Indigenous Science

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Indigenous Science: A Star in Africa's Future?

by Thomas A. Bass

http://www.utep.edu/its3350/readings/indigenous.html

Indigenous Science: A Star in Africa's Future?

Africa possesses a wealth of scientific knowledge developed independently from Western science and its methods. Bringing this knowledge to light and building upon it to benefit the continent are among the concerns of many scientists working in Africa today.

Africa is a natural treasure house. It is endowed with fabulous examples of physical and cultural diversity. These riches hold the keys to answering many questions that can be answered-if they can be answered at all- only in Africa. When did humans first start using tools and fire? How do species evolve? Where do HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and other new viruses come from? Is the Earth getting hotter and drier, and if so, what can be done about it?

Africa is also a laboratory for studying the clash between modern scientific methods and technologies and traditional practices. As in all traditional societies, African peoples have evolved sophisticated realms of knowledge, derived from experimentation or observation, that explain, predict, or control natural phenomena. This indigenous knowledge often appears to differ from- or even run counter to-the scientific principles brought with the colonial powers. The seeming dichotomy thus raises another important question: Are modern science and its methods alien to traditional African cultures? The answer to this question is crucial to anyone concerned about the less developed world and the future of science in general.

Evidence of Africa's store of indigenous scientific knowledge has emerged recently in a variety of disciplines. Africa's nomadic pastoralists who subsist on the desert's edge are acknowledged to be among the world's experts on famine and range management. The 1,000-year-old cultures living south of Timbuktu along the Niger River in Mali consult written texts that today are appreciated as a model of environmental conservation. The continent's materia medica of more than 1,000 animal, plant, and mineral products for the treatment of illness is a resource that Western-trained scientists are avidly studying. Africa's traditional plant breeders, cultivating tropical gardens that contain as many as 150 species, are now recognized as having developed a remarkably productive agricultural system.

SEEKING A MARRIAGE OF METHODS

The rewards of recognizing and taking seriously Africa's indigenous knowledge are exemplified in the work of Thomas Adeoye Lambo, former deputy director general of the World Health Organization. Born in Abeokuta, Nigeria, in 1923 and one of 30 children fathered by a Yoruba chief with 12 wives. Lambo studied medicine at the University of Birmingham, England, and then earned advanced degrees from the University of London's Institute of Psychiatry. Lambo returned to his own country in 1950 to run the Aro Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Aro, Nigeria, Africa's first mental hospital. While waiting for that facility's buildings to be completed, Lambo decided to billet his patients in neighboring villages. There he discovered that traditional African life. with its close-knit communal structure, had therapeutic value of its own. Even after his hospital was finished, Lambo continued to place patients in the neighboring villages.

Lambo's next experiment- not supported by the British administrators who controlled his government hospital-was even more radical. Using his own money, he hired a dozen traditional healers to practice medicine alongside his regular clinical staff. After studying their techniques and filming them for 12 years, Lambo discovered that the healers, long dismissed by colonial administrators as witch doctors, were employing many of the same psychiatric techniques he had learned at the University of London. Independently of Sigmund Freud and his successors-and apparently long before them-Africa's traditional healers had invented the "talking cure," free association, group therapy, and behavioral modIfication. They also had an extensive pharmacopoeia of herbal remedies and psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs. "We found their techniques to be remarkably effective." Lambo said. "Their psychotherapeutic sessions were vastly superior to ours. They showed us we hadn't got it right."

Lambo's observations included clinical histories such as the following:

A young man was brought to us with his hands and legs tied up after a schizophrenic episode. The healer said, "Take off his ropes, and we'll watch him." They unbound him and the boy didn't do anything violent or aggressive. Then he was given a potion made of ground-up leaves. No Western drugs were used on the patients being treated by traditional healers. They were in charge from beginning to end. The young man slept for two days. Later, when I had these leaves analyzed, I found he had been given a strong dose of tranquilizers and psychotropic chemicals. While the patient slept the healer interviewed his parents. The boy stayed only nine days before he was completely recovered.

To Western psychiatrists, the diagnosis in this case looks simple. "The boy had a spontaneous remission." But I witnessed traditional healers handling hundreds of acute cases the same way. Their management was superb. The patients were usually discharged within a month. If I had admitted that boy into the ward, he wouldn't have been released in nine days. His illness would have been aggravated to such an extent that he would have been there six months.

