Special Issue Introduction: Photographs as Sources for African Histories of Health and Healing

abstract: This special issue explores the opportunities and challenges of using photographs to write histories of health and healing in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Since the late nineteenth-century introduction of photographic technology to Africa, it has been employed in a myriad of manners and settings related to health. Yet while photographs abound in medical histories of Africa—typically as provocative yet unexplored cover photos or illustrations—historians of health and healing in Africa have not systematically utilized photographs as historical sources that augment or contest analyses based on written sources. This special issue introduction proposes a set of tools that establish the intersection of visual, medical and African history as a productive analytic: (1) confronting the fiction of photographic transparency through contextualization, (2) close viewing of and ethical engagement with images, and (3) centering the fictions of photographic truth as historical subjects in themselves. These tools are demonstrated with reference to the contributions in the special issue, dealing, variously, with colonial-era Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and South Africa.