African Pharmaceuticals

by

Gabrielle Robbins, Alila Brossard Antonielli

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780197768723-0006

Introduction

Medicinal substances on the African continent have galvanized extensive work in the history of medicine, as well as allied disciplines such as anthropology and science and technology studies. Processed pharmaceuticals are largely a product of the twentieth century, but their antecedents—medicinal plants, simples, inoculations, and other forms of treatment—circulated widely through and beyond the continent for centuries before the advent of industrial medicine. African communities developed extensive knowledge of therapeutic substances, which people who were trafficked across the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans carried with them. Arab, Asian, and European explorers and colonizers, who also sought to capitalize on African resources and expertise, engaged in “bioprospecting” to discover useful African medicinal plants as trade in therapeutic substances expanded. African contributions to global histories of pharmacopeia are thus considerable. At the same time, missionary and military medicine were integral to European efforts to colonize the continent. Local and imported medicinal substances became embedded into colonial regimes that substantially, often violently, transformed African societies. Drugs protected some Europeans in novel disease environments. They were also wielded by colonizers to maintain African health on slave ships, discipline and medicalize African reproduction, and control human and animal disease outbreaks in African landscapes. In some instances, these legacies led to enduring mistrust of formal medical institutions and pharmaceutical substances. In others, nationalist groups seeking decolonized, independent states saw provision of biomedical health care, and the regulation of licit medicinal substances versus illicit intoxicating substances, as important goals. Newly independent African states hotly debated self-sufficient pharmaceutical production alongside the valorization of African healing traditions and the erection of public health services. Biomedical treatments have also encountered complex therapeutic milieux increasingly defined by pluralistic approaches to healing— animistic, Christian, Islamic, Ayurvedic, Chinese, and more. Medicinal substances at times moved flexibly across these different healing systems and, at times, did not. The rise of international global health projects in the twentieth century, and the extension of humanitarian efforts in response to epidemic outbreaks, opened new channels for foreign pharmaceuticals to make their ways to African contexts. International aid regimes also repositioned African communities in relation to global pharmaceutical industries, sparking ongoing debates about the ethics and politics of drug research, drug pricing, drug production, drug circulation, and drug access. Pharmaceutical politics in Africa call for continued historical and social scientific research given enduring and fraught questions about the social roles of medicines on the continent.

Edited Volumes

Pharmaceuticals are the subject of a growing number of useful edited volumes. Some integrate case study chapters from the African continent alongside material from other regions to understand pharmaceuticals as global commodities. Reynolds, et al. 2002 is an early model, which introduced analysis of medicines’ “social lives”—their production, circulation, and consumption—across a range of sites. Another core focus has been the global political economy of medical industries, such as Petryna, et al. 2006. Greene, et al. 2016 examines “pharmaceuticalization” as a worldwide process that established drugs as frontline treatments for most illnesses and redefined approaches to global health over the twentieth century. Several volumes specifically address medical practice and pharmaceutical use on the African continent or in Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Burton and Gerritsen 2023 employs a long-durée approach to medicines’ material culture in the Indian Ocean region, covering 400 years of medical change and exchange between the East African coast and the Asian subcontinent. Luedke and West 2006 synthesizes historical and ethnographic work on medicinal substances, healing practices, and cross-border mobility in southeastern Africa. Chapters in Geissler and Molyneux 2017 examine research for drug development and public health intervention in primarily colonial and postcolonial East African contexts. The authors of Baxerres and Cassier 2021 use 20th- and 21st-century trade in antimalarial medications to unpack the dynamics of West African pharmaceutical markets. Olsen and Sargent 2017 discusses pharmaceutical use, shortage, and social meanings in therapeutic milieux marked by intersections between Indigenous and imported healing systems. The range of themes and sites covered in these volumes attests to the ongoing dynamism in social studies of pharmaceuticals.

• Baxerres, Carine, and Maurice Cassier, eds. Understanding Drug Markets: An Analysis of Medicines, Regulations and Pharmaceutical Systems in the Global South. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021.

  DOI: 10.4324/0429329517

  Historical and sociological analyses of antimalarial drugs, primarily in Benin, Ghana, and Ivory Coast. Chapters address drug regulation and drug circulation, with attention to the impact of colonial policies on present-day governance. Considers the roles of Euro-American and Indian pharmaceutical companies as well as local health-care providers and pharmacists in shaping malaria treatment regimes in these countries and pharmaceutical companies’ roles in strengthening local economies.

• Burton, Cleetus, and Anne Gerritsen, eds. Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World: Medicine, Material Culture and Trade, 1600–2000. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

  Anthology focused on material culture in historical analysis, informed by Bruno Latour’s work on the power of objects. Chapters examine circulation of materia medica and medical knowledge through the Indian subcontinent and between Asia and East Africa in Indian Ocean trade networks.

• Geissler, Paul Wenzel, and Catherine Molyneux, eds. Evidence, Ethos and Experiment: The Anthropology and History of Medical Research in Africa. New York: Berghahn, 2017.

  A multidisciplinary edited collection on the politics and ethics of medical experiments across a variety of African sites and in the context of expanding global health programs during the twentieth century. Chapters on pharmaceuticals include leprosy treatment in Nigeria; antimalarial drugs and medicinal plants in Tanzania; HIV/AIDS medication in Kenya; and drug trials and therapeutic pluralism in The Gambia.

• Greene, Jeremy A., Flurin Condrau, and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, eds. Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226390901.001.0001

  Examines “pharmaceuticalization” as a global process over the twentieth century, which describes how processed drugs (antibiotics, antiretrovirals, chemotherapies, psychiatric medications, etc.) became the primary means of treating disease. Chapters on cancer treatment in Botswana and pharmaceutical markets in Nigeria complement data from the Americas and Europe.

• Luedke, Tracy J., and Harry G. West, eds. Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

  Presents historical and anthropological analyses of medical practices in Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapters focus on movement of medicinal substances and medical practitioners in contexts marked by rising social inequality, religious intensification, novel disease emergence, and postcolonial racial politics.

• Olsen, William C., and Carolyn Fishel Sargent, eds. African Medical Pluralism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.

  DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1zxz1b8

  Ethnographic volume on interactions between healing systems in northern, western, central, and eastern Africa. Chapters address contraceptives, cancer medicines, rehydration therapies, antibiotics, and hormones, in contexts marked by complex overlaps among biomedicine, religion, ritual practice, and economic challenge.

• Petryna, Adriana, Andrew Lakoff, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

  DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv11cw7qd

  Amid expanding global health regimes and clinical trial infrastructures, this volume considers issues of ethics and political economy in worldwide medical industries. Primarily ethnographic work on drug research and drug shortages on the African continent appear alongside chapters on Japan, Argentina, France, Brazil, and India.

• Reynolds, Susan White, Sjaak van der Geest, and Anita Hardon, eds. Social Lives of Medicines. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  Primarily anthropological edited volume organized around the social meanings of drugs across a range of global sites, including Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Uganda. Divided into sections on “The Consumers,” “The Providers,” and “The Strategists.” Valuable for joint attention to drug consumption and production. Major volume in social studies of pharmaceuticals whose “biographical approach” to drugs’ production and consumption remains influential.