Vol. 33 No. 4 (2024): NJAS Special Issue: Becoming (Un)Equal in Age: Seniority and Superiority in African Societies
Special Issue: Becoming (Un)Equal in Age: Seniority and Superiority in African Societies

Augmented Authority: How ‘Simplicating’ Medicine Hurt Sukuma Elderhood

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Koen Stroeken
CARAM, Ghent University
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.53228/njas.v33i3.1164

Published 2024-12-19

Keywords

  • authority,
  • chieftaincy,
  • Sukuma,
  • Tanzania,
  • elderhood

How to Cite

Stroeken, K. (2024). Augmented Authority: How ‘Simplicating’ Medicine Hurt Sukuma Elderhood. Nordic Journal of African Studies, 33(4), 390–405. https://doi.org/10.53228/njas.v33i3.1164

Copyright (c) 2024 Koen Stroeken

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The paper describes changed elderhood in Sukuma-speaking villages in Tanzania through a combined situational and cultural analysis, starting with the traditional role of (re)generation and medicine in practices of greeting. Elderhood, I argue, has changed obliquely because of its interrelationship with medicine, whose union of recipe and rite was severed under globalizing pressures for ‘simplication’. By this we understand a process that simplifies a cultural practice, renders it predictable, through complicated substitution. Ethnographic synthesis demonstrates that the kul strand of natural growth and the kum strand of healing/regeneration are sources of production. Elders derive authority from the first source and augment it with the second. The latter’s medicinal claim to power antagonized the colonial administration in the 1930s and, for different reasons, also irritated the postcolonial state (with the exception of Magufuli’s presidency). The ‘simplication’ of medicine in the name of development has been aided by the demise of chieftaincy as well as by a national cultural divide and by dismissive attitudes to the institution of healing. Elderhood has indirectly paid the price.

This research report has been reviewed by the editors of the special issue but has not been externally peer-reviewed.

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