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

Traditional Practices Resurface
The garadema mushroom is one example of the growing interest in just about every African country in traditional medicine. Throughout the continent, scientists are studying ancient plants and herbs. The aim is to try and reestablish traditional medicine as an integral part of the primary health care system.

“Africa must return to traditional medicine,” says Dr. Ragasian Mahunnah, with the Institute of Traditional Medicine in Tanzania. “The key to health care in Africa is to be more preventive, because most Africans, once they get sick, can’t afford to treat diseases in the Western ways. We can’t afford the machines, or the drugs, or the Western trained physicians who know how to use them.”

Compared to the science in Asia, Latin America—even Europe and the U.S.—research in traditional medicine in Africa lags far behind. Mahunnah says the main reason for this is colonialism. “When the colonists came, they suppressed the traditional medicine system. It was seen as something evil—voodoo or witchcraft. The colonists used force in suppressing traditional medicines. People were killed in public for using them.”

The focus on traditional medicine in Africa today is on taking an inventory of the customs and traditions all across the continent. The African Union (AU) has a scientific technical committee on traditional medicine consisting of medical doctors, botanists, pharmacologists, chemists and traditional healers who do ethno-botanical surveys.

So far, in 19 countries, plants are being collected and identified and compiled into an ethno-pharmacopeia for each particular nation. “We are trying to document the botanical folklore in each country,” says Mahunnah, a member of the AU committee.

“Whenever a traditional healer dies,” he says, “it’s like a library being burned. That’s what I say when I attend their funerals.”

Some of the special plants themselves are being burned, says chemistry professor Dr. Mayongo Nkunya, the chief academic officer of the University of Dar es Salaam. Nkunya, who has long researched the efficacy of traditional plants on a variety of African diseases, said one tree was discovered that was “very rare, but apparently the bark is effective against malaria parasites. The people in that area use it for firewood, so soon, the tree will disappear.”

Nkunya says another danger is bio-piracy by pharmaceutical giants from developed countries. “They are taking large quantities of our plants and herbs,” he reports. “They will make the compounds and then sell them back to us.”

But the biggest problem, according to Mahunnah, is the way information has been passed on since antiquity. “The tradition was always for knowledge to be passed from one person to another—usually within the same family—and regarded as holy secrets. Its possession guaranteed status in the community. Colonialism was successful in suppressing traditional medicine because it didn’t take much to disrupt the transfer of knowledge, since there was no documentation.

“Another factor in the loss of this knowledge,” Mahunnah continues, “is that today’s traditional healers may not have learned exactly the time of year or month to harvest the plants, or precisely how to process them. Was it the leaves, the roots, the stems or some combination of them that produced the cure? Many healers today will cure some people and have no effect on others, and not know why. Every time you pick a plant, the concentration of the active ingredient is different.”

African governments are striving to institutionalize traditional medicine. Even in South Africa, where Western medicine is very advanced—the country inaugurated heart transplants—traditional medicine is being rediscovered as a method of primary health care in a nation where, like much of Africa, Western methods are too expensive to be practical for many people.

“The challenge,” says Mahunnah, “is to bridge the gap between Western and traditional medicine, as they have done in China. There is mistrust between so-called modern and traditional medicine. Most of our doctors were trained in the West. Once this divide is conquered,” he predicts, “over the next five-to-ten years, we will have cures for several diseases, including malaria, hypertension, diarrhea and many others.”

Dr. Nana Kofi Ayisi, head of the vitrology unit of the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in Ghana, believes he already has several treatments for HIV/AIDS.

“I have worked on twenty-six plants, and five of them have anti-HIV properties,” Ayisi says. “One particular plant has properties that no drug has in the world: it kills chronically infected cells. HIV infected cells produce new ones. One of our plants was able to kill these new cells without affecting the uninfected cells.”

“I also found another plant,” he continues, “which, when used in combination with two others, can be used as a vaginal microbicide. You don’t have to wait for the person to be infected. It can be used in formulations by women to prevent infection. It prevents the virus from attaching to the cells. I asked the American National Institute of Health to test the plants. Their results were even better than I was getting here. The plants inhibit the replication of HIV.”

Ayisi’s experience suggests another challenge for African scientists and governments—very few universities or nations have policies on intellectual property rights that enable researchers to profit from their discoveries or to prevent developed nations from pirating their bio-resources.

Ayisi tried to patent some of the traditional medicines himself in the U.S., but found the experience prohibitive. “Placing a patent on a product in Africa is not really effective. The U.S. has come to dominate the market on intellectual property rights, so you have to apply there. But in the U.S., the process is so complicated and expensive that very few people in developing countries have access to it.”

Despite the disappointments, Ayisi remains determined. “I always felt that God has given a purpose to my life— that there is something I have to accomplish here in science on this continent. So that when children in the future read history, they won’t think that their ancestors didn’t do everything they could to make the following generations’ lives better.”

Researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry have also engaged with traditional healers.

Dr. Ntomchukwu Sylvester Madu is the head of the psychology department at the University of the North in South Africa and has spent much of the past ten years researching psychotherapy in Africa, starting in his native Nigeria.

“Here, psychotherapy differs from the concept of psychotherapy in Europe and America,” says Madu, “because it must include concepts like religious and traditional healing. In the typical African environment, these are very important. Eighty percent of Africans consult traditional or religious healers.”

Madu was trained in Austria, but when he returned to Nigeria in 1985, he was only one of five psychotherapists for 135 million people. Madu was soon “confronted with a lot of problems. The clients’ attitudes were completely different than in Austria. First, psychotherapy is completely new to them, so a certain amount of psycho-education had to take place.”

There are also three different kinds of patients in Africa, Madu says. “There are the Westernized patients who are used to seeing a Western medical doctor. There are the rural patients who are used to seeing the traditional healer. And there are those born in the villages but who moved to the townships. They consult both types.”

Next page: Madu sees a growing body of research that suggests many methods used by traditional healers “can be categorized under psychotherapy. They are similar to typical psychological methods we use for treatment.

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