African Traditional Healers

Practitioners and transmitters of African traditional healing knowledge, covering both healers working within a documented African indigenous tradition and the historical transmission of specific African medical practices, such as smallpox inoculation, into new settings. This includes a Zulu sangoma trained in a family healing lineage who documented and publicly represented Southern African healing tradition, and an enslaved West African man whose account of variolation, a preventive practice used for generations in parts of Africa, was carried into colonial Boston medical practice. A healer whose own tradition is a Western, South Asian or East Asian system rather than an African one is grouped elsewhere even if their later career touched Africa.