“Blind sorcerer” and “maimed surgeon”: Recovering Perceptions of Disability in Early Modern West Central Africa

This paper investigates 17th and 18th century Italian missionary writings to illuminate how experiences and perceptions of bodily impairments provided unique opportunities for social empowerment in early modern West Central Africa. 

A careful analysis of Capuchin writings from the Kingdom of Kongo reveals significant insights into West Central African perceptions of disabled bodies as markers of an individual’s connection with the world of the Ancestors and spiritual forces. The missionaries often remarked on the role of people with disabilities as healer-diviners, noting how specific experiences of impairments were believed to grant individuals with special healing and divining abilities, which allowed access to prestigious social roles.

While the field of disability studies has expanded to examine non-European societies, the experiences and perceptions of impairments in pre-colonial Africa have remained overlooked in the scholarship. By reading against the archival grain, this paper argues for the need to investigate past experiences and meanings of disability from outside Western categories of thought. Exploring the connection between bodily differences, spirituality and the healing world shaping the experiences of people with disabilities in early modern West Central Africa, it highlights the existence of socio-cultural frameworks that allowed for positive and empowering interpretations of impairments in the premodern world, which warrant further investigation.