By Charles T.M.J. Dube

ON Tuesday, I was at the funeral of a nephew who died of nose-bleeding.
He was 40.
His death was a tragedy since it happened after he had gone for a funeral of one of my uncles, whose father Sekuru Hlupiwa was a veteran sangoma, who had made considerable wealth through the application of traditional medicine knowledge systems.
During the height of his career, between the 1940s and 1960s, he was so prosperous apart from travelling on horseback, he also drove a very nice car.
One of his wives was from across the races and left us vanasekuru makaradhi, who adopted an English surname because it paid to do so during the colonial times.
He was so versatile in his trade that I still have the horrid memory of that big needle, as he injected me with Western medicine when I had had a dog bite well before I started school during one of those visits kwa vanasekuru.
The death of my nephew, from nose-bleeding of all things, made me angry and has prompted me to break the flow on my series and write on indigenous knowledge systems.
I am convinced that my nephew would not have died of nose-bleeding had Sekuru Hlupiwa been alive.
I am also angry none of his children or grandchildren, let alone one of those gathered at the funeral, could think of a simple stop to nose-bleeding, opting instead to take him to hospital almost 24 hours after the start of the problem.
After this incident, I thought of Dr Tafataona Mahoso’s contribution last week on the need for African wisdom in higher education.
I was prompted to think he should have made his topic ‘The need for African wisdom in our education system’.
It demonstrates how much damage our education system has visited upon our country by robbing us of knowledge gained over centuries.
Traditional medications for common ailments like nose-bleeding and flu fall into what in Western medicine could be dubbed ‘over the counter’ drugs.
They are not specialised.
It is common knowledge invariably shared freely across the beer gourd.
Had I been present, I am sure I would have provided one of several prescriptions which were passed on to me from the earlier generations.
As it is, the hospital failed, where I am convinced local medicine could have succeeded.
While we might have had problems with diseases imported from our mixing with aliens, we by-and-large have not been ignorant about those which have always been part of our environment.
Each community had its own medicine persons and when these failed, they referred you to some other specialists elsewhere.
We got some of the cures from our relationship with nature and African wisdom.
Most snake-bite cures were obtained through the lucky encounter with animals which are known not to be affected by snake-bites; animals like cats (domestic and otherwise).
If you bumped into such an animal fighting a snake, the next thing was to monitor its behaviour after the fight and new knowledge was added to the community and you became the expert for snake-bites.
Some medications were discovered through dreams and direction by healing spirits.
The mention of dreams might sound laughable and yet it is known that the most genius among us hardly uses 10 percent of their brain capacity.
It should therefore not surprise any reader that the same brain which we hardly use can lead us to gigantic breakthroughs through dreaming.
We also patented our medicines, but only those medicines which were specialised and which treated diseases that were not a threat to the whole community, otherwise for common threats, such knowledge was freely shared.
How then was this patenting done?
The medicine man had to be secretive in carrying out his trade or alternatively, he would mix harmless useless concoctions with the more potent medicine directly related to the ailment to confuse the more observant client.
The medicine man could also introduce some rituals, which would seem necessary and specialised even if they would have no direct bearing on the cure.
That way, there was, in the application of the medicine, an element of some specialised unknown so that when the client got healed, he would not be able to trace such healing to a specific action, but a specialised combination.
Divination, hakata (lots) and use of spirit mediums was also part of the patenting process.
There had to be some other forces to the whole healing process.
Where the Western world has used patenting legislation to protect their knowledge, we introduced the element of the unknown.
From the above, it becomes apparent that we owe our continued survival to a good relationship with nature and our environment.
We harvest our food and medicines from it.
We build our homes and progress from its sustainable exploitation and construction.
It is against this background that we discover that even in the harvest of medicines, there were in-built conservation mechanisms.
If the bark of a plant was known to have medicinal properties, there were prescriptions on how to harvest it as part of its effectiveness as a cure.
There were such requirements as extracting the bark from say the east and west or north and south side only, inter alia.
That way, the tree’s life was protected.
As we herded cattle, we did not wait for the weatherman to tell us there was going to be a heavy storm coming.
When faced with threats, even from the vagaries of nature, we had our ways of handling them.
It is not as if we are a people without a history.
We cannot start from zero in our development effort.
We cannot pick it all from the way others have been handling it.
We must begin from how we have been handling it and improve upon it.
Sekuru Hlupiwa had the anti-rabies jab in his kit.
Had he lived long enough, he would still have expanded on his knowledge of medicine including Western, even without attending medical school.
His children should not have shunned his skills, maybe my nephew would still be alive.
We have introduced a dualism in our knowledge system, but that should not be so.
Sekuru Hlupiwa was right.
He added new knowledge to what he already practiced.
We are wrong for discarding what we know in adopting what other people know.
We need to revisit what we have always known and reconstruct from there.