Добавил:
Sekretar
kiopkiopkiop18@yandex.ru
t.me/Prokururor I Вовсе не секретарь, но почту проверяю
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Ординатура / Хирургия / Библиотека им академика М.И. Перельмана / Книга_5492_Библиотеки_им_академика_М_И_Перельмана
.pdf
102 Chapter 2
Historically, expertise in African healing plants has depended on
reticence. In the Akan language the symbol for wisdom
implies the
proverb “Mate masie,” meaning, “I have heard and kept it.”
67
Healers,
uncles, parents, teachers, and friends strategically concealed information
on plants, depending on the situation. A chief with effi cacious tonics
might display pulverized barks, rather than describe all the ingredients.
A grandmother who once knew about grains of paradise, and perhaps
still did, would be reluctant to discuss delicate matters like reproduc-
tive health in front of her grandson and his wife. A per sis tent student of
herbal medicine would be able to gradually accumulate knowledge on
plants, perhaps mounting plants on pieces of paper to help her identify
them in the forests, as the herbal seller Juliette Yeboah in Accra once
expressed to me. Indeed, even in the face of centuries of documentation
on grains of paradise, some have still managed to hide valuable insights,
and others are still experimenting to fi nd more.
LIGHTWEIGHT EXCHANGES
Grains of paradise are light and easy to carry. The dried peppers and
related information are simple to pass along without papers. When I
was traveling to London for a Wellcome Institute conference to discuss
my research, the pods slipped easily into my hand luggage, whereas the
hefty bottles of cloudy bitters would never pass airport security. On
several occasions, the small brown pods fi lled with seeds passed quietly
from me to another person. These lightweight exchanges remind us that
it is impossible to know exactly how plants and knowledge circulate over
time.
In Johannesburg, the plants provided a lucky indication of my com-
mitment to herbal knowledge. At the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Acad-
emy for Girls, the pepper, unknown in South Africa, remained a signifi er
of the potential of traditional herbs to cure many diseases, with no men-
tion of sexual medicaments for my audience of young ladies. But, in an
interview gone bad at the Faraday Market, grains of paradise assumed
their attributes as a treatment for impotence. The pods, forgotten in my
purse, emerged at just the right moment when my substitute translator
for the day turned out to be a former police offi cer with whom the plant
seller we were interviewing had had a previous altercation. My posses-
sion of grains of paradise suggested that I was in fact not working for the
government in disguise, but actually deeply invested in herbal medicine
in Ghana. Once the pods fell from my palms into the hands of my inter-
https://t.me/med1917
Take Grains of Paradise for Love 103
viewee, with promises that they might actually grow in South Africa and
provide a new stimulant for male customers, smiles returned and smooth
conversations continued as in past weeks.
In New Haven, a South Asian doctor sat in the back of a lecture I gave
on intellectual property rights and plants at Yale Law School. As I slipped
out during a lull on the panel to use the restroom, he brushed my arm.
Looking up from his chair along the aisle, he whispered, “Can I have a
couple of the pods?” Laughing hesitantly, I asked softly, “For your per-
sonal use? Sure.” He blinked shyly, “Of course.” He passed me his card, a
researcher at the medical school, while I slipped him some of my extra
peppers. Are the seeds under a microscope, or a tongue? Who can know
in the game of discreet bioprospecting?
Why did everyone always try to take my “herbal Viagras”? At a work-
shop at a small college in the United States, the Togolese professor mo-
tioned for me to pass him the small box of packaged Ghanaian “Man
Power Powder” under the table at a meal, so that his French wife would
not see. I obliged, and I do not think she noticed.
At the University of Pennsylvania, a Nigerian friend looked startled
when she met me after my talk. She noticed I had a couple of alligator
peppers in a plastic bag with my laptop and papers, the perennial hand-
out to keep people interested. “My father used to chew those! I haven’t
seen them for ages,” she laughed. My friend heard me out on how frus-
trating it was to take questions from an audience who knew so little
about Africa. She shook her head, saying “I’m going back home to help
the continent. You can stay here to continue to explain Africa to Ameri-
cans.” Yet, we assumed ignorance and misunderstanding of traditional
African herbs, even when the pepper at hand had long been a part of the
American story.
