Overview

Historian Florence Bernault discusses the long and rich experience of African populations and communities in confronting endemics, epidemics and pandemics, giving an account of their relations, from the colonial period to the present time, with the knowledges, theories, techniques and modes of action of biomedicine. Its appropriations and contributions to the construction of health systems and “medical pluralism” based on the dialogue of biomedicine with other knowledges and practices of care and healing and with its protagonists are part of the resistance and responses to the history of marginalization, persecution, segregation and racial and ethnic profiling that characterized colonial domination and that persist in its current manifestations.  

_{Image | Local health centers experimenting with coronavirus- sourced from US Government department: Public Health Image Library, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention}