Not Medicine at All: Colonial Healthcare and Reclassification of Indigenous Practice in Ibadan, 1900–1957

This essay argues that the conventional framing of the colonial medical encounter in Ibadan, as a competition between two systems that traditional medicine partially lost, misdescribes what occurred. Colonial healthcare provision did not simply compete with indigenous practice. It reclassified it. By deciding which practices would be counted, licensed, taught and recorded as medicine, the colonial administration and the Christian missions redistributed authority among indigenous practitioners, and they did so unevenly.