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62 Chapter 1
of plants with “larger scale grinding and extraction facilities.” P. C. Spens-
ley offered the ser vices of his plant collection fi rm, which had long
secured “from within the Commonwealth samples of the tropical plant
species required by research workers.” Spensley’s company was privy to
the research interests of competing labs:
We have also, by virtue of both workers coming to us for the samples,
managed on one or two occasions to avoid the galling situation of two
people working simultaneously on the same line. With regard to Vinca
rosea we have been connected with two separate research investigations
on this species, one using material from Ghana and the other from
Trinidad.
79
Plant distributors were another node of contact, offering advice on new
plants to study and letting researchers know of competing interests in a
par tic u lar plant.
80
According to different accounts, scientists at Lilly fi rst procured sam-
ples of periwinkle from Madagascar (see Figure 1.8). Later, Lilly secured
substantial periwinkle harvests from India to manufacture Velban, the
fi rst periwinkle derivative containing vinblastine released in 1961. Lilly
Figure 1.8 Drying periwinkle at Ranopiso. (Photo by author.)
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Take Periwinkle for Leukemia and Pennywort for Leprosy 63
reported to its shareholders that year that “supply of the raw material
was posing tricky problems. It takes 5,000 pounds of crushed periwinkle
leaves to produce 1 pound of the fi nished product.” Noble noted that his
team never would have been able to secure the 15 tons required to make
an ounce of vinblastine at Lilly. By March of 1961, Lilly received approval
of Velban from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Over six days of
concentrated activity in Indianapolis, Lilly workers toiled around the
clock to produce the fi rst 50,000 vials of Velban so that physicians could
begin to use it for cancer patients within a week of the drug’s approval.
81
The manufacture of vincristine, the second drug marketed as Onco-
vin, required even more periwinkle to extract. Malagasy growers took
advantage of rising interest in periwinkle by the 1970s. To learn more,
I traveled to fi nd the plantations where Lilly and other drug companies
had sourced periwinkle. As early as 1970, a Frenchman named Durant
had hired people to cultivate periwinkle for him on a vast tract of land
at Ranopiso (now over 1,000 hectares). Edmond Monja, a man who had
been there from the early days, recalled that “Before, I worked here, SEAR
[Société d’Exploration Agricole, Ranopiso/Society of Agricultural Explo-
ration of Ranopiso] was in the village to the south. In 1970, before SEAR,
there was Mr. Durant who had a farm here. He started SEAR to cultivate
pervenche [periwinkle]. He was a Eu ro pe an, French.” Workers used their
experience growing food crops in their hometowns to cultivate periwin-
kle for Durant. In the earliest period, about 100 men and women were
contracted to plant periwinkle seeds. After that, because the plant is a
perennial in Madagascar, the workers did not need to replant year after
year, but only from time to time. The plantation had provided Monja’s
livelihood for forty years. Two brothers had joined him over the years.
The sale of the Ranopiso planation to Boehringer Mann- Heim led to the
creation of SEAR in 1973.
82
SEAR was not the only attempt to cultivate
and export periwinkle in Madagascar. Others involved the exporter Pro-
notex, based in Antananarivo, as well as a 60- hectare plot in Bejofa and
a project of the Department of Water and Forestry at Ambalavao in the
mid- 1970s.
83
Exporters of periwinkle in southern Madagascar relied on farmers to
cultivate and collect plant parts. This led to diffi culties with standardiza-
tion. In October 1975, major exporters of periwinkle convened a meet-
ing at the Libanona Motel in Tolaganaro to discuss further expansion
of plant cultivation. The region was ideally suited for harvesting peri-
winkle, with an active port at Tolagnaro providing easy access through
the Indian Ocean to Eu ro pe an and American trade routes. The export-
ers decided to supply people in surrounding communities with seeds of
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64 Chapter 1
Catharanthus roseus “to profi t from the cultural experience of the peas-
ants.” The goal of the meeting was to form a new collective to coordinate
periwinkle exports and to safeguard quality and quantity. Together, the
exporters agreed to pay agents to collect periwinkle harvests for pay-
ments of 100 Malagasy francs, plus 20 Malagasy francs for Vatoeka (a tax
to control offi cers) per kilogram. Of par tic u lar concern was the quality
of periwinkle roots that had been collected: “For some time now, due
to their incompetence and desire to gain market share, the traditional
collectors gather roots of poor quality (too young, green . . . sometimes
false).” Those assembled learned from representatives of laboratories
about “the Quality Norms according to International Regulations” that
required dry roots, at least six months old, with a weight of 4 to 5 grams.
