Post by Admin on Feb 8, 2023 0:05:39 GMT
Under the mkone tree
When I returned to Kenya, where I grew up, I found biomedicine and traditional medicine in conversation about mental health
aeon.co/essays/what-does-mental-health-mean-to-the-people-of-malindi
Which way now? We scan the verge for signs to a place that is not on any map. My smartphone purports to know where we are. Invisible signals bounce and connect to inform Location Services: the world shrunk to a set of coordinates, a dropped pin, a pulsing blue icon confirming you are here: near the town of Malindi. But what good is a position when you have no sense of direction?
The World Health Organization estimates that around 80 per cent of the world’s population relies on traditional medicine as a source of healthcare. The importance of such knowledge has long been recognised by many scholars, including Elialilia Okello and Seggane Musisi in ‘The Role of Traditional Healers in Mental Health Care in Africa’ (2015). I am trying to get closer to this reality, to understand what has endured – how, why?
If there was a tradition around medicine in my Indian family, it was sharing pills. Painkillers were offered at the first twinge-throb-strain: don’t wait! Take a para. Medicine had nicknames; we were, after all, on intimate terms, thanks to my grandparents who had a shelf full of medications in their kitchen, a veritable pharmacy stashed between shelves of spices and pulses. It held the promise of a fix for every ailment. If things got serious, leftover antibiotics – hoarded from an uncompleted course – were brought into service.
Traditional medicine, according to the World Health Organization, ‘is the sum total of the knowledge, skill and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness.’
Eventually, memory leads us there. We have to take that dirt road, says Mary Bitta, the researcher who’s been there before, and has arranged this visit. I put away my phone, feel foolish for thinking I could rely on it. Here, I must depend on the orientation-kindness-knowledge of others. Bitta, who started and heads Difu Simo, a mental health campaign that has been running since 2019 in Kilifi County, Kenya, seems to approach the way anew each time, even over paths long-trodden.
Biomedicine is ‘a framework, a set of philosophical commitments, a global institution woven into Western culture and its power dynamics, and more.’ In short, writes Sean Valles in his entry on ‘Philosophy of Biomedicine’ (2020) for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it is ‘the name for how most powerful global institutions envision the relations between biological sciences and medicine.’ Is this dominant Western reality what has most shaped me, though I grew up in Kenya?
An ancient settlement is a contemporary refugee camp is a walking library is a death sentence is memorising the future is land is territory is rupture is legend-myth-reality is repair is a crime is flesh and blood is land is forgetting is I am you and not is spirit and ancestors is connecting is youth and desperation is owning or sharing is prayer and ritual is caring is old age and alienation is forgiving-accusing-preserving is territory is community is a rescue centre is history is hurting is a chance to heal, to tell…
They come, old men, old women. They emerge from makeshift tents of white canvas stamped with the words ‘Kenya Red Cross’; they step out of solid, conical huts made from lengths of dried grass tied with string to a framework of poles and sticks. They come to receive us.
Everything is at once recognisable and unfamiliar, like hearing an echo you can’t quite make out. I strain to grasp it, not stopping to wonder: why is knowing the goal? Might not knowing also have its uses?
We gather in a lopsided circle, unevenly spaced, unequally endowed, briefly united through an incantation recited in the Kigiryama language of the Giryama people by a local spiritual leader. He calls out words and those in the round reply, their hands outstretched, palms turned towards the sky. The gestures unfurl an aura of faith that glides fleetingly into view, and slips away as I wonder if I believe in… what?
I am no longer a disciple of the dispensary. Though I’m continuously struck afresh with wonder at the restorative powers of biomedicine, over the years I’ve also been forced to learn its limits in-by-through my own body and those of others. Yet my wish for the all-curing pill has not abated; a pill that would not just restore health, but fix the past.
My grandparents were among the many Indians who migrated to East Africa from India in the early 20th century, at the height of the British Empire, to work for the colonial administration. Colonised people who came – knowingly, unknowingly? – to help their colonisers colonise others. My ancestors joined a segregated society, were shoved into the middle of a racialised ranking that set whites above everybody and forced Black people to the bottom. Oppressor and oppressed – that’s how I came to see the Indians in Kenya, including my family.