CONCLUSION: LOCAL ROOTS AND GLOBAL SEEDS
The movement of plant materials has long been undocumented. This is
especially true in West Africa, where commerce, medicine, religion, and
science have been widely practiced and recorded through oral communi-
cation and public witnessing rather than written documentation. Grains
of paradise are indigenous to tropical West Africa and have been widely
cultivated and traded. It is extremely challenging to identify shifts in
how people living in West Africa have used the medicinal peppers over
time to establish a history of traditional knowledge. In contrast to the
story of Strophanthus recounted in Chapter 3, I was unable to fi nd a cache
https://t.me/med1917
104 Chapter 2
of documents on how treatments for grains of paradise arose in a specifi c
location in Africa at a specifi c time.
Thus, the scientist in Africa is in a bind when it comes to recent
calls to share benefi ts from research on local plants and local knowl-
edge. There is the potential for many, many confl icting claims to grains
of paradise across geographic areas. Widely dispersed healing plants,
backed by a range of pop u lar and esoteric knowledge, are diffi cult to as-
sociate with specifi c communities or specifi c countries for the purposes
of benefi t sharing. If anything, my research suggests a gendered compo-
nent to the knowledge appropriated, as African scientists have produced
research experiments with a bias toward “proving” the effi cacy of grains
of paradise therapies aimed at ailments of men. Historian of medicine
Londa Schiebinger reminds us that sometimes women have concealed
information on herbal remedies, privileging male authority in botanical
compendiums.
68
At the same time, scientists who basically adapt pop u lar
recipes into patented pharmaceuticals run the risk of stealing the inno-
vations of many others.
There is a pre ce dent for confl ict when a patent for a plant- based
chemical pro cess is centered on widely held information, especially if
the product proves extremely profi table. In that sense, the story of the
widespread grains of paradise and efforts to make new pharmaceuticals
from the pepper has much in common with the well- known neem tree
controversy. Neem grows throughout East Africa, the Middle East, and
South Asia, where it has been used for a variety of medicinal therapies as
well as in agriculture for centuries. The Indian activist Vandana Shiva,
who has promoted use of the term “biopiracy,” participated in efforts to
overturn Eu ro pe an patents related to Neemix, an insecticide manufac-
tured by the U.S. company W. R. Grace from the neem tree. The neem
controversy led to uprisings of Indian farmers. It became a po liti cal case
for the Indian government not because of the limited knowledge of the
plant in a single community but rather because of its cultural currency
across the nation. However, the plant is not commonly used just in South
Asia; its popularity extends beyond the subcontinent to East Africa and
the Middle East. Had the government pursued compensation from W.
R. Grace, as the San did in the case of hoodia, it would have been quite
challenging to determine who would benefi t.
It is a huge problem to identify exactly who was fi rst to use grains of
paradise, as with the case of rosy periwinkle and calls for retroactive ben-
efi t sharing from Eli Lilly. The original own ers of healing knowledge are
often a moving target, making the rhetoric of documenting indigenous
botanical resources to establish benefi t sharing a complex proposition af-
https://t.me/med1917
Take Grains of Paradise for Love 105
ter centuries of relatively open access. Indeed, I have been approached by
healers and environmental activists in African countries who seek advice
on how to show who “stole” recipes from their ancestors through archi-
val evidence. But, it is unclear how exactly knowledge of herbal medi-
cines spread through tropical West Africa, the Sahel, Sahara, and Medi-
terranean to Eu rope and the Americas. Where possible, I have identifi ed
the slim number of references for African contexts to approximate the
domain of healing knowledge for grains of paradise. Recipes must have
spread from person to person, often in family settings but also at trad-
ing stands, ports, and on ships. Nonetheless, the signs of this transfer
of knowledge remain with us globally today. People move, seeds spread,
and although roots establish themselves in par tic u lar places, knowledge
of how to use them can diffuse overtime to an infi nite number of sites.
https://t.me/med1917
Figure 3.1 Strophanthus pod in the Economic Botany Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
(Photoby author.)
https://t.me/med1917
107
In nearly every narrative of exploration in uncivilised tropical regions
accounts are given of poisonous substances, which in many instances are
stated to possess remarkable properties.
—Thomas Fraser, “Strophanthus hispidus”
The fl uffy seeds spring out of the tidy black boxes as I carefully lift the lids.
Each brown kernel clings to a feathery parachute, leading me to wonder
if there is any danger of inhaling a noxious residue as they launch them-
selves into the air (see Figure 3.1). Skittish seeds from East Africa led some-
one before me to scribble in red ink “TAKE CARE— FLYAWAY SEEDS.”