Lambo devoted the rest of his career to developing a methodological syncretism," an approach that attempts to fuse Western and traditional medicines. He persuaded African healers to adopt such methods as the use of antibiotics. At the same time, he taught his hospital staff traditional methods, such as the incorporation of the family into psychotherapeutic sessions. Faster, more effective, and one-fifth the price of European-style psychotherapy, Lambo's village-based cure for mental illness already has been adopted in 60 countries around the world.

Lambo explained:

I arranged the marriage of traditional and western cultures. The Masai were suturing blood vessels, removing appendixes, and practicing other sophisticated surgical techniques long before the British. Without a vast herbal pharmacopoeia, most of Africa's tribes would long ago have been wiped out. Rather than merely imitating the West, Africa should build on its indigenous strengths. Innovate, don't imitate, I tell people, because Westerners themselves are unhappy with what they have.

A WORLDVIEW WITHOUT SCIENCE

Thomas Risle Odhiambo, another leading African scientist, agrees with Lambo that the continent will solve its problems only through the fusion of modern science with Africa's traditional strengths. Born in 1931, the son of a telegraph clerk in the colonial postal service, Odhiambo founded and presently directs the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology, an $8 million-a-year research center in Nairobi, Kenya, staffed by 40 senior scientists. Schooled by missionaries and the Encyclopedia Britannica, Odhiambo began his career at the Ugandan Ministry of Agriculture. There he conducted research, on his own time, against the wishes of his British colonial superiors, becoming the first black man in East Africa to publish a scientific paper in an international journal. Odhiambo finished college in Uganda and then finished college again at the University of Cambridge, where he also earned a Ph.D.

In the landmark article "East Africa: Science for Development," published in the U.S. journal Science in 1967, Odhiambo argued that Africa has to embrace the scientific method-not just its technological results but the world-view inherent in doing science-if it wants to get beyond the "colonial interlude." He called for "centers of excellence" in Africa that would act as "powerhouses for the initiated and for those wishing to be initiated in research."

In his article Odhiambo also examined the philosophical implications of science in Africa. Why, for example, are there so few African scientists? Poor teaching and lack of jobs form part of an answer, "but is it not possible," he speculated, that there may be something in the cultural attitude and social philosophy [of Africans] that may discourage a tradition in science?"

Answering his question, Odhiambo wrote, "It is my view that the African's monistic (one world) view of nature has proved an impediment to his becoming a natural scientist." Odhiambo elaborated on that statement by explaining the concept of jok, a belief system developed by Africans living at the headwaters of the Nile, the area from which Odhiambo himself came. Jok refers to both the body and the spirit that moves it. "The Jok concept permeates the Nilotic idea of the universe, of existence, and of destiny" so deeply that nothing distinguishes the living and the dead for these Africans other than the life force, the jok that animates them. "Plants, animals, inanimate objects, God, spirits, and men" all share to a lesser or greater extent in this diffusion of energy.

"In this African philosophy there is no sharp distinction between the subjective and objective worlds," wrote Odhiambo-a distinction that in Europe on the eve of the Renaissance was the necessary prerequisite to the development of science. "Science, in the modern sense, has no firm foundations in African society," he concluded. What Africans have developed instead of science is "a vastly intricate social and communalistic system."

This social system, while opposed to the dualistic world-view of modern science, has benefits of its own. According to Odhiambo:

Africa in the last two centuries has gone through probably the worst period in its history. That we have survived without going mad is due in part to our sense of immortality, the belief that the dead can oversee the affairs of the living. It is a comforting thought to know that the living and the dead are one and the same. The only thing that distinguishes them is what in English is vaguely known as energy. The less you have of it the more you become nonliving. The more you have of it the more you are living, or you may even become a god.

This African way of thinking is synthetic, rather than analytical. Its truths are arrived at by an additive process that makes them more and more complex and faceted. The analytical approach on the other hand is reductive. It ends up with a partial truth that is easier to explain for its providing an approximation from which the African can begin to use analytical tools, even against his instincts-indeed, in this case, become schizophrenic about it. I have a feeling we not going to get very far. I myself am schizophrenic. I have my spiritual life and my scientific life. But I believe that analytical tools are very powerful and that we should use them.

At the end of his Science article, Odhiambo called for the creation of a "new" African. He wanted such a person to "reach the basic root of the problem, his monistic world view, and modify it in a manner in which he can begin to regard Nature apart from himself and other beings." Odhiambo then began developing a scientific cadre capable of fusing traditional strengths with Western analytical methods. "My own feeling is that if Africa can rationalize its strengths and incorporate science into its culture, we will have a very powerful instrument."

