ABSTRACT
The evolution of Western health care in the Third World, including in Africa, followed the establishment of political administration vis-à-vis the introduction of modern economy in the colonized regions. To start with, the colonial administrators encountered severe health problems associated with the socio-cultural and physical environmental conditions of the African landscape, besides the roles of European and Arab immigrants in the introduction of some disease problems. For reasons probably connected with the lack of understanding and the need to take firm control of both the social and political affairs of Africans, the colonial administrators conceived the African traditional health care system as ‘satanic’, ‘primitive’ and ‘unscientific’ (Anyinam 1991). Its development was suppressed but not exterminated, and up to today this view is held by many African medical professionals.
