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132 Chapter 4
relationship with Ampofo. She provided vehicles and equipment for his
laboratories at the Centre for Scientifi c Research into Plant Medicine (CS-
RPM) in the mountainside town of Mampong that he cofounded with
Ghana’s fi rst pharmacology PhD, Albert Nii Tackie. In turn, Ampofo
explained that through Winn he met cancer researchers in the United
States, supplying them regularly with plants for screening. When Am-
pofo grew blind and frail in his old age, Winn fl ew him to the United
States to see physicians at Johns Hopkins. At his funeral, she announced
that her company, Phyto- Riker, had secured access to Ghana’s national
pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. With the buyout of the drug
wing of the Ghana Industrial Holding Corporation (GIHOC), Winn took
advantage of a series of privatization mea sures instituted by the govern-
ment in the late 1990s to jump- start ailing national industries.
1
This chapter uses the story of Cryptolepis to examine how African sci-
entists worked to transform plants into pharmaceuticals after the demise
Figure 4.2 Collection points of sixty- eight Cryptolepis sanguinolenta samples in herbaria accessed
through the online database of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility: Missouri Botanical Garden;
Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle et Réseau des Herbiers de France; Herbarium Senckenberg; Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew; National Herbarium of the Netherlands; Missouri Botanical Garden, Real Jardin
Botanico Vascular Plant Herbarium, Madrid; Ghana Herbarium. (Source: Global Biodiversity Information
Facility Data Portal.)
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Take Bitter Roots for Malaria 133
of colonial occupation. As in Chapter 3, the account traces how scientists
created rec ords, experiments, explanations, products, and harvests in the
pro cess of transforming herbal medicines into marketable pharmaceuticals.
However, this case emphasizes the role of scientists in postcolonial Ghana.
Reclaiming the pop u lar West African remedy they called “Ghana Qui-
nine,” a generation of scientists sought to replicate the success of the South
American cinchona bark that contained the malaria treatment quinine.
The chapter begins in the last years of the colonial era, when Ampofo
began to write down herbal recipes that healers used in the Akuapem
mountains of Southeastern Ghana. It then examines how Ampofo’s re-
search merged with a nationalist project to document Ghanaian plant
medicine after in de pen dence from Britain in 1957. The last two sections
of the chapter show how Tackie and Ampofo depended on external sup-
port for their research into Cryptolepis, and how this led to patents being
fi led abroad. Along the way, the story traces the bitterness with which
healers and scientists in Ghana remembered the partial transformation
of Cryptolepis into a patented pharmaceutical, a dusty tea, and a stiff
tonic during a turbulent time in the nation’s history. Although many
participated in the remaking of the plant into new medications, not ev-
eryone prospered from Cryptolepis (see Figure 4.2).
2
RECORDING TRADITIONAL THERAPIES IN AKUAPEM
The long, winding road that led from the Ghanaian coast to the Akua-
pem highlands was once a footpath. A century ago, people walked for
several days from their farms along the fertile mountain range to the
ports, carry ing merchandise on their heads. From the 1840s onward,
the cooler highlands were pop u lar with Swiss missionaries, who inspired
their early converts to construct stone churches along the ridge. Then,
British colonial offi cials and their wives spent the muggy rainy seasons
at the Aburi hill station away from the fever- inducing miasmas of the
sea marshes, traveling to the region in special hammocks balanced on
the heads of four men. As a college student, I frequently traveled to the
Akuapem town of Akropong to see family and friends. The drivers of the
vans I rode knew all the twists and turns by heart, rounding bends at full
tilt. Although the road has since been leveled and widened, at the time
it was passable only until the former vacation home of the fi rst Presi-
dent Kwame Nkrumah at Peduase. From there, the van drivers dodged
pedestrians in the small mountain towns lining the narrow highway-
cum- main street. Accidents were especially a problem on Fridays and
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134 Chapter 4
Saturdays, when people from the city returned to their hometowns to
participate in family funerals. The vans whizzed by party after party of
men and women adorned in fashionable combinations of white, brown,
black, and red cloth that referred to the age of the deceased and prefer-
ence of the family. Sometimes, I passed a cousin along the way, or a rela-
tive who drove vans between Accra and the Akuapem hills saw me as he
honked his horn at our driver on his way down. In an era before mobile
phones, my cousins in Akropong often knew I was en route before I
reached the Kwabesco Hotel junction and walked the short distance to
their maternity clinic.