POTENTIAL VERSUS OUTPUT

One may question Odhiambo's philosophical assumptions, but he is obviously correct in highlighting the gap between Africa's scientific potential and usable output. A 1992 study of scientific communities in Africa by Jacques Gaillard and Roland Waast of the French Institute of Scientific Research for Development through Cooperation (ORSTOM), Paris, concluded that, because of its scientific underdevelopment, most of Africa's physical and cultural diversity has remained unexplored and underutilized. They estimated that black Africa had 20,000 research engineers and scientists. This was 0.36% of the world's scientists and accounted for 0.4% of the world's expenditure on research and development. Two countries alone monopolized scientific research in Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. They held one-third of the continent's scientists and produced one-half of its published research. Many African countries that once had viable universities and research stations have descended into political chaos. The one bright spot in African science today is the reintegration of South Africa into the intellectual affairs of the continent.

The gap between Africa's scientific richness and minimal output has been explained by various theories. They range from analyses of external factors (many stemming from the continent's colonial legacy) to discussions of the internal dynamics of African society itself-the difficulty, for example, of transmitting bodies of knowledge in oral cultures that are given to protecting guild secrets. Yet while trying to account for the absence of science in traditional African cultures, many observers over look, or fail to recognize, the scientific knowledge indigenous to Africa. If the resources available for scientific research on the continent are scant, the Westerner's familiarity with Africa's traditional knowledge is equally superficial, and much of what is known about science in African cultures was discovered by accident. Foreign experts who had been sent to "fix" the continent's problems suddenly found that the tables were turned. Instead of transferring technology from outside, the experts began adopting methods that Africans long ago had developed on their own.

DEALING WITH DISEASE

Employed by the British colonial medical service, the British entomologist John Ford, beginning in the 1950s, spent a quarter century studying trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, which is caused by a flyborne blood parasite that makes vast tracts of Africa uninhabitable by humans and cattle. Ford, at the end of his career, wrote a classic study on trypanosomiasis, in which he concluded that he and his colleagues "were feebly scratching at the surface of events that we hardly knew existed, and if we achieved anything at all, it was often to exacerbate the ills of the societies we imagined ourselves to be helping." Ford went on:

Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, it was psychologically impossible for men and women concerned in imperial expansion in Africa to believe that their own actions were more often than not responsible for the manifold disasters in which they found themselves caught up. The scientists they called in to help them were as ignorant as they of the problems they had to tackle.

Ford discovered that Africans knew all about the more than 20 species of Glossina flies, commonly called tsetse flies, that transmit sleeping sickness. They were also versed in the ecological measures, such as bush clearing and seasonal pasturage, required for controlling the flies. But while Africans long ago had figured out a modus vivendi for living with this and other of the continent's medical challenges, their systems began to break down in the colonial era.

In the European myth of the Dark Continent, Africa was ravaged by disease until the arrival of Western medical science. The truth is actually quite different. In the case of sleeping sickness, it was the British-American explorer Henry Stanley and his steamboats in the late 1870s that unknowingly transported the most dangerous species of tsetse fly upriver from its native home in the Congo and thereby introduced sleeping sickness liberally throughout central Africa. This spread was further exacerbated by the erroneous colonial policy of evacuating sleeping sickness victims, thereby spreading the disease farther into previously uninfected areas.

Medical historians now agree that the unhealthiest period in Africa's history occurred during the height of colonial contact with Europeans, between 1890 and 1930. Introduced by trade caravans from the eastern coast, cholera reduced the life span of the average Tanzanian male to 25 years. Cholera and smallpox eliminated the nomadic Masai of East Africa as a major tribe. Invading the continent in the 1890s, the rinderpest virus decimated livestock herds from the Nile to South Africa. As a result, East Africa was largely depopulated during the first three decades of the 20th century.

Precolonial Africa had suffered epidemics during the Bantu migrations from the north, the Zulu expansion from the south, and the days of Arab slaving off the coast, but nothing was equal to the disruption caused by European colonialism. Dispersed populations of hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and agriculturalists, who had worked out ways to coexist with their pathogens, were suddenly confronted with new diseases and means for spreading them. Viruses and parasites were the advance guard of colonialism, and the continent's present disease environment is one of its legacies.

