Africa’s traditional practitioners and the war against the coronavirus

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Gloria Emeagwali

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Mar 29, 2020, 3:11:40 AM3/29/20
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Africa’s traditional medical practitioners are in search of a cure for the corona virus. Let us support them fully.

Practitioners in Mali, Benin and Ethiopia seem to be on the trail, and all eyes should be on them. We wish them success on behalf of humanity.

To that sizable group of skeptics and “doubting Thomases”- who are prone to present a litany of woes and indictments against traditional medicine, there is one question I want to ask:

Where do you think chloroquine came from? For generations, Native American traditional practitioners utilized the bark of the cinchona tree in the fight against malaria, and eventually saved thousands of lives around the globe in the process. The pharmaceutical corporations took note, at some point, creating synthetic versions of the plant, whose molecular structure they deciphered. Trials of chloroquine, for coping with the corona virus is proceeding as we speak.

So is there not another tree bark with parallel or even greater potential, in Africa’s local therapeutic and pharmaceutical arsenal?

The search by the local traditional scientists must go on. They need governmental and public support and, thankfully, in some cases seem to be getting that.




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Patrick Effiboley

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Mar 29, 2020, 9:36:40 AM3/29/20
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Dear Gloria,
Thank you for for drawing our attention to the potential of African traditional medical practionners in the war against COVID-19. My compatriot, Valentin Agon has already put in place a product that has been tested last week on patients in Burkina Faso where he is also professionally active. The clinical trials are in process at a larger scale.
But I agree with you that there is a potential for African practionners to explore. But this could not be a sustainable projet without a sovereign support of our governments. The money involved is so huge that pharmaceutical firms won't be far from it...
Patrick

Dr Emery Patrick EFFIBOLEY
Assistant Professor, 
Department of History and Archaeology, University of Abomey-Calavi 
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of the Witwatersrand,Johannesburg,(2014-2016) 
 


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The Cinchona tree and its bark


GE

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Sola Ayandele

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Mar 29, 2020, 9:36:40 AM3/29/20
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Good day Ma/Sir,

We are conducting a study on the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). 

Our aim is to understand how knowledge and perceptions of Coronavirus can influence precautionary health behavior. 

With your participation, you will be helping your fellow countrymen and women, the government and the entire globe to understand and promote awareness of the pandemic and the most effective ways of curbing it. 

To take part in the study, please click on the online survey link:


The survey takes around 10 minutes to complete and it is for persons aged 15 years and older. Your participation is voluntary; you can discontinue participation at any time without consequences. All your responses are anonymous. 

Please find a quiet time and place to fill it in and be as honest as possible. 

Your responses will be used for academic purposes and treated with the utmost confidentiality. 

Help us to share this message with others on your contact. 

Thank you.

Lead researchers: 
Peter O. Olapegba, Ph.D., FNPA, MICMC
Professor of Psychology
Dean, Faculty of the Social Sciences
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1924-1675
twitter: @oolapegba
Skype: peter_olapegba

Olusola AYANDELE, 
The Polytechnic, Ibadan
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-2690-4780

Steven Kator IORFA
University of Nigeria, Nsukka
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5571-2713
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Harrow, Kenneth

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Mar 29, 2020, 12:46:55 PM3/29/20
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hi gloria
reflections on your comments on traditional medicine.
the only issue is what works. but i think of science as building bodies of knowledge, and when you have a new disease, a new strain, what body of knowledge is there in the traditional canopy of treatments?
quinine isn't a good example since they had had hundreds of years of usage in s america.
what bothers me is when people turn away from something that works, for ethnocentric reasons. a propos, wasn't the latest round of malaria medications built on a chinese pharmacology that had used some plant in china, originally?
ken

kenneth harrow

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har...@msu.edu

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Gloria Emeagwali <gloria.e...@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 28, 2020 9:04 PM
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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Africa’s traditional practitioners and the war against the coronavirus
 
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The Cinchona tree and its bark


GE

gloriaemeagwali.com

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Michael Afolayan

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Mar 29, 2020, 2:19:53 PM3/29/20
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Thanks for sharing the good news, Gloria. I sure hope our world will descend its high throne of elitism and pay close attention to our indigenous knowledge. If I recall, your 2016 edited work with Edward Shizha has a nice chapter you wrote on this subject. I should revisit it.