These journeys to the highlands are how I fi rst learned of Ampofo, an
advocate of plant medicine and the found er of the Tetteh Quarshie Memo-
rial hospital in his hometown of Mampong. My aunt and grandmother
had both perished while delivering children in the Akuapem mountains,
and I was keen to understand the role of private and public health care
workers in alleviating maternal mortality. Because several of my cousins
ran a maternity clinic, I found myself interviewing them and their col-
leagues in nine towns and villages along the ridge. I was particularly
interested in the stories they narrated about nutritious herbal soups rec-
ommended for pregnant women, as well as the plants they used to stop
bleeding or speed up delivery. Noting my interest in herbal medicines, the
birth specialists with whom I spoke arranged for me to go visit Ampofo.
Ampofo, one of the fi rst Ghanaians to receive medical training
abroad, also worked to document plant recipes in the Akuapem region
in the late colonial period. Ampofo’s rediscovery of African healing
emerged from his experience with colonial education. Ampofo recalled
watching court proceedings at the feet of his father, Chief Kwesi Am-
pofo, in the southeastern town of Amanase before beginning primary
school in 1916 at a Basel Mission school when he was seven. Unusual
for the time, his mother had attended several years of primary school
through the Basel Mission, whereas Ampofo’s father had received limited
formal schooling but learned to read and write in both En glish and the
Ghanaian language Twi through the help of childhood friends. Board-
ing schools in Anum, Mfantsipim, and Achimota relocated Ampofo to
institutionalized spaces geo graph i cally and linguistically distinct from
his home community. He crammed for Cambridge exams in En glish,
Latin, French, history of the British Empire, geography, art, mathematics,
and hygiene— intellectually entering a literate space to which his parents
never had full access. By 1931, Ampofo won one of the fi rst government
scholarships available to pursue medical education in Scotland at the
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Take Bitter Roots for Malaria 135
University of Edinburgh. When Ampofo struggled with the professional
examinations in pathology and materia medica, the government decided
to pull Ampofo’s scholarship. He relied on fi nancial assistance from his
brothers while he prepared for the exams of Edinburgh’s Royal Colleges
of Surgeons and Physicians, from which he was to qualify in 1939.
3
Although Ampofo maintained his Twi language skills and family
ties, his circuitous path to a medical career abbreviated his experience
with local healing methods and animist traditions. Ampofo’s British
education was critical to his rediscovery of Ghanaian art and healing.
4
As with many colonial scholars in Eu rope and America, university train-
ing abroad placed Ampofo in conversation with other African and Asian
young adults grappling with the ironies of colonial rule. Ghanaian stu-
dents, as was the case with their non- European compatriots, confronted
acute racism and misconceptions about life in their home communi-
ties. Postcolonial memoirs cite diffi culties renting apartments, animosity
from fellow classmates, and racialized notions of their inferiority em-
bedded in textbooks. These experiences solidifi ed the desire to improve
the image of non- Europeans on the world stage as they emerged as an
integral component of the independence- era leadership.
5
Rejected for a government medical post on his return to the Gold
Coast in 1940, Ampofo found himself rediscovering the local plant reme-
dies of his youth in the waning years of World War II. In his unpublished
autobiography, Ampofo described his attempts to fi nd employment with
the medical ser vice:
The war had affected every business and even farmers were burning
their cocoa. And in visiting the Director of Medical Ser vices he laughed
when I told him that I wanted to join the medical ser vice. He said rather
brusquely that there was no vacancy for African doctors yet. This upset
me because I travelled with two British classmates on the same boat and
they were admitted straight into the ser vice, allocated hospitals, given
cars and bungalows whereas another African classmate of mine was
waiting for his appointment. In fact I took this statement of the Director
as a challenge because I had originally intended to work among my own
people in Akuapem. My only problem was how to fi nd money.
6
Ampofo’s experience refl ected a systematic program to limit the number
of African doctors in the British colonial medical ser vice. By the early
1950s, one Ghanaian doctor was thoroughly frustrated with colonial
policies that favored white doctors in the colonial ser vice:
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136 Chapter 4
Our numbers have been seriously restricted by the failure of past
Governments to give more than an average of one medical scholarship
a year. Even when we qualifi ed, we were not sure of immediate
employment as a result of a ratio policy whereby African medical
offi cers were employed in a strict, and very small, proportion to the
expatriate offi cers.
