What is wrong with our traditional medicine?

There is a wrong assumption that the western model is strictly scientific and the African model paranormal. However, both western and African societies are permeated with the scientific and transcendental models.

In the West, the scientific model gains more grounds to the detriment of the transcendental model. This accounts for scientific and technological advancements in the west more than in Africa. On the other hand, in Africa, the transcendental model is more popular than the scientific model.

It is in support of the argument that both western and African societies are permeated with the scientific and transcendental models that Karl Popper asserted that scientific research is probably impossible without metaphysics. This assertion means that every culture needs both scientific and non-scientific explanatory models in accounting for events.

In traditional African thought, there is no distinction between primary and secondary causes. By primary cause I mean the transcendental model and by secondary cause I mean the scientific model. Secondary causes are said to be purely scientific in nature and follow some well-known scientific rules and principles. When a child is sick and afflicted with malaria for example, the traditional African would usually begin her explanation with the exploration of the natural causes of malaria such as mosquito bites, stress etc. This means that in order to explain occurrences, the traditional African follows some laid down guidelines or procedures.

However, it is true that the traditional African may conjoin primary causes and secondary causes when the secondary cause fails to satisfy his anxiety and curiosity for explanation. I am going to buttress my point with the traditional medicine (ethno-medicine) in Africa.

By ethno-medicine, what is meant is the traditional medical practice that is “based on bioactive compounds in plants and animals practiced by various ethnic groups, especially those with little access to Western medicines.

The knowledge of herbs and their healing properties cannot be shoved away easily. It has been documented that “early European visitors owed their lives to some Nigerian herbalists. The first-hand experience of pre-colonial Yoruba herbal mixture by Clapperton needs to be disclosed: He avers that “The caboceer brought me some medicine to take, it was like lime juice and pepper. I was so sick that I could not stand for half an hour. After I had taken it I then got suddenly well, both as to the pain in my side and the severe diarrhoea which had troubled me.’’

Another European visitor also attested to the pre-colonial Sokoto herbal mixture thus: “The fruit of the gherret is a very important native medicine, especially in cases of dysentery, and it is most probably to them that I owe my recovery when attacked by that destructive disease during my second stay in Sokoto in November 1854.’’

Africans today have been made to believe that we cannot survive until we fully succumb to the scientific medicine of the whites, for instance, if a child is having malaria and herbs are used and the malaria vanishes and the same child when given paracetamol tablet, the malaria vanishes, are both not to attain the same end, are they not medicines? How come one is seen as unexperimented hence should be jettisoned while the other is to be extolled at the expense of the other?

My position is that it is important to return to the relevant aspects of the traditional past that may serve as the viable catalyst for theory and method that will improve contemporary medical culture in the country.

Damilola Peter Olatade, Lagos State University, Ojo, Lagos