A not-so-modern clinic in northwest Zimbabwe

Africa Talks seminar

In 1965, an African immigrant from southern Zimbabwe, Cleto Zharare, established the Rupenyu clinic in Gokwe district, lying in the northwestern part of the country. This was at a time when Gokwe was experiencing unprecedented immigration due to displacements from ‘white’ farms and a state-backed boom in African cotton farming. The clinic appeared to be ‘western’—using drugs, syringes, and pills, and staffed with professionals trained in biomedicine working in a ‘modern’ dispensary. However, the clinic borrowed from and tolerated African healing practices. This talk explores the contentious duality of scientific and traditional medical systems that transformed the clinic into ‘a not-so-modern’ institution. I would want to argue against most literature that portrayed Africans as intermediaries within state frameworks that the clinic demonstrates how Africans outside of state structures carved a niche and dispensed independent, unique healthcare service in the face of limited colonial state development programmes.

About the Author

Asa Mudzimu is a Cadbury Fellow at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham. He specialises in the history of Southern Africa with a particular focus on the social history of medicine and environment in Zimbabwe. Before joining the DASA, Asa taught at the University of Zimbabwe, History Department.

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