Healing Environmental Harms: Social Change and Sukuma Traditional Medicine on Tanzania's Extractive Frontier.

Abstract

Mwanza, a border zone of Tanzania, on the south end of Lake Victoria, is at the center of a transportation corridor of extractive industry and export oriented economies. Historically the area was a center of the Sukuma group, an amalgam of various in-migrants over time who are brought together by traditions of healing that link to collective rituals as well as to agricultural and pastoralist prowess. The recent explosion of the commercial fishing and gold mining industries in the region has dramatically eroded people’s landscapes, and altered social structures and migratory patterns of labor. The first section of the thesis documents traditions in Sukuma subsistence practices as these link to traditional healing and patriarchy, chronicling transformations wrought by colonial, socialist, post-socialist, and neoliberal political economies within Tanzania over the last century. The second section captures a paradox: factors driving an increasing need for traditional medicine at the same time inhibit its practice, and transform its legacies. The prevalence of HIV has led to new modes of commercialized traditional healing, with storefront remedies and new floral and faunal components. However, new social tensions are eroding the socially embedded rituals that intrinsically link physical healing with political and spiritual leadership. The threats to traditional medicine (e.g. criminalization, climate-driven in migration of non-local healers and their remedies, loss of biodiversity and conservation related restrictions) are greater than ever. Overall, the study thus contributes to scholarship on healers and magico-political leaders in East Africa, but also to emerging work on African environmental justice issues, by addressing Mwanza’s traditional healers as key players in systems of nested and interconnected vulnerability to environmental and economic change.