Feierman, Steven. "Healing as social criticism in the time of colonial conquest". African Studies, Vol.54, No.1 (1995): 73-88.

Feierman, Steven. "Healing as social criticism in the time of colonial conquest". African Studies, Vol.54, No.1 (1995): 73-88.

• Scholars of colonial histories often separate out the process of colonialism and anti-colonialism into distinct political, environmental, and religious movements and processes. The author attempts to combined all of these elements into a single theme by exploring traditional African medicine as an anti-colonial critique to colonial environmental change (73-75).
• In many African societies, the role of 'healer' also included religious and cultural authority. In the case of the Chwezi healers of Uganda or the Nyabingi healers of Rwanda, healers were expected to both manage individual health and community health through religious intervention against plague, famine, or other disasters (75).
• Although healers had specially cultural authority to speak on matters of collective well-being and environmental concerns, they did not have a monopoly on these forms of knowledge. Many 'lessons' of healers on livestock management or farming were also common knowledge in their regions (76).
• The area of Kigezi, in modern-day southwestern Uganda along the border with Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, was a mountainous borderland in the 18th Century, providing shelter for those fleeing conflict or subjugation in neighboring polities. This area was ethnically mixed and had a numerous of religious practices (77-78).
• Among these groups, the religious mediums of the Nyabingi were particularly prominent in history due to their leading a number of military insurrections against colonial rule by the Germans, British, and Belgians (78-79).
• Uganda and Rwanda experienced a major environmental and economic catastrophe beginning in 1890, when a rinderpest epidemic killed more than half of all cattle, forcing some Tutsi communities to relay entirely on German government support. This was followed by a series of smallpox epidemics, the arrival of jiggers, and major famines almost every other year from 1897 onward (80).
• The first anti-colonial Nyabingi movement began during the summer of 1897 during the first major famine, when healers and religious leaders in Kigezi met to discuss how to deal with the famine. The council blamed Europeans for causing the epidemics which led to the famine and for failing to relieve them, using the traditional 'healer' role of religious authorities as a nexus for a political response to the famine (80-81).
• The Nyabingi worldview placed health and the natural order of the world in terms of flow, with the flow of rain to the Earth being dependent on other forms of flow. Special significance was placed on milk, both human and cow, as well as the gastric health of leaders, whose constipation was often linked to droughts (82).
• Whereas traditional forms of political power in Rwanda and Uganda were wealth-based and heavily patriarchal, requiring leaders to have amassed both community respect and vast sums of money, the vast majority of Nyabingi were outsiders. They attained political power despite being poor women, and often post-menopausal women with little perceived purpose in regular society. Many leaders were also foreigners of unclear origin, a trait which enhanced rather than diminished their mystic reputation (84).
• The fact that Nyabingi were generally outsiders to society to weakly located within traditional social structures meant that they were more able to form broad anti-colonial coalitions, since they did not have to depend on limited local patronage as did other political leaders (84).
• The establishment of distinct Nyabingi political power by the 1910s had implications for the nature of the institution. Prominent Nyabingi leaders sought to pass down power to their children, leading to a mixture of traditional and Nyabingi forms of political authority, often through Nyabingi using their religious authority to install their sons as political leaders under British rule (85).
• The British had a big problem with the Nyabingi, and found their separation from traditional authority structures deeply troubling for colonial rule. They conducted widespread campaigns to imprison Nyabingi, a process made difficult by near leaders assuming the authority and name of recently killed Nyabingi (85-86).
• This fear led to the passage of anti-witchcraft laws in Uganda and Tanzania, which gave colonial authorities the power to prosecute anyone who claimed to possess occult powers. This essentially meant that every traditional healer could be arrested, although it practice it was only applied selectively to arrest political opponents of colonial rule (87).
• Whereas pre-colonial healers in this area played a very public role in organizing collective environmental, ecological, and health responses to famine or plague, the atmosphere of fear created by the British colonial regime's anti-witchcraft laws resulted in a transformation of healers into purely private figures responsible for individual rather than collective responses to medical or environmental issues (87).