Pathisa Nyathi
As I continue penning my autobiography, the one aspect that looms large is the Salvation Army (Impi Yosindiso) founded by Commissioner William Booth in England in the 19th Century under difficult social conditions that prevailed then. As expected, the church is inextricably linked with my life story. In 1958 I began education at Sankonjana Primary School and in 1967 I proceeded to Mazowe Secondary School. Both schools were established and run by the Salvation Army.
After doing teacher training, I went to teach at two educational institutions that were run by the same church. These were Usher Institute and Howard Institute. It should thus follow that I acquired certain lifestyles from the church during my formative years. Further, I wrote a book on the Bhebhe people who relocated from an area close to Usher Institute. They were a part of the population that was evicted and resettled in a reserve set aside for them. Areas of settlement were Donkwe Donkwe, Mbembeswana and Zamanyoni, inter alia.
At Mbembeswana the Salvation Army established a corps, an education institution and a clinic. This was a three-pronged thrust of the conventional churches in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The institution experienced water shortages due to Semokwe River failing to yield water perennially.
That prompted the church to relocate to Tshelanyemba where the nearby Shashane River was more dependable in terms of water provision. In my forthcoming book I make some reference to the spread of the church to schools east of the Shashane River. There were Kafusi (Manuka), Manyane (Joseph Mtshumayeli Ngwenya), Lubhangwe and Sankonjana.
However, this article is not about my life story. Rather, it is written to show that medical philosophy and practice are almost always associated with religion or spirituality in the case of Africa. The various church denominations sought to evangelize, spread education and provide health care. There was a song that we used to sing with the accompaniment of tumbrels and the drum.
“Lahl’ idlozi,
Lahl’ inyoka,
Lahl’ amanyala wonke,
Woza kuMsindisi manje,
Uyakusindisa.”
Part of the proselytizing or evangelizing campaign was to encourage Africans to do away with their spirituality and embrace the Christian faith. No church did it better than the Salvation Army through the message in the cited above. Africans were being advised to abandon belief and practice related to their ancestral spirits (inyoka and idlozi). A very strong word, “amanyala” was used to describe African spirits.
I cannot overemphasise that African spirituality and medical knowledge and practice were interlinked, intertwined and interwoven. To launch a vicious crusade that sought to destroy African spirituality meant, in essence, to destroy belief in and practice of African medicine. It is also important that we appreciate that in the African context, healing of diseases and illnesses does not always require the use of herbal formulations.
Where divinity is short, the body may suffer illness and efforts are made through spiritual intervention to restore lost spiritual equilibrium. What is being emphasised here is the fact that the link between material body and spirit translates to the two mutually affecting each other.
It is important to appreciate medical practice in Africa in its broader perspective, ramifications and manifestations. As Government seeks to sanitize African medicine there are intricacies that need to be empathetically and objectively dealt with and understood. It is true African medical resources have not been fully utilized. The reasons are pretty clear. Colonization initiated the demonisation of virtually everything African, not just African medicine and its practice.
A holistic approach is thus called for in order to come up with sustainable strategies for the elevation of African medicine to a respectable level where it may be used without some sense of inadequacy and shame to a point where patients resort to necodemous approaches.
Even the language we use reflects the bifurcated nature resulting from racially induced prejudices. A doctor is one who uses Western medicine. His African counterpart is a traditional doctor. There is medicine, peddled by Western doctors, and traditional medicine used by traditional (read African) doctors. Then we have a whole department at some universities that pride themselves in lecturing and researching Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS). IKS is knowledge as developed and practiced by Africans, perceived as racially inferior.
Otherwise, Africans have no knowledge. Real knowledge and worthwhile is developed and used in West. I have always argued that all knowledge is indigenous to some community in some corner of the vast world. What, in essence, is being referred to here is that real knowledge is not African. Where there is some semblance of knowledge traceable and existing among Africans, it must be qualified-as indigenous knowledge systems. Some Africans get excited when their knowledge is so described. They do not appreciate what that means.
We fall into the same trap when words such as culture and traditions are used. They are confined to Africans. Hardly, in Africa, do we use these words in reference to Western communities. Knowledge gate keepers have excluded anything other than their own research methodologies in the context of recognized scholarship and academy. It is just not true that knowledge, all knowledge, may be gleaned through the use of science and technology. Thinking along these lines has only succeeded in elbowing out African knowledge and, in the end, it is the world that is all the poorer when other knowledge is trashed and demonized.
Government and those concerned will need to be alert to the fact that denigration and demonisation are now being advanced and perpetrated by the Africans themselves. In some instances, there are people who shun African medicine and others who make use of it by under the cloak of secrecy as the practice is perceived as being too demonic to be used in the public domain. It is a practice that has been consciously and willingly been pushed underground, not quite dead but living a life that is not celebrated.
Be that as it may, there is need to undertake research to unpack the broad and complex world of African medicine and its related philosophy and practice. There are some of its aspects that work on the basis of chemical constitution.
African medical practitiones lack the knowledge to isolate active ingredients that would assist them to patent their products. These are the medicines that lend themselves to documentation. There are many medicines that are known to and practiced by ordinary people with no spiritual endowment. That tip is of a monumental iceberg and is worth researching, documenting and derive treatment from it.
At the same time there has to be unavoidable recognition of spirituality being at the centre of medical practice.
Spirituality is in the driving city of medicine and medical treatment. This is a wide and complex field. The person who knows the medicines is endowed with the gift from conception. Knowledge of medicines is revealed to the host/medium through visions and dreams which the West doesn’t recognise. The spirit and not the medium is one that possesses the requisite knowledge. Science and technology have been elevated to the status of a god that is literally worshiped.
Some plants derive their efficacy not on chemical constitution but on applied symbolism. There are many requisite factors to take on board such as the side of the tree to be barked, the time of day when to harvest the requisite part of the tree, whether one is dressed up or in the nude when harvesting the leaves, knowing how appreciate the services of the particular tree, among other numerous considerations. All these are dictated by the ‘owner’ of the medicine who is one with the knowledge. The spirit has the capacity to withdraw all knowledge from the medium/host in the case of serious transgression or abuse of medical knowledge.
It is the spirit who hides knowledge from other people. This is a form of copyright within the context of spiritual operation. At death of the medium the spirit exits but will take possession of someone else down the generations.
That spirit takes with it its knowledge of medicines and the knowledge, which may be developed and broadened as knowledge is not cast in stone. Spirituality possesses the capacity to deal with new forms of diseases as it relies on divination rather than unchanging knowledge as held by a human being. Transmission through mediumship facilitates knowledge transmission down the generations without the knowledge accessed by unauthorised persons.
This is an arrangement that takes care of both patenting and copywriting.