7
Through a series of loans and support from his older siblings, Ampofo
managed to establish a clinic in his hometown. He fi rst used drug sam-
ples he had brought from En gland; when these had run out, he took
public transport to the capital city several times weekly to restock. He
described these early days as overwhelming, with people coming from
across the Akuapem region to see if this new doctor could cure what the
retired physician could not.
8
In contrast to Eu ro pe an doctors in the co-
lonial ser vice keen to tackle specialized research in the handful of hospi-
tals in urban centers, African doctors like Ampofo focused on providing
care in rural villages.
9
With more cases than he could handle, the young
doctor conscientiously tried to cure all he could, often taking gravely ill
patients to the colonial hospital on the coast himself.
Malaria was the most prevalent concern among Ampofo’s patients.
10
The disease is caused by parasites that enter the blood through mos-
quito bites. As the parasites mature, the body responds with cycles of
high fevers and chills, which can be deadly if the parasites overrun the
spleen or invade the brain. For centuries, people offered many causes for
malaria fevers, confusing then with other feverish conditions like yellow
and blackwater fever. The term “malaria,” Italian for “bad air,” comes
from Eu ro pe an interpretations that putrefying matter created toxic mi-
asmas that created the fevers. By 1900, researchers isolated mosquitoes
as the carriers of malaria parasites. The decision to focus on mosqui-
toes stemmed from previous studies on parasites borne through fl ies in
China, as well as from indigenous theories of mosquitoes as a cause of
malaria that Eu ro pe an missionaries and explorers had collected in Africa
and Asia over the years.
11
People who frequently come into contact with
malaria parasites develop short- term immunities. This led colonialists in
Africa to believe that their subjects were immune to malaria even though
they harbored the parasites. We now know that, in some places, people
also inherited partial immunity through ge ne tic mutations that affected
the shape of blood cells. Confi dent that malaria only killed whites, co-
lonial administrators implemented systematic segregation in places like
the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone to maintain “sanitary corridors” be-
tween white housing on higher ground and black housing in swampy
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Take Bitter Roots for Malaria 137
lowlands. This was thought, erroneously, to prevent infected mosquitoes
from fl ying into Eu ro pe an homes.
12
It was not until the 1950s that Eu-
ro pe an scientists began to acknowledge the huge problem that malaria
posed for Africans, especially young children who had yet to develop
any immunities.
13
Ampofo, however, was keenly aware that malaria threatened the
health of Akuapem communities during the colonial period. How did
he treat malaria? Within the Gold Coast as a whole, people with whom
I have spoken recalled how as children their parents would make them
take bitter grains of quinine on Sundays as a prophylactic during the
1940s and 1950s. Quinine was derived from the bark of cinchona, a
plant from South America that Portuguese and Spanish missionaries
had appropriated as a treatment for fevers since the sixteenth century.
As quinine came to be used around the world to prevent the growth
cycles of malaria parasites, some stronger parasites survived and became
resistant to quinine. In the 1940s and 1950s, Ampofo would have com-
bated malaria cases with quinine as well as with tablets and injections of
mepacrine, proguanil, and chloroquine. The colonial government also
sponsored expeditions to drain swamps, cover house hold water tanks,
and spray heavy doses of toxic chemicals like DDT to control the growth
of mosquito larvae on open water. However, despite such efforts, re-
ported cases of malaria in the Gold Coast surged from around 30,000
in 1930 to 130,000 by 1950. This reported increase could have been
due in part to increased use of government hospitals and clinics where
statistics were maintained, as well as increased re sis tance of malaria to
drugs. Today, a less virulent malaria parasite, Plasmodium vivax, is im-
mune to quinine in West Africa, and the more deadly malaria parasite,
Plasmodium falciparum, has come to evade successive waves of drugs (see
Figure 4.3).
14
Over the years, Ampofo also found that people used herbal remedies
to combat the fevers, nausea, headaches, and body aches that accom-
pany malaria. Although colonial governments at the time did not ac-
knowledge African malarial treatments, it was a rational decision to try
plant remedies when quinine or other imported drugs failed to combat
fevers. It is unclear when Ampofo learned of Cryptolepis as a useful tra-
ditional remedy against malaria. The specifi c species, C. sanginolenta, is
a relatively scarce climbing shrub found in West African forested areas,
including those in Ghana, Senegal, and Nigeria. The roots have been
used for multiple purposes over the years, including treatments for chest
ailments, fevers, dye for goat leather, and an aphrodisiac.
