Of Herbal Healing, Spirituality And Public Health, By Reuben Abati

The other week, July 20 to be precise, I was the reviewer of an important book on herbal healing. Herbal healing is often dismissed as a form of sorcery and in these days of obsession with Pentecostalism, many Africans still consider traditional medicine a taboo. To disprove this, a Catholic monk, Fr. Anselm Adodo began an experiment in 1996 when he set up in Ewu, Edo state, an institution titled Pax Herbal Clinic and Research Laboratories  “to serve as a centre for genuine African holistic healing that blends the physical and spiritual aspects of the human person, and to serve also, as a research centre for scientific identification, conservation, utilization and development of African medicinal plants.”
Pax Herbal since then has produced over 32 products, listed and certified by NAFDAC. These include Pax Beauty Cream, Bitter Tea (an antibiotic), Diatea (for the treatment of diabetes, cholesterol, and hypertension), blood tonic, BK caps, cough syrup, herbal soap, potensine capsules, logotine caps, kilodine, pain cream, skin ointment, and Pax herbal colour therapies. Many of these products can be found and purchased at Catholic churches across the country. Fr Anselm has been able to establish that traditional medicine is a viable business and that alternative medicine, properly modernized can indeed be a useful contribution from Africa to the world, and a major source of  constructive engagement.   In this book:  Anselm Adodo, Integral Community Enterprise in Africa: Communitalism as an Alternative to Capitalism (London and New York: Routledge, 2017, 172 pp). the author provides an intellectual justification for his enterprise.  I find this, a far more interesting subject at this moment, away from politics and the increasing stupidity of Nigerian professional politicians.
I consider Dr Adodo’s book a work of significant scholarly insight and interest. Much of the global discourse on issues of development, history, economy and culture has been governed by a tendency to inferiorise the poor and the seemingly underdeveloped, “the other” as it were, thus extending a colonial, imperialist rhetoric in new forms. Africa has in particular been a victim of this negative rhetoric, with unanalytical presumptions, which project Africa as the dark, unproductive, continent, without culture, history, civilization, medicine or any indicators of modernity or human advancement.
Whereas this old presumption had been tackled by a generation of African scholars in different fields, the snobbery continues to exist, it is back in fashion as it were, evident in a sense in the notion that Western countries are rich because their culture is superior and Africa and other countries of the world are poor because they are governed by a culture that permits indolence and waste. The effect is the dominance of the Western, neo-liberal, capitalist perspective, a kind of epistemological terror, which makes race, identity or wealth the core of geo-politics, and creates unfair advantages and a regime of inequity.  The poor is left unprotected, groups are marginalized, and the bottom billion suffers not only from the imbalances in the world, but also from an identity crisis.
It seems to me that Anselm Adodo’s most compelling argument is that “the world needs a new model of development,” and that new model may not come from the centre, but from the periphery.  The problem however with that periphery, is that the leaders and the people themselves seem to have bought into the inferiorisation project, into one way of seeing the world, a kind of slave mentality co-optation which violates the people’s identity and pushes them willy-nilly into an identity and self-authentication crisis. This predominance of an emerging unitarist view of reality robs the world of the advantages of inclusiveness, also of a broad range of useful knowledge.  We live then, in a divided world that is in urgent need of transformation, innovation and a new paradigm of thinking. This transformation would require new modes of doing, of action, of being, of
learning and understanding.
Adodo, in seeking this new reality offers a humanistic paradigm that is rooted in his own local context but which nevertheless constructs the world as an integral entity and essence, a new system where the purpose and the overriding objective is the common good. Put differently, he recommends a development model that is cognitive, spiritual, and cultural, based on the integration of four worlds: the North, the West, the South and the East or what he calls the four PAXes – community, the spiritual, science and enterprise, or the 4Cs: call, context, co-creation, contribution or CARE defined as Community Activation, Awakening of Consciousness, Research to innovation and Embodiment via transformative education and transformative enterprise –a movement away as it were from a limited, biased Western-oriented model that ignores and negates other axes of development. Adodo’s paradigm is about balance, and harmony, the unity of man and nature and his environment, a world that is driven by value and higher ideals, rather than the venal pursuit of individual interests and capital for selfish gain.[myad]