Curiosa and Curiosa

Stephen Mpofu

With a definitive cure for Covid-19 remaining a needle in a haystack as it were, it surely borders on the absurd for the World Health Organisation (WHO) to make disparaging remarks about efforts by the African island nation of Madagascar to find a herbal remedy for the virus which has and continues to destroy thousands of lives across the globe.

Or are Africans being made to glimpse the ugly head of ethnocentrism reared in the suggestions by the international health body to the effect that only successful clinical trials, presumably in the West, and not in former colonialists’ pejorative “dark continent” of Africa will confirm that efforts to come up with a vaccine have passed the necessary litmus test for the cure for which the world waits with fingers crossed and bated breath?

A senior pastor of a Pentecostal church in Bulawayo charged the WHO three days ago with being “high-handed” in its reaction to reports that Madagascar had come up with a herbal cure for the Covid-19 pandemic which has left the global village under lockdown, virtually ruining many economies with millions of jobs under the axe and widespread hunger looming across the globe as a result of unemployment for breadwinners.

The man of God, who preferred anonymity, said that instead of its negative views on developments in Madagascar the WHO should aid indigenous acquisitions of skills in the search for remedies for diseases affecting people in order to save lives.

A senior doctor at a major hospital in Bulawayo that also daily deals with coronavirus cases said since a few deaths were being reported in Madagascar the people there were on track with their herbal initiatives to bring an end to the coronavirus scourge.

The doctor, who cannot be named for professional reasons, also said that doctors in China were using herbal treatment against the deadly virus in a country where the germ was first discovered and where recent reports say health authorities there had succeeded in reducing or stopping the spread of Covid-19.

A team of Chinese experts recently visited Zimbabwe and toured various areas sharing their expertise with their local counterparts.

An all-weather ally since the long years of the armed struggle that brought independence and freedom to our country, China has continued to provide aid to Zimbabwe, the latest being in the fight against Covid-19.

It is to be hoped that the Chinese medical experts shared their knowledge on the use of herbs in combating the coronavirus so that our own people may add what they may have learnt from our Chinese counterparts to the herbal treatment of diseases known to have gone on in the motherland since time immemorial and before the advent of Western medicine to Africa.

This writer was born and raised in different remote parts of this country some of which still remain distant from health centres and can testify that villagers depended, and still do so, on herbal treatment for many health challenges; otherwise populations in far-flung areas of the country would have been wiped off.

(But of course born-‘n-locations will never know or understand the medicinal richness of trees and plants dotted all around our countryside.)

A traditional healer was heard on radio this week saying that climatic conditions determined the type of herbs used in the treatment of various diseases around the county.

In the absence of pre-knowledge about when, or whether a vaccine against coronavirus will become available, medical experts from Africa might see it fit to make beelines to Madagascar to take a leaf out of that country’s herbal efforts to provide a death knell to the virus instead of knuckling under what appears to be Western racist disparagements of the continent’s indefatigable efforts to flaunt a cure against the Covid-19 scourge.