LIVING ON THE DESERT'S EDGE

Experiences similar to that undergone by Ford have been registered by other researchers sent out to study Africa's problems. One of them is the British economist Jeremy Swift, who has advised many governmental and United Nations agencies on the design of famine early warning systems in the Sahel, the vast semiarid region of Africa south of the Sahara that stretches from the Atlantic coast to The Sudan. Born in 1939 and currently a professor at the University of Sussex, England, Swift long ago arrived at the conclusion that "the people who really know about famines are the nomads. They've lived with them for hundreds of years. They are the real experts on devising early-warning systems and life-saving responses."

Nomads on the desert's edge have developed sophisticated strategies for stocking their herds and adjusting herd size to the relative pricing of animals and crops. They are expert in livestock marketing, agrometeorology (the relationship of weather and climate to crop and livestock production), plant production, and range ecology. Over the millennia in which they have survived in their precarious environment, they have worked out animal-migration patterns, ecological reserves, famine foods that can be gathered in times of need, stock associates (from whom animals can be borrowed to replenish one's herds), and other means for weathering adversity.

One-third of the Earth's land surface is desert or semiarid scrub, but it is home to 40 million nomadic pastoralists with animal-based economies. Of these nomads 25 million live in the driest and least hospitable parts of Africa. For the past 25 years they have faced unusual periods of drought. They also have endured devastating onslaughts of civil war and social policies that have been criticized as misguided.

Frequently the authorities have sought to force nomads to settle in fixed communities. Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian-born American expert on desert climates who is currently a professor at Boston University, called such attempts "Bedouin bashing." El-Baz has said that, in seeking the causes of the misfortunes of the desert dwellers, "it's easiest to blame the 'ignorant native,' while in reality these people know more about the desert than we do, and if we want to understand it, we better ask them what they know. The most dangerous thing we can do is settle the nomads because nomadism is the best possible way of living in desert environments."

The reluctance or inability to recognize the value of traditional knowledge in African society is attributed by Swift to the inherent limits of modern science. In his view:

People tend to make their reputations in Africa in one narrow area. The model for their research comes from physics and is basically reductionist. But this isolation of elements in the hope of finding one item capable of improvement doesn't work. You have to move forward on all fronts at once. The real challenge is to relate the detail of the mechanism to these larger, more amorphous systems, and to do this, you have to listen very carefully to what farmers and herders say.

Another scientist who was impressed by what he learned from Africa's farmers and herders is British developmental economist Richard Moorehead, former director of a large aid project in the inner delta of the Niger River, south of Timbuktu. In the late 1980s Moorehead was sent by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) to develop an ecological master plan for the area. His project was based on the idea of dividing the delta's resources into multiple-use zones, which would both protect the delta's abundant wildlife and guarantee the livelihood of the million people who live in this desert wetlands. Moorehead was surprised to discover that the concept of multiple-use zones already existed. It was so well developed, in fact, that it had been written down more than a century earlier in Arabic texts called ta'rikh.

The traditional system, developed over millennia, arranged these wetlands on the edge of the Sahara into carefully synchronized patterns of land use capable of producing eight times as much plant matter as the average wheat field. A half-dozen Malian tribes have worked out elaborate protocols for sharing this common ground as it cycles from floodplain to pasture for a million cattle and three million sheep and goats-the highest herd density in Africa.

In the traditional system that existed until the colonial era, the floodplain was divided into 37 leydi or districts, controlled by village elders. They maintained fishing and woodland reserves, organized access to resources, and managed their own highly effective forms of conservation. Cattle crossings, fishing rights, and other rules were codified in a body of law known as the Dina system. "The Dina was a system of multiple land use that imposed a balance on resources and their exploitation," said Moorehead. "These are sophisticated, practical people who have known about conservation and multiple use reserves for a long time."

EXPERT FARMERS

Yet another scientist who has come to respect Africa's traditional knowledge is Bede Okigbo, a botanist trained at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, who served in the 1980s as deputy director general of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan, Nigeria. The son of an Ibo farmer in eastern Nigeria and one of Africa's leading scientists, Okigbo is an expert in the area of agriculture known as farming systems.

The development of agriculture traditionally has been credited to the Near East, where the shift from food gathering to food production marked the beginning of the Neolithic revolution. But Okigbo and other botanists now think that agriculture evolved independently in Africa. At the same time that people in southwestern Asia were settling down to village life, Africa was developing its own "Fertile Crescent" along the headwaters of the Niger. Here a Neolithic civilization emerged from the Stone Age and domesticated plants that are now cultivated around the world. These include millet, sorghum, African rice, cowpeas, groundnuts, yams, okra, watermelons, cotton, oil palms, sesame, tamarinds, and kola.

