Chronicle Editor
When Africans, their intellectuals included, question and or suspect the nature and origins of the coronavirus, and the vaccines that are being advanced to combat the disease, they are quickly shouted down and silenced as conspiracy theorists.
It has always been my observation and argument that those that have suffered the grand conspiracies of slavery and colonialism are perfectly rational to question and suspect anything, including medicine, that comes from the West.
If they can enslave and colonise us what would stop them from poisoning us is a legitimate political question to ask in Africa. Well, we Africans have taken countless vaccines from Europe already from the time we were babies to our dying days we are flooded with compulsory western medications so to suspect, question and boycott a vaccine for coronavirus might look too little too late and even senseless.
We have evidently been saved from certain death by western medicines. The inner me will also remind us that many medicines that are called western actually have African origins or Indian genealogies.
The debate is politically profitless for now, I must say. And there is even no time to be debating, questioning and suspecting because we are dying in our big numbers and we urgently need to survive. It may not be existential wisdom to be philosophising when a vampiric pandemic is gobbling our population down. We probably need that vaccine and urgently so, even as we are aware of the history and the politics around diseases and medicines in the present world system.
Epistemologies of the South
The “epistemologies of the South” as part of the province of the philosophy of liberation of the people of the Global South insist that natives and indigenous people also think and know, they can produce arts and sciences of human survival on earth. It is not true that western science is the only epistemology that will secure the survival of men and women on earth. In the recently passed festive season I retreated to my village, Siyabuswa, in Mpumalanga Province.
Like in other parts of South Africa Covid-19 is levying a heavy tall. But the villagers are fighting back with traditional modes of dealing with flues, fevers and pneumonia.
The remedies include herbal drinkables and ukufutha, the herbal steam bath that clears the respiratory canal of patients with breathing difficulties.
There are whispers that those that are taken to hospitals do not come back alive so home nursing through a combination of modern and traditional remedies is trusted more. Even medical doctors are encouraging patients to give traditional medicines a try.
Clinics and hospitals that are strewn around are getting less trusted. The lesson of our time is that western science and medicine alone are not going to be our sole salvation.
We are and we must pay attention as well to traditional remedies, the articles of the epistemologies of the South.
Western scientists may and probably must also learn from the natives and the indigenous people of the South that are also students of nature and healers.
A world should be built where medicine, from the South or the North, should be trusted as medicine and not contaminated with the colonial and racial politics of the world.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina, Pretoria, in South Africa: [email protected]
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