15
In an article
published in 1983, Ampofo credited the healer Kwadwo Manu, who lived
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138 Chapter 4
in the nearby town of Apirade, with providing him with information
on Cryptolepis.
16
Ampofo most likely documented this treatment some-
time in the 1960s or 1970s, when government support allowed him to
work part- time on herbal research and patients returned to traditional
therapies to treat drug- resistant malaria. Ampofo explained that in his
practice more than 80 percent of his patients also visited traditional
healers to treat their illnesses. He began to spend time discussing local
plant remedies with some of his competitors. He recalled working closely
with Mr. Kwasi Adae, Mr. Kofi Addo, Mr. Kwame Awuku, Mr. Adu Darko,
Mr. Kwaku Poku, Alhaji Sidi Biney, Mr. Nyampon, Mrs. Kyeiwa, and Mrs.
Adae.
17
In describing how his interest in local herbs was piqued, Ampofo
explained in interviews with me in 1997 that while he was conducting
his work as a physician, he was constantly negotiating with his patients
about his treatments versus those of the herbalists. Laughing, he recalled
that most of his patients, having already visited an herbalist, would tell
him frankly the limitations they saw with his medicine. He said they
would explain, “ ‘Well, I got ill and I’ve been treated by a herbalist but
I’ve come to you just for injection.’ ”
18
Figure 4.3 Former site of Ampofo’s Obi Kyere Herbal Center, precursor to the Center for Scientifi c
Research into Plant Medicine. (Photo by author.)
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Take Bitter Roots for Malaria 139
It soon became clear to Ampofo that he would have to assess the
usefulness of the local plants that his government education and medi-
cal training had taught him to ignore. During the colonial period, there
was little pre ce dent for people living in the Gold Coast to write down
recipes for the medicinal plants they used to treat diseases. One excep-
tion was the Fante herbalist J. A. Kwesi Aaba, from the city of Sekondi,
who in 1934 was the fi rst Ghanaian known to publish his herbal recipes.
Aaba provided only the Fante names of herbs in his treatments, includ-
ing Adisikankyi and Kunkruma plants, which could be used to treat Ko-
noruku (malaria). Aaba related Konoruku to overconsumption of mangoes,
miasmas, and mosquitoes:
One of the symptoms of Konoruku is cough; and people, taking this
to be common cough, are deceived by the cunning Konoruku until it
poisons the whole blood and claims its victim. Whenever malarial signs
are detected, take this Simple Formula:
Ankama [Lemon] leaves. . . . . . . . . . 1 part
Kunkruma roots and leaves . . . . . . . 1 ”
Adisikankyi roots or barks . . . . . . . . 1 ”
Dried pepper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a suffi ciency
Boil with water for drinking and for injection by the rectum. The
decoction must be used warm.
19
It is unclear whether either of the two plants in Aaba’s recipe may have
been Cryptolepis. Given that Aaba lived on the more arid coast, it is less
likely than if he had lived at the edge of the rainforest in Akwuapem.
Ampofo developed a system for documenting the herbal remedies of
healers on the Akuapem ridge. Year by year, Ampofo amassed a personal
archive of information gathered from these healers, which would later
become a source of confl ict between Ghanaian scientists at CSRPM and
foreign visitors. After Ampofo’s death, I sought out his old friends for
their reminisces, including Jimi Moxson, the last colonial mayor of Accra,
who had retired in Aburi after in de pen dence and presided as a local king.
Weeks before his own death, Moxson spoke fondly of the late doctor and
his wife. Moxson had married them while serving as District Commis-
sioner in the Eastern Region. He requested that an assistant provide me
with pages from his autobiography in progress, where he described how
Ampofo honed his interest in plant medicine. Moxson explained how Am-
pofo documented information on local plants, which he “painstakingly
recorded in his card index system together with the vernacular names
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140 Chapter 4
(in three or four different dialects), the En glish names, and the botanical
names.” Moxson noted how Ampofo gained the trust of healers in the
Akuapem area: “By patience and gaining their confi dence and by a step-
by- step approach he progressively succeeded in recording their treatment
and cures and in classifying the herbs, roots, barks, leaves and fl owers
from which they cooked up their infusions.”
