The African continent must preserve its medicinal heritage, document the knowledge of its communities and retain ownership of the productive sources from which future treatments may emerge. It should reject remedies demonstrated to be harmful or useless, but it must not permit outsiders to declare the entire inheritance worthless and later commercialize selected portions under foreign ownership.
By Martin S. Mungwa, Ph.D., Fellow ASCE
Contributor The Independentist News
As Amazon associate this site earns from qualifying purchases
Get your back to school needs from Amazon
When Advanced Systems Produced Unexpected Results
For generations, Western countries presented their hospitals, pharmaceutical industries, medical schools and research institutions as evidence of an unquestionably superior health system. Africa, by contrast, was portrayed as a continent of primitive remedies, untrained healers, superstition and “voodoo medicine.” The Western hospital represented science. The African medicinal garden supposedly represented ignorance.
Then COVID-19 arrived.
The pandemic did not erase the achievements of Western medicine. Hospitals, oxygen therapy, intensive-care medicine, vaccines and antiviral treatments saved lives. Yet COVID-19 exposed an uncomfortable contradiction: countries with some of the world’s most expensive medical systems, most sophisticated equipment and highest concentrations of specialists recorded far higher population-adjusted death rates than many African countries with far fewer institutional resources.
According to officially reported figures compiled through the World Health Organization, the United States recorded more than 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths. Cameroon reported approximately 2,000 deaths, Nigeria about 3,200 and Ghana fewer than 1,500. Based on these reported totals, the United States experienced roughly 350 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, compared with approximately seven in Cameroon, four in Ghana and fewer than two in Nigeria. The WHO COVID-19 dashboard acknowledges differences in national surveillance, diagnosis and reporting, but the scale of the contrast remains too substantial to be dismissed casually.
These figures do not prove that African traditional medicine caused the lower mortality. They do, however, expose the weakness of a health hierarchy that assumed institutional sophistication would automatically produce superior results.
When Africa Succeeds, There Is Always Another Explanation
There appears to be an unwritten rule in the international interpretation of African achievement: whenever the result is positive, Africa itself cannot be credited. If an African economy grows, commodity prices must have caused it. If an African child excels, the child is exceptional. If an African institution performs well, it is an isolated case. If African communities survive a pandemic better than expected, the result becomes an anomaly, an accident, a statistical problem or an “African paradox.”
There is always another explanation. Africa is rarely permitted to be the source of a successful result. It is permitted only to be the location where an unexplained result occurred. Western achievement confirms the superiority of Western institutions; African achievement becomes an outlier requiring correction.
Certainly, Africa’s younger population helped reduce COVID-19 mortality. Underreporting also occurred, just as underreporting and misclassification occurred in various forms elsewhere. Outdoor living, lower average age, patterns of social interaction, previous exposure to infectious diseases and other factors may all have contributed. But the habitual search for every possible explanation except African knowledge, behavior and resilience reveals more than scientific caution. It reveals an intellectual bias.
When predictions of mass African death failed to materialize on the expected scale, the dominant question was not, “What might African societies be doing that deserves study?” The question too often became, “What is wrong with the African data?” That difference matters. It demonstrates how easily the international knowledge system recognizes African failure while explaining away African success. Reported Deaths Are Not the Whole Story
Scientific responsibility requires an important qualification. Africa’s lower official figures do not prove that only the reported number of people died. Testing was less extensive in many African countries, civil-registration systems were incomplete, many deaths occurred outside hospitals and some COVID-19 deaths were probably attributed to other causes.
A modelling analysis cited in the literature estimated that Cameroon may have experienced approximately 8,200 COVID-19 deaths by the end of 2021, considerably more than the official total at that time. Researchers have identified underreporting and demographic differences as major explanations for Africa’s apparently lower mortality. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases cautions that weaker surveillance complicates direct comparisons.
Underreporting, however, cannot become a phrase used to end the discussion. African seroprevalence studies indicated that the virus circulated much more widely than confirmed case totals suggested, yet hospitals and burial systems across much of the continent did not experience the universal catastrophe initially predicted.
The intellectually responsible conclusion is not that Africa defeated COVID-19 with herbs. It is that Africa’s experience was more complex and, in many places, considerably less catastrophic than dominant models anticipated. The question is not whether every African death was counted. The question is whether reporting deficiencies alone explain why Western societies possessing advanced surveillance, intensive-care units, pharmaceutical capacity and enormous healthcare budgets suffered such devastating population-level mortality. That question deserves investigation, not condescension.