Dr. Ayandele, I would be specially interested in the outcome of your survey. I should also let you know that the oldest work on Yoruba traditional medicine by J. M. Odumosu (written between 1895 and 1910) is fraught with all sorts of herbal (and non-herbal) remedies. Dr. Helen Tilley of Northwestern University, currently on sabbatical at Cambridge University) and I translated it to the English language and is contracted with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Press. Annotation is all we are currently working on now. Hopefully it should be out next year. Stay tuned!

Michael  



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Harrow, Kenneth

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Mar 29, 2020, 2:35:27 PM3/29/20
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i thought it was not unusual nowadays for scientific medical knowledge/practitioners to be studying traditional medical practices. i have seen articles on that topic. we aren't back in the benighted colonial days any more. my post had to do broadly with how we might think of traditional practices in this case, as opposed to others where a body of knowledge about a disease and its treatments might have been created
ke

kenneth harrow

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From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2020 2:02 PM
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Africa’s traditional practitioners and the war against the coronavirus
 

Gloria Emeagwali

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Mar 30, 2020, 6:06:47 AM3/30/20
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Unfortunately it is too early to declare victory, Ken. Neo-colonial thinking persists in several quarters. 

Much more has to be done in terms of funding, as Patrick Effiboley indicates in his contribution. There is also the psychological barrier by some evangelicals who conflate ATM  with ATR and  believe that lightening will strike them  dead, or even worse, that they may turn into a pillar of salt, if they  support ATM in any form.

Michael, Thanks
for the information on 
Odomosu’s text.   I  look forward to the publication, and will send
a copy to Ken😀 who thinks that
a body of knowledge about disease and its treatment does not exist, in the case of ATR.  That amounts to saying that ATM does not exist, Ken.

I thought cinchona bark/quinine was a great example. After about two hundred years the mainstream medical establishment still rely on it and apparently have no better option.
I was happy to hear of the 
trials in Burkina Faso, Patrick.
Please keep us informed of  the outcome. 


GE


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Harrow, Kenneth

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Mar 30, 2020, 8:49:29 AM3/30/20
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what are atm and atr? the only atms i know are machines for taking out money.
ken

kenneth harrow

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Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2020 10:37 PM

Michael Afolayan

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Mar 30, 2020, 9:01:27 AM3/30/20
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Really? Ken, are you just being sarcastic here?
Ok, then: ATM is African Traditional Medicine and ATR is African Traditional Religion.
Got it?
MOA







Harrow, Kenneth

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Mar 30, 2020, 9:23:39 AM3/30/20
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not sarcastic! just didn't know the acronyms.
k

kenneth harrow

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michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

From: 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2020 8:59 AM

Harrow, Kenneth

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Mar 30, 2020, 9:29:51 AM3/30/20
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i said a body of knowledge about this virus, new to the world, doesn't exist in atm--that's my assertion. a body of knowledge can exist only about diseases that have been seen and studied.
it is not reasonable to expect miracles from atm or atr, or any religion for that matter.
let's not change what i wrote into something else.
ken

kenneth harrow

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Sent: Sunday, March 29, 2020 10:37 PM

Gloria Emeagwali

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Mar 30, 2020, 7:53:31 PM3/30/20
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Ok.

African Traditional Medicine (ATM) and African Traditional Religion (ATR).

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Harrow, Kenneth

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Mar 30, 2020, 10:10:21 PM3/30/20
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thanks

kenneth harrow

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Sent: Monday, March 30, 2020 7:49 PM

Femi Kolapo

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Mar 31, 2020, 4:14:20 AM3/31/20
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Ken, applying Karl Polanyi’s idea of Tacit Knowledge to ATM seems better able to accommodate what you are asking of it. Those of us who lived in African villages when ATM was more the mainstay of medical practice than were the modern Western clinics and hospitals and who had been patients under traditional medicare or had witnessed its efficacy could attest to this. As Polanyi would put it, we [and the practitioners] knew (and know) more than it was/is possible for us [and the practitioners] to tell!

