia. But we have to see how that project evolves in the future.
- [62:41]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Yeah, I mean, I was thinking a lot about this because like you mentioned even in your book, this idea of Africa having not been colonized to the extent, for instance, that the Americans were colonized earlier precisely because of, you know, the amount of disease that Europeans would suffer when they enter some of African environments. And in a way this notion that this didn't happen like full fledged colonization didn't happen until the 19th century when European technology was able to support a more sustained colonial project. And how your book, in a way, sort of makes us think a little bit more carefully about that narrative, isn't it, that maybe it makes us forget that Europeans might have struggled a little bit, but in many of these areas they did manage to figure out ways to live and to survive. And they did so precisely because they took advantage of the knowledge that already existed on the ground. And not only that, but that said knowledge contributed to broader traditions of medical understanding. In other words, that the Europeans were not the only ones who had cracked the knot of how to survive in Africa. Africans had done it long before that. So, yeah, it definitely made me sort of rethink a couple of things that I say in my lectures when I teach. So thank you for that. I think I've taken quite a bit of your time. Would you like to tell us a little bit what you're working on? Is it just this pot project on the Finnish medical mission or is there anything else on the works?
- [64:45]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Yeah, as I said at the beginning, so the African history crew in Finland, it's a small community, and I also feel that we have a responsibility to engage with the larger public here and show how and why African history matters. So I'm working with some of my colleagues on a book or synthesis about demography and health in African. He. African history. Of course, not relevant to the international listeners out there, but at the same time, it's. It's something I hope more Africanist scholars would take up and. And think about how to center the African experience and make it relevant so that it speaks to. To a larger public and to readers and viewers and listeners, whichever medium you choose to use.
- [65:48]
Esperanza Brisuela Garcia
Yep, I agree. I couldn't agree more with that. Well, both of those projects sound like great, great too, and we will be looking forward to them. Thank you so much for being with us today. I really enjoyed it and I really enjoyed the book, so thank you for the book, too. Take care and we hope to talk to you soon.
- [66:12]
Dr. Kali Kananoya
Thank you, Esperanza.