Chronicle Editor
Vincent Gono, News Editor
THE preservation of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) has not been so easy in so many developing countries as the tidal wave of globalisation has had an imperialistic enveloping effect on the important but often disregarded body of local knowledge.
Globalisation has been threatening to sweep to extinction the remaining vestiges of indigenous knowledge forms that have resisted death despite the racial and colonial onslaughts that they have suffered at the hands of Western imperialism.
These forms of knowledge (IKS) have originated locally and naturally and have survived for a very long time through the processes of acculturation and through kinship relationships that societal groups form and hand down to posterity through oral tradition and so many other cultural practices forming adhesives that bind society as they constitute communicative processes through which knowledge is transmitted, preserved and acquired by humans in their different geographical areas.
Thus, every society is bound to have knowledge in one form or another since each society has its own experiences of reality. This experience of reality over time develops among indigenous people an understanding of causal effect relationships that naturally drive them to develop adaptation methods that become their body of knowledge. Indigenous knowledge bodies encompass medical practices, education systems, food and culinary habits, social relations, belief systems, weather and environmental adaptation techniques, among others.
These, however, despite being readily available, cheap, locally relevant, easy to use and effective have largely been ignored as people opt for and become obsessed with foreign goods. This has not been without cost to the country, especially in the area of medicine, food and culinary items where a lot of the country’s revenue has been spent on imports to wet the citizens’ appetite for foreign goods when IKS could be developed and commercialised.
The corona-virus era forced a number of countries to rethink modelling their economies around a strong local production base and IKS comes naturally to the fore as the starting point of going back to basics. This has forced a good majority to use traditional medicine as an accessible and cheaper option to conventional medicine. Before that, traditional medicine faced demonisation and denigration.
Scarcity and cost of conventional medicine is likely going to see an increase in the percentage of people relying on traditional medicine for their primary care needs in developing countries with an estimated 80% of their populations according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) relying on traditional medicine.
Research has shown that demand for medicinal plants is increasing in both developing and developed countries and surprisingly, the bulk of the material traded is still from wild harvested sources on forest lands and only a very small number of species are cultivated.
The only adverse effect of the expanding trade in medicinal plants however, is the threat to the survival of several plant species, with many under serious risk to become extinct. Medical scientist and Traditional Medicine Practitioners Council member, Professor Bartholomew Mazuru Gundidza said prior to the advent of science and research that birthed conventional drugs, large numbers of African families (both rural and urban) used traditional medicine for their health care, much so because it was accessible, affordable, culturally appropriate and acceptable.
He said despite the increasing acceptance of traditional medicine in Zimbabwe’s rural and urban communities, the rich indigenous knowledge was not adequately documented. “Documentation of plants used as traditional medicines is therefore needed so that our indigenous knowledge systems can be preserved and the plants conserved and used sustainably. There is a need for a deliberate paradigm shift in policy towards what is local, as corona-virus has taught us the effects of relying on imports,” he said.
He added that nature was a pharmacy where a number of wild fruits could be used to treat various cancers.
Musimboti Traditional Science and Technology Institute director and herbalist, Mr Morgan Zimunya who runs Musimboti Traditional Pharmacy located on shop number one Third Avenue and JM Nkomo Street said it was true that populations in developing and developed countries rely on traditional medicine.
He said even powerhouses such as India and China were known for their unwavering policy that encourages the use of traditional medicine harvested through indigenous knowledge systems. Mr Zimunya said through traditional medicine he could cure snake bites, sugar diabetes, intestinal upsets, headaches, high blood pressure, kidneys, cancer, sexually transmitted diseases, genital warts, skin diseases including erectile dysfunction adding that it was absurd for anyone to suggest that traditional medicine does not work as it was used before the advent of modern medicine.
He posited that there was a need for a deliberate policy as was in the communities, to protect the harvesting of medicines in order to preserve medicinal tree species that were normally indigenous and wild. “I harvest some of the medicine from the wild trees. The idea is to know which tree cures what and the method to harvest. You will find out that our elders knew how to protect the trees and would prescribe that one should get the tree bark from the east and the west to ensure that the tree was not ringed as it would kill the tree. That was a conservation strategy and it made sure medicine tree species were protected,” said Mr Zimunya.
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