It would be necessary, participants were told, “to educate the peasants
so they replant these young roots during thinning.” All told, twenty- four
individuals from two of the export companies attended this afternoon
meeting to discuss the future of Madagascar’s periwinkle industry. Those
in attendance included a mix of Eu ro pe ans, Asians, and Malagasy, judg-
ing from the names.
84
Exporters came to rely on Malagasy scientists as well as peasants.
The scientists took up a supporting, rather than a leading, role in the
creation of Oncovin and Velban. Alongside evidence of continuous use
of periwinkle and harvests for export in Madagascar, I also sought infor-
mation on the contributions of Malagasy scientists to investigations that
might have led to the Lilly breakthrough. Indeed, a number of Malagasy
scientists with whom I consulted suggested that Phillipe Rasoanaivo, a
leading chemist who had written his PhD thesis on new alkaloids from
periwinkle in the 1970s, had helped shape work at Lilly. Given that Svo-
boda secured his patents in 1965, it seemed that these comments were
merely a sign of reference to a leader in the Malagasy scientifi c com-
munity.
85
Rasoanaivo studied biochemistry in France at the Faculty of
Science of Orsay, part of the University of Paris. By 1972 he participated
in efforts to identify a new alkaloid from the Catharanthus genus, using
methods of extraction from the work of Svoboda. In his 1974 doctoral
thesis, he addressed the pro cess of extraction of alkaloids from the plant
C. longifolius. This fl owering shrub was related to C. roseus and was one
of the seven species of the genus original to Madagascar. Rasoanaivo
continued his quest for new drugs in his capacity as professor at the
University of Antananarivo and laboratory director at IMRA, which was
founded by Ratsimamanga, the early proponent of pennywort. When I
spoke to scientists at IMRA, they explained that Rasoanaivo had been
eager to develop drugs from periwinkle but had not been able to fund all
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Take Periwinkle for Leukemia and Pennywort for Leprosy 65
his research, necessitating the sale of his fi ndings. During the 1980s and
1990s, Rasoanaivo fi led several patents for drugs derived from additional
plants and published policy suggestions on sustaining biodiversity in
Madagascar.
86
International pharmaceutical fi rms relied on the expertise of Mala-
gasy agronomists to help improve periwinkle exports over the years. Ra-
soanaivo provided expertise to periwinkle exporters, as did Jean Joseph
Andriamanalintsoa, one of the next generation of scientists, who took
up the position of technical direction at SEAR, the Ranopiso plantation
where fi rst Eli Lilly, and then other international drug fi rms, sourced
both periwinkle and pennywort. Andriamanalintsoa was picked for this
post after he conducted arguably the most comprehensive study to date
of the cultivation and harvesting of C. roseus. His thesis was littered with
the chemical structures fi rst elucidated at Lilly. Laboratories in Madagas-
car would have been hard pressed to fund the research for periwinkle
during the mid- 1960s while the Malagasy were in the pro cess of ending
French colonial rule. However, it was Andriamanalintsoa’s careful moni-
toring of local techniques for drying racks, root and leaf harvesting, and
climatic monitoring that allowed for continued export of periwinkle
to companies in Eu rope and North America that adapted the expired
patents of Lilly. As he showed me the stacks of plants ready to be sent
to international researchers for their own laboratory studies, he sighed
and explained that scientists in Madagascar still needed to improve their
own laboratory work to allow for the better extraction of plant chemicals
prior to export. A hulking machine, once used to separate essential oils
from plants, was now painted white and set in the stunning gardens of
Ranopiso, an eerie reminder of one of the many previous attempts to
jump- start Madagascar’s pharmaceutical industry.
Export companies sourced periwinkle from sustainable harvests at
the same time the government restricted environmental devastation in
the area. My arrival in the southern town of Fort Dauphin, now To-
lagnaro, where the fi rst documented exports of periwinkle to France
began in the 1600s and where Lilly identifi ed the best form of C. roseus,
also coincided with the beginning of a massive destruction of forested
coastland around the town. The international mining conglomerate Rio
Tinto had just that week begun the excavation of illimente, a valuable
mineral from beach sand used in paint. To do so, they had to obliter-
ate entire mountains of forest. But, according to Rio Tinto employees,
it was all well and good because a two- decade biological survey and im-
pact study meant that a nursery of plants grown directly from seeds by
Malagasy and collaborating researchers from En gland, the United States,
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66 Chapter 1
and other countries could be used to restore the area. As the mining
compactors whirred in the distance, I stood in the ware house looking at
the stunning collection of seeds, some fl orescent blue, others speckled
with muted hues. Malagasy scientists and local farmers all wrung their
hands, and everyone knew it was fruitless to try to replicate nature, but
at least they had interesting research, a new school, and more jobs in the
community. Not surprisingly, the small museum Rio Tinto built next to
the nursery had a photograph of periwinkle with a caption describing
the importance of the plant to the pharmaceutical industry. It was a sign
that here, where the story of periwinkle’s exportation began, the plant
still held historical currency and po liti cal relevance.
