Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change by Barbra Mann Wall

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change by Barbra Mann Wall Paul Kollman C.S.C. Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change. By Barbra Mann Wall. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2015. Pp. xx, 230. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8135-6622-1.) No historian of Christian missions can ignore the place of medical care in missionary self-understanding and self-presentation. Like schools, clinics have long featured at missions, and churches still provide substantial health care across the world. By exploring Catholic sisters from both international and indigenous religious communities who delivered health services in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania after World War II until 1985, Barbra Mann Wall sheds light on important episodes and issues, illuminating women’s experiences otherwise unknown. Her analysis draws on these groups’ archives and some interviews, supplemented with relevant historical and anthropological literature, to highlight the transnational nature of their work. Several themes emerge. First, sisters’ clinics often struggled with training and employing local people. Organizing courses for nurses, settling labor disputes, and overcoming cultural barriers consumed considerable time and energy. Second, nuns often negotiated their roles vis-à-vis mostly male colonial and church authorities who strove to stifle their autonomy. Third, providing sophisticated medical care grew in nuns’ self-understanding as missionaries, and they gained cultural appreciation of varying local approaches to health and healing over time. In turn, they [End Page 652] directed their efforts toward primary care and structural issues rather than only on curative biomedicine, and this drew them into transnational conversations about global health. At its best, this book examine episodes and individuals for which Wall’s archival research provides close description. These include the Biafran War in late 1960s Nigeria, when Catholic sisters observed the conflict firsthand, and the late 1970s war that overthrew Idi Amin in Uganda. Equally rich are her portraits of nuns trained as medical doctors who provided heretofore unknown medical relief to peoples far from other health services. She is judicious in assessing the sisters’ work, questioning the value of missionary medicine in improving health at times, but admitting that missionary-recommended oral rehydration therapy, for example, was better than local approaches to dehydration like the “red pepper and ginger enema, which often caused seizures” (p. 132). Her subjects, she admits, participated in trends that drove down infant and maternal mortality, among other measurable advances. Wall makes historical mistakes. For example, she misrepresents the role of Propaganda Fide (or “the Vatican”) in assigning nationalities to mission territories (p. 94; it assigns religious congregations); wrongly attributes the founding of a group of Ugandan sisters to Vincent McCauley, C.S.C., an American priest who arrived two decades later (p. 13); serially misspells the name of a famous hospital in Uganda (Kitovu, not “Kituvo”); and asserts that the Catholic Church teaches that “anything beyond abstinence in the form of family planning is morally wrong” (p. 164; it encourages the rhythm method). She also makes problematic generalizations that evince limited historiographical awareness such as about Catholic women’s religious life (for example, stating that sisters only in the 1950s “began to see themselves as individuals with human dignity instead of pawns of local bishops” [p. 17]; saying that sisters “held the Feast of the Holy Family” one January, when they simply followed the liturgical calendar [p. 42]; and taking as representative the view of one African nun that the vow of poverty has no value in Africa [pp. 168–69]). She also makes dubious statements about Catholic approaches to missionary medical provision, which she presents as instrumentally focused only on conversion until the latter twentieth century and naïve about how prayer affected healing, instead of appreciating a more nuanced approach always in play (pp. 42, 72). She also mistakenly asserts a unanimity about missionary denigrations of African cultures prior to World War II, when there was considerable diversity in opinions and practices (p. 19). Despite these shortcomings, this book is a valuable step in advancing a better understanding of the work done by these women, and so many others, through missionary medicine. [End Page 653] Paul Kollman C.S.C. University of...