When I returned to Kenya, where I grew up, I found biomedicine and traditional medicine in conversation about mental health
aeon.co/essays/what-does-mental-health-mean-to-the-people-of-malindi
Which way now? We scan the verge for signs to a place that is not on any map. My smartphone purports to know where we are. Invisible signals bounce and connect to inform Location Services: the world shrunk to a set of coordinates, a dropped pin, a pulsing blue icon confirming you are here: near the town of Malindi. But what good is a position when you have no sense of direction?
The World Health Organization estimates that around 80 per cent of the world’s population relies on traditional medicine as a source of healthcare. The importance of such knowledge has long been recognised by many scholars, including Elialilia Okello and Seggane Musisi in ‘The Role of Traditional Healers in Mental Health Care in Africa’ (2015). I am trying to get closer to this reality, to understand what has endured – how, why?
If there was a tradition around medicine in my Indian family, it was sharing pills. Painkillers were offered at the first twinge-throb-strain: don’t wait! Take a para. Medicine had nicknames; we were, after all, on intimate terms, thanks to my grandparents who had a shelf full of medications in their kitchen, a veritable pharmacy stashed between shelves of spices and pulses. It held the promise of a fix for every ailment. If things got serious, leftover antibiotics – hoarded from an uncompleted course – were brought into service.
Traditional medicine, according to the World Health Organization, ‘is the sum total of the knowledge, skill and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness.’
Eventually, memory leads us there. We have to take that dirt road, says Mary Bitta, the researcher who’s been there before, and has arranged this visit. I put away my phone, feel foolish for thinking I could rely on it. Here, I must depend on the orientation-kindness-knowledge of others. Bitta, who started and heads Difu Simo, a mental health campaign that has been running since 2019 in Kilifi County, Kenya, seems to approach the way anew each time, even over paths long-trodden.
Biomedicine is ‘a framework, a set of philosophical commitments, a global institution woven into Western culture and its power dynamics, and more.’ In short, writes Sean Valles in his entry on ‘Philosophy of Biomedicine’ (2020) for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it is ‘the name for how most powerful global institutions envision the relations between biological sciences and medicine.’ Is this dominant Western reality what has most shaped me, though I grew up in Kenya?
An ancient settlement is a contemporary refugee camp is a walking library is a death sentence is memorising the future is land is territory is rupture is legend-myth-reality is repair is a crime is flesh and blood is land is forgetting is I am you and not is spirit and ancestors is connecting is youth and desperation is owning or sharing is prayer and ritual is caring is old age and alienation is forgiving-accusing-preserving is territory is community is a rescue centre is history is hurting is a chance to heal, to tell…
They come, old men, old women. They emerge from makeshift tents of white canvas stamped with the words ‘Kenya Red Cross’; they step out of solid, conical huts made from lengths of dried grass tied with string to a framework of poles and sticks. They come to receive us.
Everything is at once recognisable and unfamiliar, like hearing an echo you can’t quite make out. I strain to grasp it, not stopping to wonder: why is knowing the goal? Might not knowing also have its uses?
We gather in a lopsided circle, unevenly spaced, unequally endowed, briefly united through an incantation recited in the Kigiryama language of the Giryama people by a local spiritual leader. He calls out words and those in the round reply, their hands outstretched, palms turned towards the sky. The gestures unfurl an aura of faith that glides fleetingly into view, and slips away as I wonder if I believe in… what?
I am no longer a disciple of the dispensary. Though I’m continuously struck afresh with wonder at the restorative powers of biomedicine, over the years I’ve also been forced to learn its limits in-by-through my own body and those of others. Yet my wish for the all-curing pill has not abated; a pill that would not just restore health, but fix the past.
My grandparents were among the many Indians who migrated to East Africa from India in the early 20th century, at the height of the British Empire, to work for the colonial administration. Colonised people who came – knowingly, unknowingly? – to help their colonisers colonise others. My ancestors joined a segregated society, were shoved into the middle of a racialised ranking that set whites above everybody and forced Black people to the bottom. Oppressor and oppressed – that’s how I came to see the Indians in Kenya, including my family.