Global Traditions, Tanzanian Medicines

Across Africa, legislative bodies are overturning old colonial laws prohibiting traditional healing. Traditional medicines are being legalised; governments are explicitly promoting their development; and the WHO is helping to fund new laboratories to investigate medicinal plants. This project, now completed, studied the history and emergences of ‘modern’ traditional medicines in Africa. It focused on the ways in which traditional medicines have been sparking novel forms of scientific experimentation, shifting boundaries between science and non-science, and challenging actors to grapple with new kinds of translation, i.e. with new possibilities for connection, appropriation, growth, and innovation. Since the stakes are high, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the African Union are trying to position themselves as mediators between national governments and multinational agencies such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Stacey Langwick found that strategic and technical questions about integrating different ways of knowing the physical body and healing its afflictions are now also political and ethical questions about integrating different ways of knowing and healing social bodies, such as nations and regions.
 

Tanzania offers a powerful example of how national governments throughout Africa are partnering with international organisations to define and research traditional medicine. For more than forty years, Tanzania has explicitly linked local, national, regional, and global desires in its efforts to develop traditional medicine. Such linkages work to scale-up traditional medicine from a ‘merely’ local to a global category of knowledge and practice, by drawing together the work of healers, the social dynamics of rural communities, the investigations of scientists, the claims of nation-states, the dreams of regional organisations, and the aspirations of multinational agencies. The development and promotion of traditional medicine demand that these actors be thought about and brought into the same (conceptual, analytical, bureaucratic, and legal) frame. As of yet, however, there is no consensus on how this should happen. Rather, the relationships and hierarchies between these diverse actors are debated and decided project by project, often in highly specialised languages.
 

This project anchored its investigation in laboratories in Tanzania. It focused on the experts, medicines, and technologies of three Tanzanian laboratories specialising in scientific investigations of herbal medicines. The publications by Stacey Langwick reflect the special attention she paid to the relations among scientific/laboratory work, new legal and governmental apparatuses, and public hopes for traditional medicines.