African medicine is an important component of the cultural adaptive system. The system has been evolving interminably in response to changing environmental vulnerabilities and health care needs since primordial times. Flexibility of indigenous African ethnomedicine and its associated customs has since time immemorial incorporated new techniques and knowledge. The resulting textual and discourse heritage on African medicine has often depicted its dialectical interrelationship with western biomedicine and other medical systems. The oral and documentary records on the authenticity of African medicine either conceal or condescend to its contributions to overall healthseeking and illness behaviour. Tensions in conceptualisation of African medicine relate to its pragmatic borrowing from non-African medical systems that are compatible with local pluralistic systems and indigenous ontology. The advent of colonial and post-colonial health care paradigms further define the emergence of dialectics in the documentation and appraisal of African medicine against western standards of science and health care practices.

The centenary of the Great War has led to a widening of interest in aspects of the African theatre. Until 2013 the focus was mainly military. Since then, social and cultural aspects have come more to the fore with particular emphasis on the diversity of the participants. Focusing on East Africa as the main African theatre of conflict, the works by Michelle Moyd, Edmund Yorke and Jan-Bart Gewald amongst others are examples of the recent trend.

More recently, working with the diaries of medical officers, such as Norman Parsons Jewell, who served in Africa, highlighted the value of medical records to understanding the conditions faced by the military authorities in fulfilling their task. References to medical services and interactions between forces in memoirs of German participants suggest that rich comparisons can be made between the various imperial powers which saw service in Africa.

New modes of publishing African Studies accelerate research, creating digital repositories, but valuing the outcomes is complex, and contested. For tenure of both librarians and academics, refereed publications remain the Holy Grail. Fears of quality decline accompany a rise in self-publishing and inverse social media brevity. Valuing works requires reliable sources, but permanency concerns remain: online news in Africa can quickly disappear, as evident with Ebola reporting; and if you trust Google, in African languages some news never occurred! But at the same time, new modes of publishing and communication allow wider review, and the contesting of canon. Twenty years ago, Africanists hoped open access credentialing was just around the corner. This has not eventuated but a measure of recognition is conceded as society itself goes online. Blogs and open access journals will not clinch jobs, but they can let scholars leave an imprint. Graduate digital courses with blogs replacing essays and completed projects offered back to libraries show a trend to capacitise a new generation of teachers, valorising research. Librarian job descriptions insist on digital skills. Granting bodies privilege the digital. Publishers go online. African studies associations hold digital workshops. If output in core media maintains centrality in ranking and citation then there is now a merging of forms. New books appear, some to acclaim, using digital sources, new knowledge discovery techniques emerge. Across all these trends, there will remain a need to balance digital and print collected by libraries, and refereed writing with more spontaneous communication, but their boundary is likely to narrow.

Between 1990 and 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa led a prominent peaceful campaign for the recognition and just treatment of his community by the military dictatorship of General Abacha. As author and activist, he wrote - and generally self-published - across a huge range of genres: novels, plays, short stories, children's tales, poetry, histories, political tracts, diaries, satires, and newspaper columns. He used the versatility of the written medium to speak out internationally about the abuses suffered by his small Niger Delta minority community, the Ogoni. Meanwhile, his efforts at home as leader of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, helped to mobilise a mass protest, 300,000-strong, against Shell Oil in January 1993, following which the company withdrew from the area. He was hanged on 10th November 1995 on trumped-up murder charges along with eight fellow Ogoni activists.

Good health is a prerequisite to the socio-economic development of any community. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) (1988), health is defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not the mere absence of disease or infirmity. Education which plays an important role in achieving good health, however, is a complex and planned learning experience that aims to bring about changes in cognitive (knowledge), affective (attitude, belief and value) and psychomotor (skill) domains of behaviour (Yazachew and Alem, 2004). It is a combination of learning experiences designed to facilitate voluntary actions conducive to health. According to Fabiyi (2001), health education aims at encouraging people to adopt and sustain healthful life patterns, to use judiciously and wisely the health services available to them and use these to make their decisions, both individually and collectively to improve their health status and environment.

Social media applications have become increasingly popular components of our everyday lives in today's globalising society. Social media provide a context where people across the world can communicate, exchange messages, share knowledge, and interact with each other regardless of the distance that separates them (Sawyer, 2011). Technological developments the world over have made the internet an innovative way for individuals and families to communicate. Family members use social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace to create and sustain relationships (Boyd and Ellison,. 2007). These social media sites let those who use them create personal profiles, while connecting with other users of the sites; users can upload photographs, post what they are doing at any given time, and send personal or public messages to whomever they choose. In this “information age,” social media sites seem to be growing rapidly in popularity, especially among young adults (Pempek, Yermolayeva, & Calvert, 2008).