Specialist healers have been highly influential figures in African history from precolonial times to the present, but their political agency remains historically understudied. In this edited collection, the authors explore and analyse healers’ relations with states and regimes, their individual and collective agency, contests over different forms of healing, and healers’ roles as gatekeepers of knowledge and resources. Healers’ roles are frequently highlighted in the context of political, health and ecological crises and major transformations, including conflicts, colonization and deadly epidemics. Covering several periods of political transition and crisis, with emphasis on nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the chapters bring to the fore recent historical and anthropological research concerning West, East and Southern Africa.