Looking Through an Ethnographic Lens
Set aside, for a moment, the language of laboratories, regulatory agencies and clinical trials. Look at African traditional medicine strictly through an ethnographic and historical lens. For centuries, African communities lived with malaria, fever, parasitic infections, digestive illness, wounds, inflammation, childbirth complications and metabolic disorders. They did not wait for imported pharmaceutical systems before attempting to preserve life. They observed plants, compared results, modified preparations and transmitted what appeared useful from one generation to the next.
This was not modern laboratory science. It was accumulated community experience. The knowledge was carried by mothers, farmers, hunters, midwives, herbalists and elders. It survived through practice rather than journals. Dosages were remembered through household measures. Preparation methods were taught by participation. A plant that repeatedly produced no perceived benefit would be less likely to retain the same cultural importance across centuries, although cultural persistence alone cannot prove that every attributed use was effective.
Why did communities continue using bitter leaf for digestive and metabolic complaints? Why was moringa preserved as both food and medicine? Why did kinkeliba remain a valued infusion across generations of West African families? Why were particular barks used for fever, certain leaves for inflammation and specific combinations prepared during seasonal outbreaks?
These practices undoubtedly included mistakes, exaggerations and ineffective remedies. Every medical tradition has made errors. But dismissing the entire system as primitive requires us to believe that generations of Africans observed absolutely nothing, tested nothing through experience, learned nothing and preserved nothing of therapeutic value. That proposition is less reasonable than the traditions it attempts to discredit.
The Staggering Historical Result
The most staggering result is not a single laboratory measurement. It is historical survival. African populations survived for centuries in environments carrying some of the world’s heaviest infectious-disease burdens. They formed families, cultivated land, built political communities and transferred knowledge between generations long before the arrival of modern hospitals. Their survival cannot be attributed solely to herbal medicine, but neither can indigenous health practices be removed entirely from that history.
Traditional medicine was not a fashionable supplement. For many communities, it was the primary system of care. It was available in the household when no hospital existed nearby. It was integrated into food, family practice, agriculture and knowledge of the local environment.
Kinkeliba—Combretum micranthum—became a widely consumed West African infusion. Moringa—Moringa oleifera—was valued as both a nutrient-rich food and household remedy. Bitter leaf—Vernonia amygdalina—became cuisine and medicine. Other leaves, roots and barks were used for fevers, wounds, digestion, childbirth recovery and recurring illnesses. The significance is not merely that individuals consumed these plants. It is that communities repeatedly incorporated them into systems of care and continued doing so over long periods.
Ethnographic evidence does not establish that every remedy worked, nor does it prove that any particular plant prevented or cured COVID-19. It establishes that African societies developed an organized relationship with their medicinal environment and judged portions of that knowledge valuable enough to preserve. That is knowledge, even when it is not recorded in the preferred language of Western institutions.
A Health System Is More Than a Hospital
COVID-19 demonstrated that health cannot be measured solely by the sophistication of medical facilities. A nation may possess world-class hospitals while its population remains vulnerable because of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, processed food, sedentary living, social isolation and unequal access to care.
An engineer would never evaluate an entire system by admiring its most expensive component. A powerful transformer does not guarantee a reliable electrical grid. The engineer must inspect the source, transmission network, operating conditions, maintenance regime, protection system, redundancy and points of failure. Medicine should be evaluated with the same discipline. The hospital is only one component of a health system. Food, movement, family support, age distribution, preventive habits, environmental conditions, community knowledge and early treatment practices are also components. COVID-19 did not test hospitals alone. It tested the entire social and biological system.
Western medicine demonstrated extraordinary capacity to intervene after severe illness developed. African traditions, at their best, frequently operated within food, household practice and daily life. One system emphasized institutional intervention; the other often began with the relationship among the person, the community and the natural environment. Neither model is perfect. Yet the pandemic showed that the most expensive intervention system does not necessarily produce the most resilient population.
How American Medical Reform Marginalized Herbal Medicine
The dismissal of medicinal plants was not confined to Africa. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States itself possessed competing schools of medical thought. Alongside conventional physicians were eclectic doctors who relied substantially on botanical medicines, physiomedicalists, homeopaths, naturopaths and other practitioners. Some of these schools were poorly equipped and deserved serious reform. Others preserved traditions of plant-based treatment developed through European, Native American and community experience.
The institutional landscape changed decisively following Abraham Flexner’s 1910 report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada. The report was commissioned and published by the Carnegie Foundation, not by Rockefeller. However, Rockefeller philanthropy, particularly through the General Education Board and later Rockefeller organizations, supplied enormous financial support for the university-based, laboratory-centered model that Flexner promoted.
