Michael Jennings

Chinese Medicine and Medical Pluralism in Dar es Salaam: Globalisation or Glocalisation?

African healing systems have always been pluralistic in form and structure, capable of absorbing new traditions and practices. The spread of Chinese medicine in Tanzania over the past decade is a testament to the flexibility of pluralistic healing systems, as well as evidence of south-south processes of globalisation that are often ignored by the literature on globalisation. This article suggests, through a study of a Chinese medical clinic in Dar es Salaam, that its popularity highlights the strengths of local cultures despite increasing globalising forces, and that any consideration of globalisation must include south-south (or East-south) dynamics as well as the customary focus on the north-south track. The article also suggests that whilst the absorption of new traditions of healing speaks to the strength of the local, it also functions as an indication of the failure of alternative healing systems to address key current medical needs, and as such represents a crisis in health, as much as strength, in the healing sector.

Healing of Bodies, Salvation of Souls’: Missionary Medicine in Colonial Tanganyika, 1870s-1939

This paper re-examines missionary medicine in Tanganyika, considering its relationship with the colonial state, the impulses that led it to evolve in the way that it did, and the nature of the medical services it offered. The paper suggests that, contrary to traditional depictions, missionary medicine was not entirely curative in focus, small in scale, nor inappropriate to the health needs of the communities in which it was based. Rather, missionary medicine should be considered as a vital aspect of early colonial health services, serving those excluded by the colonial state. Missionary medicine before 1945 was fragmented, small-scale, lacking in resources and overstretched. Its services could not necessarily compete in quality with the best of the state hospitals. But it succeeded, within the local context, in providing a network of health services that stretched into the rural society, and ensured that, where there was a mission hospital, there was an option for the local people to make western biomedicine a choice for healing.

Ten years of JEAS

Looking back at its first 10 years, we are happy to see that the Journal of Eastern African Studies has established itself as a major Area Studies journal. As our readership has broadened – in addition to our readers among the members of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Journal is now widely available through standard library subscription bundles – we have climbed to the ranking of third among journals in African Studies, and 9/69 in Area Studies. We are pleased also at having cultivated a global audience, with readers in African, European, American and Asian institutions. Our submissions reflect a similarly diverse profile. Our primary goal remains the same as it was in the first issue in 2007, when the journal’s founding editorial team, David M. Anderson, Hassan Wario Arero, Joyce Nyairo and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, stated in their opening editorial that the journal “aims to promote fresh scholarly enquiry on the region from within the humanities and the social sciences, and to encourage that communicates across disciplinary boundaries.” The primary quality that we continue to pursue in our publication is original scholarship based on substantial empirical research, analyzed in ways that speak to contemporary scholarly debates. We would like to thank the staff at the British Institute in Eastern Africa for their institutional support of this journal, as well as the production and marketing staff at Taylor and Francis. But above all we thank our authors and readership for making this journal the success that it has become. Over the last decade, the Journal of Eastern African Studies has published 36 issues – shifting from three issues per year at its launch in 2007 to its current rate of four times per year starting with volume 5 in 2011. These 10 volumes total 351 articles and briefings, and number 6,710 pages of original scholarship and analysis. Although a clear majority our articles concern East Africa and the Horn, we understand “Eastern Africa” in much broader terms, reaching out to Central Africa, Southern Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean, as well as to border-crossing “transnational” topics such as trade and diaspora that have a significant regional component. While some of our articles are primarily regional or thematic in scope, the vast majority have been focused case studies situated within the following countries: Kenya (95), Uganda (73), Tanzania (39), Ethiopia (40), Somalia/Somaliland (25), Sudan/ South Sudan (23), Rwanda (19), Democratic Republic of Congo (8), Eritrea (6), Malawi (6), Burundi (4), Zambia (1), Comoros (2), Mozambique (2), and Zimbabwe (2). These articles also reflect our proudly interdisciplinary scope, based in social sciences and humanities, although the specific disciplines of politics, history, sociology and anthropology have tended to feature most prominently. The editors will shortly release a “virtual issue” of the Journal, highlighting the range of our articles over the past decade. Among the hallmark features of the Journal of Eastern African Studies during its first 10 years has been the number and quality of special issues, and special themed collections within issues, that range from topics as diverse as the politics of rain, Ethiopia’s revolutionary democracy (1991-2011), historicizing political violence in Eastern Africa, sexuality and morality in Uganda, and the effects of “statelessness” in post-1991 Somalia – just to name a few. One of the journal’s signature strengths has been its examinations of national elections –most prominently the highly contentious 2007 Kenya elections, but many others since – that have