Godly medicine: The ambiguities of medical mission in Southeast Tanzania, 1900–1945

Abstract

Recent historical writing has cast medical missions in Africa as handmaidens of colonialism. The present paper offers a revisionist medical history of one medical mission effort—that of the Universities Mission to Central Africa (U.M.C.A.)—which was explicitly opposed to colonial capitalism and such policies of industrial medicine as the coercion of laborers, but which shared with other missions a paternalistic civilizing mission and Christian evangelization. This combination of scientific rationality and Christian evangelicalism provide the basis for a ‘theory’ of mission medicine, in terms of which it can be asked whether, and to what extent, missions—here the U.M.C.A.—succeeded in their goals. A series of tests confront the Masasi U.M.C.A. medical position, to illustrate mission medical history, including: (1) the early colonial epidemics (1880–1926) which largely overwhelm mission medicine, with the exception of success in treating Yaws; (2) the role of the jamaa lay kin therapy managing group's interference with the mission's self-defined role in diagnosis and treatment; (3) the practice of alternative therapies within the African Christian community; (4) medical modernization and the formation of a cadre of African medical people; (5) initiation rites and efforts of mission personnel to improve circumcision hygienic conditions without disrupting the rites; (6) the challenge of spiritual healing and the rise of African prophetic healing. Although the U.M.C.A. is considered to have failed to maintain its objectives in each of these tests, and ultimately to have abandoned its early ‘theories’, it survives in Tanzania as a government-sanctioned presence with a role in contemporary rural health care, utilizing very different goals from those originally espoused.