One of the many stories we grow up with in Africa is that of the denunciation of and battle to suppress Africa’s long acceptance of the supremacy of ideas of the white imperialists and that Africans are nakedly crude in any known or unknown yardstick for measuring culture and civilisation. It might actually not be far from the truth (though embarrassing to most modern Africans) that the first set of Ankara-clothing worn on the African continent by the African warlords (before their wives, in-laws and others were permitted to get clothed) was shipped in by some sea-faring Portuguese merchants in exchange for some black slaves captured (by the same black warlords) during skirmishes at neighbouring settlements and that these Portuguese (and other white explorers) became increasingly greedy in these shady trades-by-barter leading to a coordinated effort of colonisation, hatched and brutally executed to put the emerging black civilisation under perpetual check, but our choices about what and who rule us is ultimately ours.
It is, however, also true that whenever most 21st century Africans reason loudly, speak up and act in public, it always give the white man a rest of mind that he is still in control of Africa with the assurance that there is no danger if he sleeps with his two eyes closed. Some brilliant African thinkers believe that the white man did a very good job in programming the thought process of Africans to accept different colourations of black inferiority as a way of life (no thanks to the open connivance of most African leaders till date) and that Africans would need to miraculously wake up from the continent-wide Nitrate-plug to the white man’s Matrix before the continent could realise how long and how deep they have been jinxed and put in remote mode by the whites. I sincerely hope I am not writing this article under the influence of such programme.
A recurrent aspect of our lives, recently pushed to the fore by the on-going Covid-19 pandemic, is the disparity created between the so-called orthodox medicine and something commonly called traditional medicine. It is on record that every human race (at one time or the other) once relied on its natural and organic environments for sustenance and cure, before the emergence of laboratory chemistry and controlled chemical reactions created un-expected opportunities and afforded some of these human races the chance to study chemical constituents of matter and to synthesise natural occurring curative products in larger-than-the-immediate-environment quantities in order to cater for their growing populations, while other races (notably Africans) stuck to nature partly due to the regressive philosophy (of the cult of “AS:”à la Wole Soyinka) which reads in part as follows: “As it was, so shall it be” (“whatever that was must always be in its original form”) and partly due to the fact that the practice of medicine (by Africans) was once shrouded in the unnecessary spirituality of invoking from the underworlds and recitations of chants in the opening of imaginary portals for the gods of healing that would supposedly make the drugs potent. What we really have always had and now have is organic medicine versus in-organic medicine.
One has been fully embraced and is continuously explored for mass production (and is now being weaponized across continents) while the other is largely mis-applied and constantly mis-understood. It is, therefore, very inaccurate to believe that one form of medicine is trash or that another is superior. It is more accurate to say that nature or natural medicine had been long abandoned by some influential races whose cultures pushed forward new and crazy ideas in science while the black race generally feared to create any upset in the natural schemes of things (hoping, albeit wrongly, with their faith in the philosophy of “AS” to always be in control of the minds of her people) and has always relied on pure nature for sustenance and cure. The practices of natural medicine may differ from one continent to the other, even among countries, due to the variation in the locally available roots and herbs and due to the immediate culture of the people, but it is absolutely wrong to believe that natural medicine is African. Everybody has its natural environment, even if some others willingly chose to destroy it for technological space and advancements.
There is, however, the need to understand the nature of science and discoveries if Africans will ever be taken seriously by other human races and if natural or organic medicine will ever be fully explored and exploited by Africans. This understanding pertains to sole discoveries in medicine.
It is not impossible to have a sole breakthrough in any field of research but Africans must understand (and must vigorously pursue the fact) that no form of modern medicine in the complexity of its need to be safe, efficacious, of right quantity, etc would support sole discoveries. Such claims of sole discoveries from anywhere on the globe only make the results of the findings less believable and less true. Gone were the days and gone were the risks, even among the white medical scientists, when drugs were administered on faith or based on the reputation of the sole-discoverer or on the authority of the personality, and any fatality caused thereafter by the drug is explained away. The whole world is right to be sure of our findings. Even Africans need to be sure of the efficacy of their natural remedies before administering them and may not have to wait for foreign approvals in their acceptance and usage of their findings.
