HOLISTIC HEALING IN THE AFRICAN
*In many traditional African healing practices, as in other Indigenous groups around the world, sickness is treated holistically. It is understood that there is an inherent psychic, spiritual, and emotional component to sickness and healing. The use of special dress, music, dancing, and various other techniques in the ritual of healing is common and diverse across the continent. The time of harvest can be an important factor to consider as well. Formulas of plant mixtures may often be employed versus the silver bullet approach of one herb or pharmaceutical to treat a problem.
Botanical Knowledge Transfer:
To understand the transfer of agricultural and herbal traditions and knowledge in the context of the forced roles of enslavement, one must first remember that the knowledge of enslaved peoples was typically considered the property of their owners and not credited to them. Most enslaved peoples did not read or write, so healing was primarily a generational oral tradition. However, through the cultural cauldron that was the slave trade, it is clear that many ideas were shared or forcibly extracted in regards to the utility of plants both from the “old” world of the colonizers and the “new” world that was collectively being explored and exploited. The tropical experience of Africans meant that many white settlers from northern cool-climate Europe were absolutely dependent upon their knowledge, along with the knowledge of local Indigenous peoples, with regards to creating a plantation herbalism that employed and synthesized the use of locally-introduced and natively-occurring plants.
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has helped outline some of the contributions of both Africa and its people to the rich blend of herbal knowledge from which we all benefit in our current age.
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HARVEST MEDICINAL TREES IN YOUR BACKYARD
When we think of healing plants, our minds gravitate toward the plants growing at our feet – the garden herbs, weeds, and woodland plants of the forest floor – but there’s a veritable treasure trove of healing remedies towering above. Humans have been harvesting and using medicine from trees for millennia, and medicinal trees and shrubs probably already grow near where you live.
As a child, I spent many afternoons scaling the white pines my father had planted in our backyard. Decades later, when I bought my first home, my dad set to planting trees right away, including a weeping willow by the creek in our front yard. The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree: My daughter spent her youngest years learning to climb in the low branches of that willow. Those white pines and that willow are now towering giants. Watching a tiny sapling grow into a massive being is deeply satisfying.
Most folks think the medicinal part of trees is the bark. But woody botanicals have a diversity of medicinal parts, including flowers, inner bark, fruits, leaves, roots, resin, and root bark. You have to learn which parts are used for food or medicine from any given tree species. Harvest resin by looking for trees that have already released it, and then scraping it from the trunk right into little jars. Resin is much easier to gather after it’s begun to harden. Gathering flowers, leaves, and fruit from trees is pretty straightforward as long as you’re leaving more than half the medicine behind so the plant can still reproduce or photosynthesize, and local wildlife can share in the bounty.
DIVINATION
Divination means consulting the spirit world. It is a method by which information concerning an individual or circumstance of illness is obtained through the use of randomly arranged symbols in order to gain healing knowledge. It is also viewed as a way to access information that is normally beyond the reach of the rational mind. It is a transpersonal technique in which diviners base their knowledge on communication with the spiritual forces, such as the ancestors, spirits, and deities. It is, therefore, an integral part of an African traditional way of diagnosing diseases. The “spirit world” is consulted to identify the cause of the disease or to discover whether there was a violation of an established order from the side of the sick person. This is established through the use of cowry shells, throwing of bones, shells, money, seeds, dice, domino-like objects, or even dominos themselves, and other objects that have been appointed by the diviner and the spirit to represent certain polarities on strips of leather or at pieces of wood. The divining bones that form the large majority of the objects include bones from various animals such as lions, hyenas, ant-eaters, baboons, crocodiles, wild pigs, goats, antelopes, etc. The bones represent all the forces that aect any human being anywhere, whatever their culture. Because of the revealing powers of divination, it is usually the rst step in African traditional treatment and medicine. Interviews and medical reportsOral interviews are sometimes used by some traditional healers to nd out the history behind the sickness, where they have been for treatment and how long the person has been in that