Separated from their downy tails, other seeds nestle together in large
glass bottles. They come with fl uorescent orange stickers of a skull and
crossbones with the words “VERY TOXIC
.” Yet, in their various stages
of entombment and decay, none of the seeds seem particularly harmful
as I hold and examine them without gloves or a mask. Most have been
segregated by region: Strophanthus kombe from Central Africa in one jar;
Strophanthus hispidus from Ghana in another. The seeds harbor historical
clues on their journey from Africa on tiny slips of yellow paper tucked
into their boxes and bottles. From an expedition in Niger in April 1894,
reddish S. hispidus seeds traveled to London. In January 1901, fi ve pock-
ets of Strophanthus seed and nine bales of pods lay in wait at the Drug
Ware house at the London Docks. A pod full of S. hispidus seeds from the
CHAPTER 3
Take Arrow Poisons for the Heart
https://t.me/med1917
108 Chapter 3
Gold Coast made its way to the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine by
1915. On October 20, 1947, a cluster of gingerlike roots of S. hispidus left
the forest on Bana Hill in the Gold Coast with a scribbled message, “The
natives use the root against syphilis.”
1
For most of the nineteenth century, these seeds were best known as
the crucial ingredient in arrow poisons. By the century’s close, however,
investigations on African poisoned arrows in Eu rope led to the creation
of a new heart medication called “strophanthin.” The Strophanthus case
allows us to probe the question of how plants became pharmaceuticals
under colonial occupation (see Figure 3.2). As with other plants exam-
ined in this book, researchers have engaged in a complex and interlocked
set of activities, including the production of new kinds of rec ords, ex-
periments, explanations, products, and harvests. Colonial investigators
sought ways to “civilize” African plant knowledge, much as missionaries
and government offi cials hoped to industrialize and Christianize their
colonies. Initially, scientists in Britain, Germany, and France comman-
deered African plant expertise through networks of Eu ro pe an physicians
and botanists visiting new colonies. Then, they placed seeds and arrows
Figure 3.2 Plants included in 1885 British Pharmacopoeia, with approximate
continent of origin (175 plants in all). (Source: General Medical Council, British
Pharmacopoeia.)
https://t.me/med1917
Take Arrow Poisons for the Heart 109
under microscopes and injected laboratory animals with Strophanthus
extracts. They created chemical and physiological explanations for why
Strophanthus seeds increased the heart rates of animals, developed tidy
tablets from strophanthin, and or ga nized Strophanthus plants in walled
gardens.
Although it has received little historical attention, the search for new
drugs was a central component of colonial expansion in Africa during
the late nineteenth century. Eu ro pe an botanists appropriated plants and
information, expanding diasporas of healing plants established through
Early Modern African networks of trade and kinship. On the Gold Coast,
the British overran the capital of the Asante Kingdom in 1874 and estab-
lished a permanent capital for their self- declared protectorate among the
Ga people in Accra by 1877. The colonial governor and his administrators
were tasked with fi nding ways to make the emerging Gold Coast colony
pay for itself, including the discovery of any medicinal plants of value.
Eu ro pe an appropriation of poisoned- arrow technology for an export trade
in the valuable Strophanthus seeds— seeds critical to both the weapon
and the drug— represented one of the earliest episodes in transnational
drug prospecting in African colonies. It is signifi cant that the 1884– 1885
Berlin Conference that paved the way for Eu ro pe an colonization in Af-
rica demanded safe passage for scientifi c parties exploring plants along
the Congo and Niger Rivers.
2
In the Gold Coast, a botanist from the
Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew was dispatched to set up an experimental
agricultural garden in the southern mountain town of Aburi. The gov-
ernor also appointed a group of interested men to a Commission for the
Promotion of Agriculture in the Gold Coast colony.
3
A close reading of
pharmacological history suggests that the search for new drugs was also
a factor in the scramble for Africa.
This chapter examines how new colonial subjects on the North-
ern frontier of the British Gold Coast resisted these efforts to appropri-
ate plant information, ban arrow poisons, and harvest Strophanthus for
emerging pharmaceutical companies like Burroughs Wellcome and E. R.
Squibb and Sons. Fundamentally, it probes how populations in the Gold
Coast confronted efforts of colonial offi cials to create new databases
and gardens open to different Eu ro pe an parties but closed to African
subjects. Further, through the pro cess of appropriation of Strophanthus,
colonial researchers obscured the role of African plant experts whose
prior experimentation was critical to the transformation of the plant
into a drug. The fi rst section considers how colonial offi cials attempted
to take control of the use of poisoned arrows as a technology of warfare
and re sis tance on the West African Sahel from 1885 to 1922. The second
https://t.me/med1917
110 Chapter 3
section examines the same period through the story of the conversion
of the weapon into a drug, and the third explores the subsequent export
scheme in the Gold Coast.
