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The author compiles medical and general folk beliefs and practices among Bantu peoples, surveying tribal organization, indigenous healers, surgical techniques, herbal remedies, midwifery, and child care. Chapters combine observational notes, descriptions of native practitioners and treatments, and inventories of remedies and ritual practices, with commentary on how colonial and missionary contact has altered traditions. Material drawn from records and informants includes botanical treatments and customary diagnostic and therapeutic methods, presented as a structured record of techniques and beliefs seen as increasingly vulnerable to change.
The foregoing pages prove, I think, to us that the Kaffir races, as represented by their “Amagqira,” possess no mean amount of knowledge of disease and its treatment, and their extensive use of herbs show in an astonishing degree, the valuable information which the tribes possess of the therapeutic actions and uses of the vegetable kingdom as it exists in those parts of the country which they inhabit.
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