African farmers, to the consternation of colonial administrators, have always preferred to jumble a selection of crops together and grow them all at once. Okigbo and other agronomists have discovered that this system of mixed cropping is actually a prudent strategy on a continent where crop pests are as numerous as crop varieties. Mixed cropping discourages the insects that attack particular crops from breeding to high levels. The labor of harvesting is staggered, crops are produced over a longer period of time. losses in one crop can be balanced with produce from another, and a wide variety of foods is supplied.

Okigbo has pointed out the tendency of the industrialized world to overspecialize on a handful of crops while ignoring the abundance of varieties often found on indigenous farms. "There are five hundred thousand plant species," he noted. "Ten thousand are utilized by man. Two hundred are grown industrially. But only a few of these are of commercial importance. Fifteen plant species out of the half million that exist in the world give us seventy-five percent of our food."

In recent years Okigbo has devoted himself to studying what are known as compound farms. While cultivating their outlying fields, many African farmers traditionally grow a garden around their family homes, or compounds. Unlike gardens in temperate climates, which are horizontal, these tropical gardens are planted vertically. Above people's houses rise galleries of palm trees that wave over plantains, which in turn shade the spices and cocoyams planted below. "Tropical rain forests have no fewer than four stories." explained Okigbo, "and the multistoried compound farm is the only agricultural system in the world that tends to mimic nature."

A recent study of compound farms in eastern Nigeria identified 146 plant species, with as many as 57 grown in a single compound. "At IITA we're working at a much simpler level than the local farmer," said Okigbo. "This means we can only give him information about one or two systems, while he has to deal with something far more complex." It also means that Western scientists stand to learn many things from African farmers, including the limitations and pitfalls of reductionism.

DEVELOPING AFRICA'S DESTINY

Much bad news has come out of Africa in recent decades-news of civil wars, droughts, famines. Okigbo has cautioned that Africa's food crisis is only one of four crises currently plaguing the continent, the other three being political instability, economic indebtedness, and environmental degradation. In the eyes of many observers, Africa is littered with white elephants-the bleaching bones of animals and aid projects alike. To them the latter are proof that technology transfer, the dominant model for African development since the end of colonialism, has failed and will continue to fail until policy makers comprehend the real nature of science and development in Africa. In the words of Kenya's Odhiambo:

We don't need any more fire brigades. In an atmosphere of crisis it's natural to want to take shortcuts. Africa has been sold the idea that it can transfer technology from other parts of the world to solve its problems. But it won't work, and we've lost a quarter of a century because of this simplistic view. I believe instead that basic scientific research is what is going to bring Africa to a position where it can control its destiny.

To generalize from the examples cited, if Africa is to overcome the multiple crises it now faces, it must develop the centers of excellence called for by Odhiambo and devote more resources to basic research. It must take advantage of the indigenous knowledge already in place. Finally, it must fuse African wisdom and Western analysis to arrive at a new scientific synthesis, which has the potential to benefit the entire world.

See also Feature Article: THE GODDESS AND THE GREEN REVOLUTION.

FOR ADDITIONAL READING

� Africa and the Disciplines" The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities, Robert H. Bates. V.Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O'Barr, eds. (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

� The African Background to Medical Science: Essays on African History, Science, and Civilizations, Charles S. Finch (Karnak House, 1990).

� African Philosophy, Culture, and Traditional Medicine, M. Akin Makinde (Ohio University, 1988).

� "African Science Before the Birth of the 'New' World," Ivan Van Sertima, The Black Collegian (January-February 1992, pp. 69-71).

� Camping with the Prince and Other Tales of Science in Africa, Thomas A. Bass (Houghton Mifflin, 1990).

� "East Africa: Science for Development," Thomas R. Odhiambo, Science (Nov. 17, 1967, pp. 876-881).

� Ngoma: Discourses on Healing in Central and Southern Africa, John M Janzen (University of California Press. 1992).

� Reinventing the Future: Conversations with the World's Leading Scientists, Thomas A. Bass (Addison-Wesley, 1994).

� The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A Study of the Tsetse Fly Problem, John Ford (Clarendon Press, 1971).

� Science and Technology in Africa, John W. Forje (Longman, 1989).

� "The Uphill Emergence of Scientific Communities in Africa," Jacques Gaillard and Roland Waast, Journal of Asian and African Studies (January-April 1992, pp. 41-67).

Thomas A. Bass is Scholar-in Residence at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. Among his books are Reinventing the Future: Conversations with the World's Leading Scientists (1994) and Camping with the Prince and Other Tales of Science in Africa (1990).

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