Quests for Health and Contests for Meaning: African Church Leaders and Scottish Missionaries in the Early Twentieth Century Presbyterian Church in Northern Malawi

This article is a micro-level case study in the cultural history of medicine and healing in Africa. It analyses issues of health, healing and medicine in the early Presbyterian Church in the Northern Malawi region during the first decades of the twentieth century. A central theme is the relationship between the emerging church and African healing theories and practices. The initial focus is on the discussions and debates in the Livingstonia Presbytery, the central meeting forum for the missionaries and African church leaders. The article then shifts to the level of individual congregations and church leaders, consulting congregation papers and oral sources, analysing the role of African clergymen, evangelists, preachers, ministers and their families in the search for health and therapy in local communities. Although missionary attitudes towards African healing were generally derisive and dismissive, and missionaries had hegemonic aspirations to create a healthy Christian society where missionary medicine would be central, the article argues that the topics of illness and health were open to contestation. In both theory and practice, the African Christian elite negotiated an acceptance of medical pluralism among the Presbyterian Christian communities of Northern Malawi. ‘Dig for your medicine and mix it with God’(African proverb from Northern Malawi, translated by Revd A. Dewar, 1903)1 1 The National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS), Acc. 7548, D 70, Letters to the Livingstonia Sub-Committee, Dewar, 10 August 1903, p. 114.