The only way to be sure may not necessarily mean towing the line of the white man methods but the African Method of Proofs must necessarily be defendable and has capacity for improvements. In short, the retrogressive philosophy of “As it was, so shall it be” has to be deliberately extinguished among Africans. One medical expert, even if he or she is a world renowned professor of virology or pharmacognosy or of herbalogy can not efficiently be relied upon to discover a drug, test the efficacy, confirm its non-toxicity, etc and to expect all of us to have pure faith in the drug, unless we are all ignorant of the vast expanse of the theory and practice of medicine and of the fact that medicine (organic or non-organic) is a very wide field of endeavour, so large so that as little (to the laymen) as pharmacy is, it is a huge faculty in our Universities with numerous specialties that one man or woman cannot claim a total expertise of more than a minute percentage. Let African sole-discoverers in medicine stop making mockery of themselves and of the continent. Let African researchers, especially medical workers, learn to share ideas and conduct research as teams so much so that when a discovery is announced by a team-leader, the list of co-researchers and collaborators accompanying the white paper would be so intimidating to give the world a sense of erudite accomplishment that would only need to be adjusted and improved upon as clinical trials are undertaken. This is global best practices and not necessarily the white man’s way of burdening Africa.
Permit me to give you a mathematical analogy of my thoughts on sole-discoveries. Calculus, an aspect of mathematics dealing with rate of change (called Differentiation), infinitesimal sum (called Integration) and their applications, was believed to have been explicitly sole-discovered by Sir Isaac Newton (England) around 1664 (though Archimedes was reported to have implicitly used the method of Riemann Integration some centuries before Newton). Due to some unresolved propriety claims between England and Germany, we now resolve to say that Calculus was jointly created by Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. However because Calculus was not a drug needed to be administered in an emergency in 1664, the crude discoveries of its basic concepts by Newton and Leibniz were applauded and later researches into the nature of the theory were gradually pursued by mathematicians like Leonard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, the eight members of three generations of the Bernoulli family, Carl Jacob Jacobi, Charles Hermite, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincaré, among others (not to mention the modern abstractions of the concept of Calculus) over several decades, all of which were shedding more and more light to the original creation of Newton leading decades later to the creation of esoteric fields of mathematics like Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE), Partial Differential Equations (PDE), Differential Geometry, Differential Topology, etc and their powerful applications in Economics, Statistics, Engineering, Geography etc.
Now, if Calculus were a drug or vaccine needed in an emergency in 1664 to stop a pandemic like the present COVID-19, many patients whose peculiarities or complications needed a PDE (say) to survive would be long dead because the machinery of PDEs was not yet available in 1664 but was only added to the tentacles of Calculus much more later by other researchers. However, if Sir. Isaac Newton was a team leader with Leibniz as assistant while Euler, Lagrange, Laplace and two of the Bernoullis were co-researchers and collaborators, then the “drug” Calculus (when discovered in 1664) would quickly reach a fairly safe level of development (even up to the status of PDE) that could be administered to save many more lives (including a lot of people that would develop unexpected complications) in the 1664 emergency (than in the crude form it was in the hands of Newton and Leibniz) and be peacefully improved upon thereafter. This is the nature of discoveries which begs for collaborative efforts (as dictated by human limitations) in life-threatening circumstances and should never be overlooked by Africans researchers in their pursuits of COVID-19 cure or vaccines. Life-and-death circumstances in medical researches cannot be treated and risked on sole-discoveries like the pen-and-paper Calculus discovery of Mathematics. It is either we collaborate on medical findings or we consistently collapse in the presence of the white man’s collaborative vaccines.
One last point, either now or post COVID-19, researches (medical or non-medical) must not be deliberately starved of funds that would push the willing experts to becoming political-academics and turn them to hoarding the few available funds through water-tight connections, thus making them to work in scattered isolations across the country or the continent mostly out of their personal purses and forcing them to un-realistic claims of sole-discoveries. Indeed, if we will not always fall back on the efforts of the white man after our usual fast and bogus claims of sole discoveries are easily shelved, every agency of government and private establishment should now see the need to dedicate a percentage of their annual earnings and/or allocations to fund a research of their interest. The initial efforts of the entire nation of Madagascar on COVID-19 is worthy of improvement. Otherwise, when next a virus escaped from another foreign laboratory, the strains of the virus imported to Africa might have been weaponized to be extremely resistant to African heat.
Dr. Olufemi O. Oyadare is a Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife. He writes from [email protected]
