In rural Zambia, where global health organisations arrive continuously – to implement HIV programmes, volunteer in clinics, or conduct randomized control trials – vernacular healers (bang’anga) are also visited by outside actors who offer them healing advice: these are spirits who dress in white medical gowns and who physically resemble white people (bakuwa). Like their human counterparts, these spirits are unpredictable: they arrive and leave on their own terms, setting in motion new relationships and sometimes cutting them off unexpectedly. By situating vernacular healers as worldly actors who are entangled within transnational dynamics of global health, this paper explores their distinctive responses to the problem of disconnection. Vernacular healers developed careful techniques for maintaining and repairing their relations with these unpredictable spirits over time. These techniques draw attention to the long-term attachments that are set in motion through projects of care – revealing a desire for connection and accountability that transcends the secular boundaries of the state. By focusing on these relations, this paper shows how the practices of vernacular healers offer resources for rethinking critiques of global health, foregrounding long-term connection and a recognition of responsibilities across borders.
