author
Matthew L. Hewat
An early 20th-century physician and researcher, he is remembered for documenting Bantu folk beliefs and healing practices in southern Africa. His work preserves a snapshot of cultural knowledge that he feared was disappearing under colonial change.
1 Audiobook
Bantu Folk Lore (Medical and General)
by Matthew L. Hewat
About the author
Little biographical information about Matthew L. Hewat survives online, but library and archival records identify him as Matthew L. Hewat, M.D., and Project Gutenberg’s source data gives his lifespan as 1868–1931.
He is best known for Bantu Folk Lore (Medical and General), first published in Cape Town in the early 1900s. In the book’s preface, he explains that he had spent time in the border districts of the Cape Colony and was motivated to record what he saw as the medical folk traditions of Bantu-speaking communities before older customs were lost.
That makes Hewat an interesting figure for modern listeners: part medical observer, part collector of oral tradition, and very much a writer of his era. His surviving work offers a compact but revealing look at folklore, healing, belief, and colonial-era ethnographic curiosity in southern Africa.