Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 1 | Scholarship Emerges in Africa, page 2, (low-bandwidth)

A New Breed
Dr. Keto Mshigeni, professor of marine botany at the University of Namibia, is one of the new breed of African scientists. Mshigeni has, like Jones, single-handedly created new industries for Africa’s subsistence farmers. His work has launched mushroom and seaweed farming industries where none existed before, creating jobs for mostly previously unemployed women in East and West Africa.

In Zanzibar and in Mshigeni’s native Tanzania, 40,000 women are now farming seaweed, which in some form is probably consumed by virtually everyone on earth. It is used in a wide variety of pharmaceutical and food products, including yogurt, toothpaste, shaving cream and ice cream. From zero seven years ago, the export industry in Tanzania is now valued at $20 million annually. Mshigeni believes the kind of farming that has been spurred by his research would be sustainable in all the coastal countries of the continent.

For his work on seaweed, Mshigeni has been awarded the UN’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali Prize. But he says the biggest reward for him is to see how his work has resulted in an improved quality of life for the women who have become seaweed farmers.

“We thought, now we are being liberated,” says 70-year-old Miriam Juma Hamis, who was the first woman to take up seaweed farming in Zanzibar, where the project began. “We could earn a living.” She is speaking as part of a group of about seven women seaweed farmers, who all nod in agreement.

Ahura Abdul Aziz Isa, a 51-year-old mother of nine children, says, “The whole family depends on this money. I can pay my children’s school fees and buy the uniforms, shoes and books they need.”

Like Jones, Mshigeni’s scientific imagination was fired in childhood. He says, “In my home village, Mamba Same, in Tanzania, my friends and I used to harvest certain plants, which we put into river ponds. We caught fish that way.”

Mshigeni shares with Jones and other leading African scientists, a deep religious belief. Many of his friends refer to Mshigeni as “Almost Reverend,” because, by the age of 11, he could recite more than 150 biblical verses from memory.

One of the earliest lessons he learned while studying as a scientist, Mshigeni says, was that researchers’ imperative to publish papers in English and other Western languages was hurting African development. “These papers—many of them quite good—would just languish,” he notes. “They were of absolutely no use to most Africans because they were not in their local language. I decided, starting with the work on seaweeds, to translate them into Swahili so that the people of East Africa could easily understand them.”

Another difficulty African researchers have with the publishing imperative is that many struggle to do so in languages not their own. Dr. Ruth Oniang’o is the editor-in-chief of the African Journal of Food, Agriculture, Nutrition and Development, one of the growing number of scientific journals created on the continent because of the perceived difficulties of publishing in the West. “I’m finding that, for some papers, it may take two or three reviews just to get it to the level of publication,” she says.

Mshigeni’s work is already delivering exponential benefits: new businesses have developed to add value to farmed seaweed, which is presently cultivated only for the export market. South African Klauss Rottman has a seaweed processing business in Johannesburg. He sees a wide range of new applications for the product, including medicinal uses, crop fertilization and cosmetics.

“Goiter is a huge problem throughout much of Africa,” Rottman explains. “One hundred million Africans are affected by goiter and other related disorders. Pregnant women don’t get enough iron and they have children with birth defects. Seaweeds are very high in iodine. The problem with iodized salt is the iodine evaporates during the long distances the trucks have to travel. But seaweed retains its iodine. It could be powderized, spread on food and save many lives.”

Despite the success of his scholarship on seaweed farming, Mshigeni is even more excited about his most recent research—on the cultivation of mushrooms. “The global market,” he notes, “is worth $30 billion a year for edible mushrooms and $10 billion for medicinal mushrooms. Africa’s share of that is .03 percent. If we just took truffles alone, which we also have here in Africa—just like France—that one crop is worth $3-4 billion.”

Mshigeni is hoping that mushroom farming, which he has helped spread to eight African countries so far, will become the signature project for the UN ZERI project—Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives—for which he serves as Africa chairperson.

“ZERI looks into a wide range of materials that we generally conceive of as waste in order to see how we can turn them into raw materials for new, marketable, value-added products,” he explains. “Africa, where 80 percent of the people are subsistence farmers raising maize, sugar cane, cotton, bananas, coffee, sisal and the like, produces huge amounts of organic wastes, which can cause pollution. Mushroom farming is just one example of what we can do with this biomass, which can be used as a substrate to produce not only mushrooms but also bio-gas for energy, construction materials and other products not yet dreamed of.”

The UN’s ZERI project in Africa, now headquartered in Namibia, aims to have “Centers of Excellence” in eight African countries to research and distribute information throughout the continent about the marketable utilization of so-called organic wastes.

A growing number of African medical researchers are exploring another offshoot of Mshigeni’s work—medicinal mushrooms. One variety, the garadema mushroom, is producing promising results.

Dr. Waza Kaunda is the son of Zambia’s founding president, Kenneth Kaunda, a Pan-Africanist. Waza Kaunda has been studying the use of medicinal mushrooms on HIV/AIDS patients. “These mushrooms grow on dead trees,” Kaunda says, “and are a very good immune booster. In our research project, patients treated with the mushrooms stop losing weight and keep improving. We surprise doctors at the hospital when, after one year, we send them patients who they thought should have been dead.”

Dr. Daniel Mtaengo, senior research fellow at Tanzania’s Institute of Traditional Medicine, doesn’t think the mushroom is a cure for HIV/AIDS, or a substitute for anti-retroviral drugs—an assertion that Kaunda agrees with. “It’s an immuno-stimulator,” Mtaengo says.

“This mushroom has long been used by traditional healers as a rejuvenator, a tonic, an aphrodisiac. When we tried it on HIV/AIDS patients, we proved it works for them. It improves appetites, skin and complexion. It builds blood vessels and improves circulation. It revives the linings of the intestines and helps cure fungus infections much quicker. The mushroom seems to extend patients’ lives but we can’t say how long yet.”

Next page: The garadema mushroom is one example of the growing interest in just about every African country in traditional medicine.

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