87
Finding Pennywort in Madagascar and India
SEAR, the company that exported plants from southern Madagascar,
competed with the local market, especially for the second main medici-
nal plant export, pennywort. Alongside their private farms, SEAR relied
on middlemen contracted to obtain plants for them from families in
neighboring towns. During my visit, an older gentleman explained that
he had played this role for SEAR for several de cades. It was diffi cult work,
as he had to take a bicycle from village to village to coordinate harvests
of cultivated plants and monitor stockpiles of specimens collected from
the wild. I asked if it was diffi cult to monitor whether people gathered
the correct plants and was told that, although they had training pro-
grams, there were sometimes problems. “I go to so many villages,” he ex-
plained to me. “Lately, it is diffi cult because my bike has broken down. It
is diffi cult work for an old man like me. Do you really want me to name
all of them? Well, then, to collect pennywort (Centella or Mahavita) I
go to Ankaramena, Bemavoriky, and Fenoatsimo. To collect periwinkle
(Pervenche or Tsahavitay), I go to [more than forty towns].”
Pennywort is generally not cultivated in Madagascar, with exports
dependent on collection from the wild (see Figure 1.9). Along the road
to Ranopiso, groups of young children stood with woven baskets brim-
ming with delicate pennywort leaves. A young girl explained to me, “I
collected this basket myself in the morning with my brother. It took
fi ve hours, and this basket is all of the leaves I gathered myself.” Andria-
manalintsoa, a technical director at SEAR, examined the basket and
estimated that the leaves weighed 5 kilograms. The girl’s tiny younger
brother held up his basket with a mere kilogram of the leaves. Mireille
Rasoanaivo, a director of research at SEAR, explained, “It is necessary to
be courageous and fast. So you have a girl with a large collection, and a
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Take Periwinkle for Leukemia and Pennywort for Leprosy 67
small boy who only has a small crop.” She pointed out that the mothers
of the thirty children who were gathered by the road sat nearby in the
shade of the trees. Their children, wearing faded secondhand T-shirts, their
bare feet and legs scratched and marked from the morning’s harvest,
were a contrast to a line of children in smart green uniforms walking
to school.
To further complicate the story of colonial taking of folk recipes, me-
diated through the later collaboration of a Malagasy scientist at the ex-
pense of everyday plant sellers, Indian researchers presented competing
claims to the origins and uses of pennywort.
88
Vonjy Ramarosandratana,
a Malagasy biochemist who had trained in Natal in South Africa, home
to a large base of South Asian researchers, explained that some scientists
in India claimed that pennywort originated there and that Madagascar
should not have gotten rights to a drug produced from it. Pennywort
fi gured in Ayurvedic healing traditions and was the subject of chemical
analysis in South Asia. Ramarosandratana explained that one solution
people were considering was to conduct tests at the level of population ge-
ne tics to determine if the species of pennywort in the northeastern part
of Madagascar was more closely related to Indian species, as many people
suggested. A French scientist, Pascal Danthu, coordinator of Forests and
Figure 1.9 Basket of freshly harvested pennywort leaves. (Photo by author.)
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68 Chapter 1
Biodiversity at the Center for International Cooperation in Agricultural
Research for Development (CIRAD), confi rmed when I visited his offi ce
that ge ne tic tests were under way on pennywort. Ratsimamanga had
participated in earlier efforts to test periwinkle varieties from India and
Madagascar.
89
Ramarosandratana suggested to me that perhaps it might also be a
good idea to do ge ne tic tests on periwinkle at the level of populations
in different parts of the world. This was after my conversation with the
IMRA herbarium keeper, Benja Rakotonirina, which had left me un-
clear as to how exactly periwinkle had made its way around the world:
was it the French explorers as depicted in the written record, or was it
Malagasy fi shermen in the Indian Ocean basin? Rakotonirina shook his
head and said, “That is our problem in Africa. We do not write things
down, so we must rely on the Eu ro pe an rec ords.” And Rakotonirina won-
dered if we could get funding to do a population study of periwinkle.
Who would provide the money? After all, Malagasy scientists had seen
many researchers come and go and governments rise and fall. They re-
mained cynical about their chances for claiming own ership of plants
and knowledge.