20
He noted that Ampofo
did not worry himself with spiritually based medicines, focusing only on
herbs. In his own words, Ampofo explained to me that he had “no time
to dance” when it came to the spiritual and fetish rituals integrated into
plant medicine.
21
Rather, Ampofo concerned himself with the positivist
project of classifying and documenting herbal remedies.
It was in this context of colonial disinterest in his medical expertise,
limited drugs, and abundant competition from herbalists that Ampofo
began an early project of “biological prospecting.” He was disillusioned
with the promises of the colonial regime and saw a real need for cheaper,
more readily available medicine. Through his patients, Ampofo then
found out the names of local healers and made it a habit of visiting
them and learning about their work. The in de pen dent government then
co- opted this research to create a national database of plants with the
potential to create drugs.
TAKING PLANTS FOR THE NATION
After in de pen dence in 1957, Ghanaians positioned themselves to reclaim
plant remedies, and exchanges between physicians, scientists, and heal-
ers intensifi ed. By the late 1950s, Ampofo’s investigations had gained the
attention of in de pen dence leader Kwame Nkrumah and Ghana’s emerg-
ing scientifi c community. Ampofo was asked to share his notes with
pharmacists and chemists at the Kumasi College of Technology, and the
University of Ghana engaged in the alkaloidal screening of local herbs.
These researchers were known as the “Alkaloid Group.” As plants passed
from healers to botanists, chemists and physicians, the lines of credit
became blurred.
Ghanaian Scientists Claim Alkaloids
The decision to focus on alkaloids was motivated in part by the acces-
sibility of testing alkaloid- rich plants in Ghanaian laboratories. Alka-
loids, the nitrogen- rich by- products of respiration in plants, had only
recently begun to be systematically identifi ed and studied. With around
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Take Bitter Roots for Malaria 141
98 percent of globally distributed plant species still to be analyzed for
alkaloids by the late 1950s, workers in Ghana felt that they could more
easily contribute to this aspect of drug development than they could to
expensive synthetic approaches. The possibility of honing in on specifi c
plants through the advice of local herbalists further amplifi ed interest in
this area. Located in the tropical rain- forest zone thought to be rich in
plant alkaloids, Ghana, it seemed, was ideally positioned for an alkaloi-
dal screening exercise. The clear crystalline structure of many alkaloids
provided further appeal to the fl edgling crystallography lab at Legon.
The original investigations of the Alkaloid Group in the early 1960s
provided avenues for scientifi c collaboration within and outside Ghana.
Although the Alkaloid Group gestured toward commercializing any
fi ndings, the primary focus was the expansion of scientifi c knowledge.
Collaborating researchers worked to screen “a large number of both
medicinal and poisonous herbs” and differentiate between “those con-
taining alkaloidal active principles, and those containing non- alkaloidal
active principles.”
22
Besides contributing to an increase in chemical data, the Alkaloid
Group inspired national pride. After many years, black Africans were
at the helm of po liti cal and intellectual leadership in the fl edgling
nation, and Ghana’s participation in global scientifi c activity was in
itself a cause for rejoicing. First President Nkrumah, at the laying of the
foundation stone of the ill- fated atomic reactor in 1964, captured this
sentiment as it related to his socialist agenda: “We must ourselves take
part in the pursuit of scientifi c and technological research as a means
of providing the basis for our socialist society. Socialism without sci-
ence is void.”
23
The Alkaloid Group emerged from conversations among the handful
of individuals with university training in science at Ghana’s in de pen-
dence in 1957. Oppong- Boachie, former director of CSRPM, credited four
Ghanaian scientists with heading studies initiated through the Alkaloid
Group, which was a project of the National Research Council (NRC).
These included Ampofo, pharmacist Albert Nii Tackie, and chemists J.
A. K. Quartey and F. G. T. O’B Torto.
24
Tackie, the fi rst Ghanaian to earn
a doctorate in pharmacy, took a leading role in the research. Like Am-
pofo a de cade before, Tackie was an Achimota graduate who had studied
abroad. After completing bachelor’s studies in pharmacy at London Uni-
versity, Tackie returned to the Gold Coast to serve as a principal phar-
macist at the Department of Health.
25
By 1957 he joined his classmate
Emmanuel Gyang and his former teacher Eric Allman as an instructor at
the Pharmacy School of Kumasi College.
26
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