ATM encloses (existing) bodies of knowledge about specific diseases as well as about disease typology and the practitioners did experiment and they used to pass this on to their students. ATM practitioners also used to travel to learn from other practitioners and would then pass this on to their apprentices – ritually, orally, and hands-on. The orality and the sometimes cultic and ritual framework of the learning and transmission of this knowledge that have carried over into the modern period, I believe, have constituted a great drawback to its efficacy and usefulness. It is not surprising that younger practitioners whose modern social and economic contexts foreclose the length, intensity, and close personal apprenticeship previously required to become expert in the pre-literate pre-modern period have not been able to repeat feats that oral tradition associates with the older generations of ATM practitioners. This has served to discredit ATM in the sight of our Western-educated elite. This suspicion together with the fact of our modern Westernized and “objectivist” mindsets have predisposed our leaders, scholars, and scientists (both religious and non-religious) to dismiss ATM rather than systematically study it, modernize some of its more palpable aspects, and effectively integrate it into our modern healthcare structure.

_________________________

Femi  J. Kolapo  

History Department *  University of Guelph * Ontario * Canada* N1G  2W1

________________________

SPREAD Journals of African Education: African Journal of Teacher Education || Review of Higher Education in Africa || Recreation and Society in Africa, Asia and Latin America

________________________


F. J. Kolapo, Christian Missionary Engagement in Central Nigeria: The Church Missionary Society's All-African Mission on the Upper Niger, (Springer International Publishing, 2019) http://www.palgrave.com/9783030314255

 

________________________



segun ogungbemi

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Mar 31, 2020, 6:53:30 AM3/31/20
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I agree with you. I wish them success too. 
Segun Ogungbemi. 

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The Cinchona tree and its bark


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OLAYINKA AGBETUYI

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Mar 31, 2020, 9:05:42 AM3/31/20
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And the other thing is when ATM is eventually appropriated by the West when the principles of their practicality is shared are practitioners amply rewarded and patented.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Femi Kolapo <kol...@uoguelph.ca>
Date: 31/03/2020 09:21 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Africa’s traditional practitioners and the war against the coronavirus

Ken, applying Karl Polanyi’s idea of Tacit Knowledge to ATM seems better able to accommodate what you are asking of it. Those of us who lived in African villages when ATM was more the mainstay of medical practice than were the modern Western clinics and hospitals and who had been patients under traditional medicare or had witnessed its efficacy could attest to this. As Polanyi would put it, we [and the practitioners] knew (and know) more than it was/is possible for us [and the practitioners] to tell!

ATM encloses (existing) bodies of knowledge about specific diseases as well as about disease typology and the practitioners did experiment and they used to pass this on to their students. ATM practitioners also used to travel to learn from other practitioners and would then pass this on to their apprentices – ritually, orally, and hands-on. The orality and the sometimes cultic and ritual framework of the learning and transmission of this knowledge that have carried over into the modern period, I believe, have constituted a great drawback to its efficacy and usefulness. It is not surprising that younger practitioners whose modern social and economic contexts foreclose the length, intensity, and close personal apprenticeship previously required to become expert in the pre-literate pre-modern period have not been able to repeat feats that oral tradition associates with the older generations of ATM practitioners. This has served to discredit ATM in the sight of our Western-educated elite. This suspicion together with the fact of our modern Westernized and “objectivist” mindsets have predisposed our leaders, scholars, and scientists (both religious and non-religious) to dismiss ATM rather than systematically study it, modernize some of its more palpable aspects, and effectively integrate it into our modern healthcare structure.

_________________________

Femi  J. Kolapo  

History Department *  University of Guelph * Ontario * Canada* N1G  2W1

________________________

SPREAD Journals of African Education: African Journal of Teacher Education || Review of Higher Education in Africa || Recreation and Society in Africa, Asia and Latin America

________________________


F. J. Kolapo, Christian Missionary Engagement in Central Nigeria: The Church Missionary Society's All-African Mission on the Upper Niger, (Springer International Publishing, 2019) http://www.palgrave.com/9783030314255

 

________________________



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