The “Bantu Clinic”: A Genealogy of the African Patient as Object and Effect of South African Clinical Medicine, 1930–1990

Abstract

This paper is about power, medicine andthe identity of the African as a patient of westernmedicine. From a conventional perspective and asencoded in the current ’’quest for wholeness‘‘ thatcharacterises South African biomedical discourse, theAfrican patient – like any other patient – has alwaysexisted as an authentic and subjectified being, whosetrue attributes and experiences have been denied bythe ’’mechanistic,‘‘ ’’reductionistic‘‘ and ’’ethnocentric‘‘practices of clinical medicine. Against this liberalhumanist perspective on the body as ontologicallyindependent of power, this paper offers a Foucaultianreading of the African patient as – like any otherpatient – contingent upon the force relations immanentwithin and relayed through the clinical practices ofbiomedicine. A quintessential form of disciplinarymicro-power, these fabricate the most intimaterecesses of the human body as manageable objects ofmedical knowledge and social consciousness to makepossible the great control strategies of repression,segmentation and liberation that are the usual focusof conventional investigations into the place andfunction of medicine in society. Since the 1930s whenthe African body first emerged as a discrete object ofa secular clinical knowledge, these have repeatedlytransformed the attributes and identity of the Africanpatient, and the paper traces this archaeology ofSouth African clinical perception from then until the1990s to show how its “quest for wholeness” is not anend point of “discovery” or “liberation,” but merelyanother ephemeral crystallization of socio-medicalknowledge in a constantly changing force field ofdisciplinary power.