With the increase of literature concentrating on health in Africa, specifically on diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria, HIV/AIDS, Illness, and African Well-Being situates its primary concern in the area of context, condition and circumstance. This edited collection seeks to transcend the view of Africa as a diseased continent, in response to what it deems the social science-based behavioural approach to health and well-being, and instead situate modern health issues and policy within a historical context. It does so through its three different sections: Case studies; Globalisation, development and health; and HIV/AIDS. The chapters within the ‘Case studies’ section look at a variety of health issues in different African contexts, and the divergence between colonial and indigenous medicines in addressing health. This section offers a historical understanding of health in Africa, the general themes and findings of which will be familiar to academics working within this area of research. The second section, ‘Globalization, development and health’, develops the book's historical context to consider the inter-relationship between these three dimensions within specific issue areas and countries. Most of the chapters in this section offer little new knowledge on the relationship between health and globalisation, but re-enforce much pre-existing research within the field. That said, Freek Cronje and Charity Chenga's chapter, ‘Health issues in a mining community in South Africa’, is worthy of mention as an interesting and excellent stand-alone study. The third section, ‘HIV/AIDS’, begins by giving an overall account of global governance responses and challenges to the epidemic, before focusing on the historical context to AIDS response in Burkina Faso and the inter-relationship between the government and the epidemic in Chapter 13. William N. Mkanta's study of deliberate transmission in Tanzania, and Mandi Chikombero's focus group discussions in Zimbabwe, provide interesting insights into perception, and offer key examples of the disconnect between policy and people.
Historical narratives are key to understanding health in the modern context, and thus this book is of relevance and interest to health practitioners and researchers alike. The book's selling point is its aim of multi-disciplined research and transcendence of oft-cited issues and contexts. However, this multi-discipline approach falls short in its limited acknowledgement of prior research within the field of public health. Beyond health and context, there is little continuity between chapters, and the lack of a conclusion summarising the key themes, issues of note and main contributions to knowledge leaves doubt as to the overall message of the book. The use of ‘Globalisation, development and health’ and ‘HIV/AIDS’ appear to be catch-all in this sense, and, with the exception of select chapters, offer little substantive contribution to these multi-faceted and complex issue areas. The book's main contribution is empirical research that supports and supplements existing knowledge on health and well-being, not an authoritative account of this subject matter.
