| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Method/Theory

Nancy R. Hunt. A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo. (Body, Commodity, Text.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 1999. Pp. xix, 475. Cloth $59.95, paper $20.95.

Nancy R. Hunt's study is an important contribution to the historiography of medical practice, missionary activity, and gender in the Congo, three themes that she brings together quite effectively. Her narrative focuses on Yakusu and its surroundings in the Upper Congo River area. Yakusu was home to a British Missionary Society (BMS) medical mission that, in 1929, established a training school for midwives. Hunt traces the history of childbirth medicalization in Congo from the pronatalism of the late Leopoldian period to the postcolonial birth routine in the late 1980s. 1

Medicine and medical knowledge in the Belgian Congo constituted a battlefield between colonizers and colonized in which the former attempted to obliterate local beliefs in order to produce docile bodies and minds while the latter strove to preserve their cultural continuity. This book is as much about the meaning of words as it is about the meaning of rituals and performances. Readers have to exercise exceeding patience as the author leads them into the sinuosities of semiotics, through a forest of symbols, meanings, and rituals. In the first three chapters, Hunt convincingly conveys the colonial decor within which contested claims about therapeutic practices, rituals, and cultures erupted between the European colonizers and the Lokele people. For the most part, these chapters are devoted to libeli, a boy's rite of passage that had been branded as fraudulent by the colonizers before resurging in 1924. Although discussion of this African ritual is tantalizing on its own account, the author does not make a strong enough case as to why libeli, which she presents as an eminently male ritual that involves power and food (thus wealth), is such an indispensable context to understanding the history of colonial child-bearing practices. . . .

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