Short Abstract

This panel examines how health actors negotiated medical authority in colonial and postcolonial Africa, focusing on their role as intermediaries between states, communities, international institutions, and competing forms of medical knowledge.

Long Abstract

This panel aims to bring together studies of healthcare actors from North, West, East, and Southern Africa, examining how they shaped medical practices, institutions, and forms of authority across (post)colonial contexts. By encompassing different regions and colonial legacies, it seeks to reflect the geographical and historical diversity of the continent and foster comparison across African healthcare experiences. The historiography of modern Africa has emphasized the inequalities and exclusions embedded in colonial medical systems and the financial, institutional, and material constraints that persisted after independence. Shifting the focus from national policies to the actors who made healthcare possible, however, reveals a landscape of negotiation, mediation, cooperation, and contestation. The panel examines doctors, nurses, midwives, public health officers, missionaries, and community health workers operating at the intersection of patients and communities, state institutions, religious organizations, and international agencies. It invites contributions addressing their involvement in public health campaigns, patient care, professional training, and the development of scientific and medical infrastructures. How did health professionals mediate biomedical knowledge, state policies, and local therapeutic practices, mobilize resources under conditions of scarcity, and translate international programmes and models into local practices? The panel particularly welcomes contributions examining how professional identities, expertise, and positions within medical hierarchies shaped healthcare workers’ room for manoeuvre. Rather than treating them simply as agents of colonial or postcolonial states, the panel explores their capacities to embody, circumvent, and contest medical authority, using healthcare as a prism through which to reassess political and social transformations in modern Africa.

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