The Rockefeller Archive Center acknowledges that Flexner’s recommendations influenced John D. Rockefeller and other leading philanthropists and contributed to the transformation of medical education in the United States and internationally.
The reforms produced important benefits. Admission requirements became more rigorous. Medical education acquired stronger foundations in anatomy, physiology, pathology, chemistry and supervised clinical practice. Many commercial diploma schools that lacked qualified teachers, laboratories or adequate clinical instruction disappeared. But the transformation also concentrated the authority to define legitimate medicine.
Schools that could not conform to the new biomedical model lost financial support, accreditation, students or legal recognition. Eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, homeopathy and other competing systems were marginalized. Institutions teaching botanical therapies were pressured to abandon their distinctive curricula, conform to the dominant model, merge with other institutions or close.
Historical reviews of the Flexner Report’s broader consequences and its effects on complementary and alternative medical education document both the improvements and the exclusions associated with this transformation. The consequences were also racially unequal. Most Black medical schools disappeared during this period, leaving Howard and Meharry as the principal surviving institutions. At a time when segregation prevented Black students from entering many white medical schools, this contraction severely reduced opportunities to train Black physicians. The new system improved important aspects of medical education while concentrating access, authority and funding within a smaller group of predominantly white institutions.
Rockefeller, Industrial Medicine, and the Petroleum Claim
It would be historically inaccurate to say that Rockefeller personally banned all herbal medicine or single-handedly created a pharmaceutical industry based entirely on petroleum. Modern pharmaceutical chemistry developed through multiple pathways, including medicinal plants, minerals, biological products and synthetic chemistry. Early synthetic drugs were strongly connected to the European coal-tar dye industry; later industrial chemistry increasingly used petrochemical feedstocks. Many important medicines still originate directly or indirectly from nature. The stronger and more defensible criticism is institutional.
Rockefeller wealth helped finance a model centered on universities, laboratories, specialized hospitals and standardized biomedical science. As that model acquired financial and professional dominance, medical traditions unable to conform to its preferred institutional structure were pushed outside mainstream education.
Botanical medicine was not necessarily prohibited by one national law. It was displaced through a combination of accreditation, funding, licensing, curricular standardization and professional authority. This history shows that the separation between “scientific medicine” and “traditional medicine” was not produced by evidence alone. It was also shaped by philanthropy, institutional power, professional competition and control over education.
Who financed the surviving schools? Who established the standards? Who decided which knowledge belonged in the curriculum? Who received accreditation? Who controlled research funding? Which products could be standardized, patented, manufactured and sold repeatedly?
Once medicine became increasingly connected to industrial research and large-scale manufacturing, standardized pharmaceuticals possessed commercial advantages that locally gathered medicinal plants did not. A family could grow bitter leaf or moringa without paying a corporation for each use. A standardized and patented formulation, by contrast, could generate recurring revenue through manufacturing, distribution and intellectual-property control.
This does not prove that pharmaceutical medicines were ineffective or that every botanical therapy was suppressed solely because it threatened profits. It establishes that the emerging system rewarded forms of medicine compatible with laboratories, industrial production, licensing and commercial distribution. It created chokepoints through which medical knowledge had to pass before being recognized as legitimate.
The Plant Was Not Rejected—Control Over It Changed
The historical irony is unmistakable. After botanical medicine was pushed toward the margins of American medical education, universities and pharmaceutical companies continued searching nature for useful compounds. The plant was not necessarily rejected. Control over the plant changed.
When an African grandmother prepared bitter leaf, the practice could be ridiculed as superstition. When a foreign laboratory isolated a compound from the same plant, assigned it a technical name and incorporated it into a standardized product, the work became innovation.
The plant did not suddenly acquire intelligence after entering a foreign laboratory. The knowledge became respectable after passing into institutions authorized to define what counts as knowledge. This raises the questions Africans must ask: Who identified the plant? Who preserved knowledge of its use? Who owns the productive source? Who finances the research? Who controls the formulation? Who owns the patent? Who receives the recurring benefit?
Africa must not remain the botanical warehouse of the world while foreign institutions own the intellectual property derived from African knowledge. The continent should not provide the plant, community memory and historical experience, only to purchase the finished product at a price its citizens cannot afford.
The World Health Organization’s Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034 now recognizes traditional medicine as an important field of health knowledge requiring evidence, safety, appropriate integration and equitable benefit. Traditions once portrayed as obstacles to civilization are increasingly described as potential sources of discovery and innovation. Africa should welcome genuine inquiry—but it must follow the ownership.
