Africa

Written sources from around 1550 BCE

Ancient Egypt left behind one of the oldest written medical traditions in the world. As early as the Old Kingdom, more than 4,500 years ago, physicians are mentioned by name. Around 2600 BCE Hesy-Ra held the title “chief of dentists”, and Peseshet is named as “overseer of the women physicians”. The main sources are medical papyri. The Kahun Papyrus, from around 1800 BCE, deals with women’s medicine. The Edwin Smith Papyrus, from around 1600 BCE and a copy of an even older text, describes injuries from head to torso in a strikingly sober order: examination, diagnosis, and the verdict on whether an injury can be treated. The Ebers Papyrus, from around 1550 BCE, has 110 pages with some 700 to 800 recipes, arranged by organ and complaint. Egyptian medicine impressed its neighbours. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Egypt was full of physicians, each specialising in a single ailment. The architect Imhotep, who lived around 2650 BCE, was worshipped centuries later as a god of healing, and the Greeks saw in him their own Asclepius.

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Passed down across generations; no single start date

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.

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Use predating colonization; knowledge passed across generations

The Khoi and the San, often called the Khoisan together, are among the oldest inhabitants of southern Africa. For centuries the San lived as hunter-gatherers, the Khoi as herders. Their knowledge of the dry, plant-rich landscape of the Cape is deep and old. Rooibos (Aspalathus linearis) grows naturally only in a small area around the Cederberg mountains in the Western Cape. Indigenous inhabitants gathered the needle-like leaves, bruised them, let them ferment and dried them in the sun. That is how the red tea now known worldwide came about. With European colonisation the Khoi and San lost much of their land and way of life. Settlers took over rooibos. In 1904 the merchant Benjamin Ginsberg began selling rooibos, and in the 1930s people succeeded in cultivating the plant. So rooibos grew into a major export product, without the original knowledge holders seeing anything in return. That changed. In November 2019 the rooibos industry and the councils of the Khoi and San signed an agreement, the first of its kind in the world. Since then the communities receive a levy of one and a half percent of the price farmers get for rooibos.

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An ancient, living practice; varies by people and region

Throughout southern Africa, among the Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Venda and other peoples, traditional healers have played a major role for centuries. They are consulted in illness, but also in misfortune, conflict and at important moments in life. In colonial times and under apartheid, healers were distrusted and opposed. The Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1957, for instance, banned “practising witchcraft” and divination. Yet people kept going to healers, often alongside a visit to a clinic. After apartheid South Africa chose recognition. In 2007 parliament passed the Traditional Health Practitioners Act. The law recognises diviners and herbalists, among others, as traditional health practitioners and sets up a council that regulates registration, training and conduct.

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A long history; still in daily use

The kola nut is the seed of the kola tree, which grows in the rainforests of West Africa. There are two important species: Cola nitida, whose nuts split into two parts, and Cola acuminata, whose nuts have three to six parts. The nuts contain caffeine and theobromine, and chewing them drives away tiredness and hunger. Kola nuts have been an important trade product for centuries. They were carried north from the forest zone, including the land of the Asante in present-day Ghana: to the Hausa cities in present-day Nigeria and beyond, across the Sahara. Because Islam forbids alcohol but not kola, the nut became a beloved stimulant in the Sahel and North Africa. The trade was large and well organised. Caravans of porters and donkeys carried the nuts, which had to be kept moist so they would not dry out, over great distances.

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