Traditional Healers and Colonial Doctors: Spiritual and Biomedical Approaches to Illness in Ado-Ekiti, 1900–1950

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between traditional healers and colonial medical practitioners in Ado-Ekiti between 1900 and 1950, a period marked by significant transitions in health practices and political authority. Drawing on archival records, missionary reports, and secondary historical scholarship, the study examines how spiritual and biomedical approaches to illness coexisted, competed, and sometimes converged within a context of expanding colonial rule. While British administrators introduced dispensaries, hospitals, and public health campaigns aimed at promoting Western biomedicine, indigenous healers continued to provide herbal, divinatory, and ritual therapies grounded in Yoruba cosmology and spiritual interpretations of illness. The article argues that, rather than producing a straightforward replacement of traditional healing, colonial medical interventions generated a complex form of medical pluralism in which local residents navigated multiple therapeutic options depending on perceived causation, accessibility, affordability, and cultural legitimacy. By analyzing points of encounter and tension between these two systems, the article demonstrates that colonial medicine in Ado-Ekiti shaped, but did not erase, indigenous healing traditions. These findings contribute to broader debates on African medical history, cultural resilience, and the entanglements of power, spirituality, and health under colonialism.