What the COVID Comparison Establishes
The COVID-19 experience does not establish that kinkeliba, moringa, bitter leaf or another traditional preparation prevented or cured the disease. No responsible population-level comparison can prove such a specific causal relationship. It establishes something else of great importance: Western institutional superiority did not guarantee superior population-level outcomes.
Cameroon, Nigeria and Ghana recorded dramatically fewer official COVID-19 deaths per capita than the United States and several Western European countries. Some African deaths were undoubtedly missed. Yet underreporting cannot be invoked as a magic phrase that ends all inquiry. The African result deserves to be examined as a result—not merely corrected as an outlier.
Were younger populations decisive? Did outdoor life reduce exposure intensity? Did previous encounters with infectious diseases influence community responses? Did lower rates of institutionalized elderly living matter? Did dietary patterns, routine medicinal-plant consumption or environmental factors contribute? Were there forms of immune experience that deserve investigation? These are questions, not established conclusions. Serious inquiry begins by asking them without assuming beforehand that nothing valuable could have originated in Africa.
The Failure Was Also a Failure of Design
COVID-19 exposed single points of failure in Western health systems. Some countries possessed world-class specialists but insufficient protective equipment. They maintained sophisticated pharmaceutical industries but depended on distant supply chains for essential materials. They had expensive intensive-care facilities but populations burdened by preventable metabolic diseases. They collected vast quantities of health data but allowed inequality, mistrust and fragmented public communication to weaken their response.
A health system cannot be judged only by what it does after a patient becomes critically ill. It must also be judged by how effectively it prevents the population from becoming vulnerable. Who maintains public health between emergencies? Who profits from chronic illness? Who controls the food system? Who invests in prevention? Where is the redundancy when hospitals become overwhelmed? What remains functional when imported supplies stop arriving?
Technological sophistication without social resilience can produce an expensive but brittle system. Societies described as medically underdeveloped may possess forms of resilience that conventional health rankings fail to measure.
From Herbal Extraction to African Scientific Ownership
Africa should not respond to Western arrogance by rejecting modern medicine. It should respond by establishing ownership over its medicinal inheritance and building institutions capable of preserving, interpreting and developing that knowledge.
Traditional healers and knowledge-holding communities should be treated as intellectual contributors, not merely as sources from whom information is extracted. African universities should preserve ethnobotanical knowledge before it disappears with the elders who carry it. Communities should retain recognized rights in the knowledge they transmit and in commercial products derived from it.
The continent must not surrender its medicinal inheritance in exchange for a few research grants and later purchase the finished products from foreign patent holders. African knowledge should circulate into African education, African laboratories, African manufacturing, African intellectual property, African employment and improved health for African communities.
Who owns the productive source? Who owns the knowledge accumulated around it? Who controls its development? Who receives the recurring economic return? What remains productive in the community after the plant, research sample and intellectual property leave? These are the questions of productive sovereignty.
The Illusion Exposed
COVID-19 did not prove that African traditional medicine is superior to Western medicine. It proved that the hierarchy was never as simple as its defenders claimed. Western medicine has produced extraordinary achievements. African medicinal traditions also contain accumulated knowledge worthy of respect. These conclusions can coexist.
The illusion is not that Western countries possess advanced medical technology. They unquestionably do. The illusion is that technology, expenditure and institutional prestige automatically produce health resilience. COVID-19 showed otherwise.
A health system must ultimately be judged by results: who lived, who died, who received care, who remained healthy and whether the system protected the population under extreme operating conditions. By those measures, several countries proclaimed to possess the world’s finest health systems suffered staggering losses, while African countries expected to collapse produced outcomes the international establishment still struggles to explain.
Africa should no longer accept a knowledge system in which its failures are treated as proof of inferiority while its successes are treated as statistical accidents. The continent must preserve its medicinal heritage, document the knowledge of its communities and retain ownership of the productive sources from which future treatments may emerge. It should reject remedies demonstrated to be harmful or useless, but it must not permit outsiders to declare the entire inheritance worthless and later commercialize selected portions under foreign ownership.
The final question is larger than COVID-19, Rockefeller, Flexner or herbal medicine. Who has the authority to define knowledge? Who owns the plant? Who owns the experience accumulated around it? Who receives the benefit when inherited African wisdom becomes a global medical product? Until those questions are answered, the world may continue calling African success an outlier while quietly converting African knowledge into intellectual property.
As Amazon associate this site earns from qualifying purchases
Get your back to school needs from Amazon
Martin S. Mungwa, Ph.D., Fellow ASCE
Contributor The Independentist News