Read together, these contemporaneous narratives recover the social
and global milieus in which pharmaceuticals continue to be embed-
ded. The overlapping stories reveal the messiness of not only drug
discovery from plants, but the rise of pharmaceutical science more
broadly. It implicates scientists like Thomas Fraser, the creator and pro-
moter of strophanthin at a laboratory in Scotland, in the coercive
practices that marked rule on a colonial frontier. When understood as
both a drug and a weapon, Strophanthus holds the ironic position of
functioning as a tool for fending off the very empires that would have
their children take chocolate- covered strophanthin pills. While here
it might be tempting to draw easy lines between bad colonists, rotten
African chiefs, and resisting subjects, the starker difference is between
those who could set themselves up as scientifi c experts, whether white
or black. Determining lines of own ership and rights to both plants
and related traditional medicines continues to represent a po liti cal
dilemma that often sacrifi ces those with less access to the language of
the laboratory.
TAKING POISONED ARROWS
Poisoned arrows were critical weapons in the arsenal of African popula-
tions resisting invaders, slave raiders, and distrusted voyagers. The party
of the Portuguese explorer Nuno Tristao made the earliest Eu ro pe an
report of poisoned arrows in West Africa after a failed attempt to land
in Gambia in 1447.
4
Poisoned arrows also killed a large number in the
party of the British navigator Richard Hakluyt as he approached Cape
Verde in 1567.
5
Poisoned- arrow technology became synonymous with
the mysterious dangers of the African continent. For several centuries,
details on their manufacture were unavailable to Eu ro pe ans at coastal
forts. In 1673, the Danish missionary Wilhelm Müller wrote of Fetu poi-
soned arrows purportedly laced with crocodile bile on the Gold Coast,
but until the late nineteenth century further information eluded inquisi-
tive Eu ro pe ans.
6
During the 1890s, the British Colonial War Offi ce and Royal Botanic
Gardens at Kew witnessed a spike in correspondence surrounding arrow
wounds as wars were waged to secure territory in Africa.
7
Earlier emissar-
ies of the empire, including David Livingstone, had collected poisoned
https://t.me/med1917
Take Arrow Poisons for the Heart 111
arrows for Eu ro pe an museums. Army surgeons and military intelligence
were now concerned with their actual deployment as weapons. Much
has been made of the devastating impact of the repeating rifl e in Africa
after its introduction to British troops in 1889; as the satirist Hilaire
Belloc famously quipped, “What ever happens, we have got the Maxim
gun, and they have not.”
8
Regardless of their military advantage, how-
ever, British colonial authorities voiced continued apprehension. Indeed,
Britain’s considerable success was followed in the emerging West African
colonies in newspaper reports on fatalities and advances. In June 1892,
the Gold Coast Chronicle published a fi ght song describing the war in
nearby Nigeria (sung to the tune of Bonnie Dundee): “Away with the
Jebus! / Bring out the Rockets / The Maxims, the Gatlings / Give it ’em
Hausas, Ibadans and Scouts / Finish ’em, Finish ’em, Finish ’em now!”
9
However, apprehension surrounding poisoned arrows and other African
armaments shaped a surprising footnote to the offi cial narratives of co-
lonial conquest.
Africans capitalized on their superior understanding of local plants
to challenge efforts to occupy their territory. Among Gurunshi commu-
nities living along the Sahel in West Africa, secret recipes for “red- tipped
arrows” were disclosed to religious and healing fi gures such as the land
priest or tiindana who prepared the poison in secluded parts of the bush
ahead of offensives (see Figure 3.3). In the face of colonial espionage in
the 1890s, those privy to poisoned- arrow production supplied incom-
plete details:
The seeds are reduced to a powder by grinding and the other parts added.
And to this a small quantity of water is added and stirred. The mixture
is then boiled for some time until it becomes of a thick consistency. It is
then allowed to cool and the arrows are subsequently smeared with the
thick brown coloured resinous looking residue.
10
Figure 3.3 Illustration of poisoned arrow from Albert Chalmers’s “A Further Repor t of Experiments upon
the Fra Fra Arrow Poison” (1899), in “Miscellaneous Gold Coast Cultural Products (I– W),” 1888– 1906.
(Source: Archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Image reproduced with the kind permission of
the Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.)
https://t.me/med1917
Соседние файлы в папке Библиотека им академика М.И. Перельмана