90
CONCLUSION: MEDICINE’S ROOTS CROSS CONTINENTS
Both periwinkle and pennywort emerged as leading medicinal plant
exports for Madagascar by the late twentieth century. Pennywort relied
on important investigations conducted by the French scientists Grimes
and Boiteau and was later transformed into a patented method for curing
wounds through the additional research of the Malagasy physician Ratsi-
mamanga. Around the same time, periwinkle, a widely used weed, found
an international market for pharmaceutical preparations after Eli Lilly
laboratories identifi ed antitumor properties in the plant. In both cases,
pop u lar knowledge of the plants— not only in Madagascar but in India,
various African countries, the Ca rib be an, and the Philippines— led to
the collection of herbal recipes by scientists.
Eli Lilly’s discovery of alkaloids in Madagascar’s periwinkle has be-
come the classic example of biopiracy, but the story presents a weak case
for theorizing benefi t sharing, because the plant is so widely distrib-
uted and information about its uses has also coevolved with the plant’s
migration. Rather, the histories of drug discovery from periwinkle and
pennywort show the indebtedness of scientists to one another, to early
documentation of plants from colonial exploration, and to traditional
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Take Periwinkle for Leukemia and Pennywort for Leprosy 69
plant exporters. Both plants have long featured in folk recipes to cure
various ailments, and these recipes inspired physicians to conduct clini-
cal studies and chemists to take the plants into the laboratory to test bio-
activity. Periwinkle is a pantropical weed, and pennywort grows in both
Africa and Asia, patterns of distribution that have led to many, many po-
tential claimants to the plants, their chemicals, and related knowledge.
Further, the shifting boundaries between scientists engaged in colonial
and postcolonial research has amplifi ed the concerns of healers that Af-
rican and foreign investigators wish to usurp them of rights to medicinal
plants. Their reliance on folk recipes shows the pa ram e ters of inven-
tion among physicians, biologists, and chemists in Canada, the United
States, France, Madagascar, and India engaged in work on periwinkle and
pennywort. Benefi t sharing from the profi ts of patents thus becomes a
symbol of the drug industry’s debt to global communities rather than of
retrospective justice for specifi c groups.
Many people— healers, scientists, el der ly women, corporations,
communities— help shape products of medical science, complicating
claims to priority in science and traditional medicine. Because some of
these groups of individuals historically did not document their research
on healing plants with written rec ords, credit for innovation has typi-
cally gone to those who could claim to be inventors of chemical extrac-
tion using complex, expensive equipment. Pharmaceuticals coexisted
with viable herbal preparations. Conversations with Malagasy plant sell-
ers and collectors indicated sustained knowledge of folk uses for the two
leading herbal exports, pennywort and periwinkle, and their importance
to regional and international trade networks. Importantly, in the face of
diffi cult odds, Malagasy plant sellers used private recipes and informa-
tion about plants in bids to maximize profi ts. Similarly, scientists at IMRA
found that license agreements and patents were a useful way to maintain
funding for their investigations. They also supplemented their incomes
with the sale of herbal products through IMRA’s commercial wing. This
led to mistrust between scientists and plant sellers, who had less access
to resources and education. Similar tensions surfaced, as I explore in sub-
sequent chapters, in Cameroon, Ghana, and South Africa.
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Figure 2.1 Ripe grains of paradise in Pebase, Ghana. (Photo by author.)
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71
The phenomenon of cultural exchange or borrowing makes clear that
traditions have widespread roots.
—Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity
The oval pods swell up and turn bright red, like the glands of an animal
in heat. They encase rows of pungent peppercorns wrapped in a soft,
downy fi ber. The peppers hide themselves close to the ground, at the
base of lacy, green fronds that stretch past my waist. At fi rst, the pods
remain elusive, until we swish through the branches with our hands
and sticks to fi nd them. The wandering plants seem almost like weeds,
although the farmer explains his late mother cultivated them close to
the house under these trees to make a little money on the side. They
intermingle now with old cans someone threw casually into the bushy
embrace of their stalks. In their brilliant red cases, the grains of para-
dise seem for a moment to multiply into the discarded red tomato tins
that surround them. The peppers remind us of the ripe promise of this
hidden fruit, abandoned once more in a small settlement between two
rainforest preserves far from the main road that might lead them to
global markets.
1
Grains of paradise have circulated through the history of West Africa
and the world, celebrated over time as an aphrodisiac, cooking spice,
and general cure- all. Historically, the peppers featured in medicinal and
CHAPTER 2
Take Grains of Paradise for Love
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