Local African healing traditions

Africa is a continent of more than fifty countries and thousands of peoples and languages. So there is no single African medicine. Many traditions do share a few features, though: knowledge is often oral, tied to a particular area and community, and health is about more than the body alone.

The history of this knowledge has largely not been written down, but it is old. Plants people still use today, such as the baobab and the shea tree, have been part of food, trade and care for centuries. Knowledge travelled along trade routes across the Sahara, along the Swahili coast and down the Nile, and mixed with Islamic, Arab and later European influences.

There are written traditions too. In Ethiopia there are centuries-old medical manuscripts in Ge’ez, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, with recipes and prayers. In West African cities such as Timbuktu, scholars kept manuscripts that also cover medicine.

The colonial period put traditional care under pressure. Colonial administrations and missions fought especially its spiritual sides as superstition. After independence many countries looked for a way to let traditional and biomedical care exist side by side.

In many African traditions health is a matter of balance and good relationships: with one’s own body, with family and community, with the ancestors and with the land. Illness can therefore have a natural cause as well as a social or spiritual one.

Many traditions distinguish between ordinary ailments, treated with familiar remedies, and illnesses that are “something else”: persistent, inexplicable or linked to conflict. For the second group people ask not only what is wrong, but also why it is happening to this particular person.

Healing therefore often concerns more than the sick person alone. A treatment can include a ritual for the whole family, settling a quarrel or honouring the ancestors.

There are many kinds of healers. Herbalists know plants and preparations. Diviners or seers look for causes and meaning. Midwives accompany pregnancy and birth. Bonesetters treat fractures. Often one person combines several roles.

Knowledge is usually passed on within families or through an apprenticeship with an experienced healer. There is also broad household knowledge: which leaves you boil for fever, which bark for stomach ache. At markets in cities such as Lagos, Accra and Durban, specialised traders sell herbs, roots and bark, and give advice.

Some knowledge is secret or meant only for initiates. That protects it, but also makes it vulnerable when young people no longer take up the tradition.

Most knowledge is not recorded in books but in practice, in songs and in stories. What has been written down often comes from outsiders: travellers, missionaries, colonial officials and later anthropologists and botanists. These sources are valuable, but they look from the outside.

Exceptions are the Ethiopian medical manuscripts in Ge’ez and the manuscripts from the Sahel, which show that African medicine also has a written tradition of its own.

An important modern moment is the regional strategy on traditional medicine adopted by African health ministers in Ouagadougou in 2000. Since 2003, 31 August has been African Traditional Medicine Day.

According to the World Health Organization, a large part of Africa’s population uses traditional medicine, often alongside hospitals and clinics. Traditional healers are close by, speak their patients’ language and know their world.

More and more countries regulate traditional care by law. Ghana has had a traditional medicine council since 2000, and some state hospitals offer herbal medicine. South Africa passed a law for traditional health practitioners in 2007.

At the same time there is concern for conservation. The bark of the African cherry was harvested so massively for the international market that the species was protected under the CITES convention in 1995.

Plant knowledge is as diverse as the continent. In West Africa people drink tea of kinkeliba and a red drink of hibiscus flowers. The fat of the shea tree is used for the skin and in cooking, and the fruit and leaves of the baobab as food and remedy.

Moringa and neem originally come from South Asia, but have become established in large parts of Africa and woven into local knowledge. In the mountain forests of Cameroon, Kenya and Madagascar, among other places, grows the African cherry, whose bark is traded internationally.

Besides plants, healers also use clay, minerals, animal products and water. What works depends on the tradition, the area and the healer.

Do not speak of “African medicine” as one thing. If you want to know more, look at a particular people, a particular area and a particular tradition.

Traditional knowledge is often the property of a community. When companies make products from it, that community should share in the proceeds. Choose sustainably harvested products, because popular plants can quickly disappear from the wild.