author
Matthew L. Hewat
An early 20th-century physician whose writing opens a window onto traditional Bantu beliefs, healing practices, and storytelling in southern Africa. His best-known work blends medical curiosity with folklore in a way that still feels vivid and historically revealing.
1 Audiobook
Bantu Folk Lore (Medical and General)
by Matthew L. Hewat
About the author
Matthew L. Hewat was a medical doctor and writer best known for Bantu Folk Lore (Medical and General), published in Cape Town in 1906. In that book, he describes spending time in the border districts of the Cape Colony and becoming interested in recording the medical beliefs and traditional lore he encountered there.
Because so little biographical information about him is readily confirmed in major reference sources, it is safest to describe him through his surviving work. His book reflects an early 20th-century effort to document folk medicine, customs, and oral tradition among Bantu-speaking communities in southern Africa, and it has remained accessible through archival and public-domain collections.
Readers coming to Hewat today will likely find him most interesting as a historical observer: a doctor trying to preserve knowledge he believed was fading, and a writer whose work captures both the curiosity and the limitations of his era.