Medicine: A new cultivar of global coloniality

Pre-colonial African herbal lore ownership, control and preservation

The essence of traditional medicine attracts varying feelings across the globe depending on the metaphysical orientation of the persons concerned. Westerners usually demonise traditional herbal knowledge and the capacity of Africans to pioneer any scientific discovery or development.

Such undermining of African scientific capabilities especially in the medicinal field dates back to the colonial period and has persisted in the 21st century though in a different guise.

Pre-colonial Africa owned, controlled and preserved its traditional herbal and medicinal knowledge.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has defined African traditional medicine as the knowledge and practices, explicable or not, used in the diagnosis, prevention and elimination of physical, mental or societal imbalances for a particular indigenous people.

In this respect, every group of people had its understanding and ways of interacting with nature for the that African metaphysics entails the African world view concerning the existential bugging issues they face in life. Existence from an African metaphysical point of view is onto-triadic in profile. It comprises of three hierarchies namely the Supreme Being at top, followed by other spiritual beings like ancestors in their descending order of seniority, while the material beings, including human beings, constitute the lower section of the ladder (Mbiti, 1969).

What is important here is the fact that there was a very active interaction between the Supreme Being, other spiritual beings and the animate as well as the inanimate world in Traditional African society.

The spiritual realm in the face of ancestral spirits and alien spirits as guided by the Supreme Being endowed the African people with some specialist herbal and other medicinal knowledge. It was common in traditional Africa to have a person with a healing spirit (shavi rekurapa) in Shona.

Through the guidance of such a spirit the individual was able to discover herbs and other medicinal materials with curative abilities for the benefit of society at large. Guided by the spiritual beings, diviners provided diagnosis for health challenges then the herbalist chose and applied relevant remedies.

Herbalists, medicine man and midwives were good examples of figures who had specialist herbal and medicinal knowledge in traditional African societies (Chavhunduka, 1994).

Interestingly the knowledge about plants and medicine was kept a secret and only passed to the next generation of practitioners. The secrecy here need to be understood as security against theft or misappropriation of the medicinal knowledge. Warren (1991) made it clear that the knowledge was intergenerational and kept in trust for the future generation.

It is purely practical experience, proven through trial and error, that was handed down. In this respect, herbal and medicinal discoveries were a product of thorough “experimentation”. It is important to note at this juncture that what is important is not whether the preservation was through written records or orature. What is crucial is the fact that traditional African people possessed tried and tested herbal and medicinal knowledge well before the colonisers set foot on African soil. The San people, for example, are best described as first class botanists, who can identify over 300 different plants with different properties (New Africa, December 2013).

In this regard it is the way a given people interact with their biological resources that give rise to a knowledge that is unique to that group since those people are the ones who know their environment better. Interestingly, the herbal and medicinal knowledge was not commercialised. No profit motive was attached to the possession of such knowledge. The knowledge was a communal property for the benefit of that community and not for profit realisation. If ever a payment was made, it was just a token of appreciation especially after the restoration of one’s health. Usually a hen was given to the herbalist, medicine man or midwife, just as a token of appreciation (Chavhunduka, 1994).

Such sanity and unity with traditional herbal and medicinal lore was disturbed by the bullying nature of the Western colonisers on Africa.

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