This chapter focuses on remedies and the materiality of medicine in Angola. It discusses the exchange and transmission of medicinal knowledge between Africans and Europeans and the circulation of West-Central African medical ideas throughout the Atlantic world. This medical interaction started soon after Europeans made first contact with the Kingdom of Kongo, and the Portuguese eagerly began to learn healing methods from locals. Exchanging medical knowledge formed the basis for cultural contacts, as local rulers requested European healing specialists and offered valued African medicinals as gifts to be sent to Portuguese kings. Common to many European observations, some of them based on personally experimenting with African phytotherapies, was an appreciation for an African plant remedy. A shared trait in cross-cultural medical interaction during early modern European expansion was that local medicinals were regarded as the most suitable to cure diseases contracted in those places. However, West-Central African medical knowledge and medicinals also spread throughout the Atlantic world, especially to Brazil and Portugal, by the eighteenth century.

This chapter introduces the conceptual, theoretical and methodological framework of the book, with focus on cross-cultural medical encounters in Africa and the Atlantic world. It discusses health and healing in African settings, in which medicine and medical cultures have been configured spatially and temporally in different ways, with multiple nexuses between healing and political power. Bringing together histories of healing from the Black Atlantic world, the chapter highlights medical pluralism as a central concept to describe the context of healing in this in the early modern period. From the point of view of cross-cultural medical interaction, Europeans shared a number of assumptions about illness causation and therapeutic practice with Africans. This common ground led to widespread reliance on African healing and harming specialists. Not all medicines were beneficent, but accusations about the use of sorcery and poison occasionally emerged in European documentation.

By concentrating on the interaction between indigenous informants and European settlers, this chapter highlights African botanical expertise and medical knowledge on the Gold Coast. Just like in Angola and Kongo, local medical knowledge emerged as a viable healing alternative for European settlers, who were confined to West African coastal enclaves and could not always count upon a steady supply of imported European medicines. Cultural go-betweens, many of them women, provided everyday healthcare and facilitated Europeans’ access to local healers when necessary. This can be detected in English, Dutch and Danish sources on the Gold Coast, which are examined in this chapter. Europeans who settled in West Africa experimented with local medicinals and sought to tap the sources of indigenous healing knowledge by consulting with their African companions and slaves and by seeking access to specialist healers. Some of them accumulated knowledge that allowed them to act as their own doctors with a mixed bag of medicines.