The medical life of William Anderson Soga in late nineteenth-century Britain and South Africa

Abstract

William Anderson Soga is considered the first indigenous Western-educated medical doctor in the region that would become South Africa. As a medical missionary he epitomized the union of medicine and religion to promote ‘civilization’. This paper explores the world inhabited by the Sogas which comprised the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’, progress, conflict and conquest. It seeks to contextualize the figure of William Anderson Soga in late nineteenth-century South Africa and uses as a case study Soga’s thesis on the Bomvana as a means of understanding his own position as a figure of mixed heritage during a period when Western ‘civilization’ was unequivocally harnessed to the narrative of progress. Soga’s analysis of the health and indigenous healing practices of the Bomvana spanned the fields of medicine and ethnography, with a focus on the role of the environment, an environment that was rapidly changing owing to modernization. While Soga explicitly advocated Western medical practices, his thesis was nevertheless an attempt to record aspects of indigenous culture as they were being eroded by the pervasive influence of Western knowledge systems. Finally, this paper addresses the intellectual influences that underpinned Soga’s analysis, demonstrating the ambiguous legacy of modernity.