Willem ten Rhijne’s Cape Khoikhoi Healing Report

Record summary

Willem ten Rhijne’s 1686 Schediasma de Promontorio Bonae Spei includes an early European description of Cape populations, illness concepts, healing, and ritual specialists. It is a promising source for investigating historical representations of altered consciousness, diagnosis, and claims of spirit-mediated treatment before the eighteenth-century expansion of colonial ethnography. The report is brief and framed through European medicine and natural philosophy, so it cannot independently establish what practitioners experienced or whether treatments worked. Its value lies in identifiable comparison with later Cape sources.