In 1977, my grandfather ran out the door of his South African home in pursuit of my then 6-year-old fathers cries. The scene he entered upon was a strange one: My father, with snot and tears mixing on his face, sat plump and huddled in the shade of the garage door. In the center of the driveway the family black cat, Peanut, hung upside down from a clenched hand, hissing at his captator: A tall Black man in a long jacket. My grandfather looked into this man’s blank eyes and realized was none other than a witch doctor. The witch doctor broke the gaze to retrieve a knife from his coat pocket and poised it at the top of Peanut’s soft, rotund belly, preparing to slice him in two.
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When you think of traditional medicine, what comes to mind? Do you think of witch doctors and voodoo? Do you think of sorcerers and medieval magic? Do you think of acupuncture, herbs, and specimens? Do you think of strange concoctions and potions of plants, oils, and excrements? Do you think of the word credibility?
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Before the knife could pierce Peanut’s skin my grandfather rushed forward and hit the witch doctor across his head with a baseball bat retrieved from the doorway and the cat broke free. The men glared at each other, holding their respective weapons in a moment of tension. The witch doctor rubbed his head and backed away speaking in Zulu too fast for my grandfather to understand. He turned and fled down the street. My father had stopped crying, now focused on squeezing a gecko that had unfortunately found itself between his chubby fingers. The driveway was quiet. it was almost as if the scene had never occurred. What was left was an air of unease, and my grandfather felt it was not wrong to suspect that this was not the last of the witch doctor’s peculiar wrath. The next day my grandfather fractured his arm falling off a ladder that broke in two as he was emptying the rain gutters.
The story of the witch doctor plagued my childhood, and my brother and I would listen intently with each retelling, enraptured by our fathers words. We crept up to the bushes at the gated communities walled borders and looked out at the people of greater Johannesburg: Black people walking their kids home from school, large women watering their gardens and hanging up the laundry in the sun, teenagers in plaid school uniforms buying smoking Boerewors from stands on the sides of the street. We tried to spot the witch doctors, because our father had said that you couldn’t always tell at first glance, that you had to look close to see it in dark eyes and dark spirit. We were not allowed outside of the gated community, he said, because the witch doctors could turn us into bullfrogs. We sat excitedly at the gates, contained in our little world of manicured ornamental plants: plots of aloe and protea.
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Although you may not have known it, we are in the midst of a scientific race for plants, it is the era of the gene rush. With the advancement of gene sequencing techniques in the modern age, it is possible to collect the genetic data of biological systems more efficiently than ever before. This has led scientists to global biodiversity hotspots, mostly tropical areas, for their abundance of genetic strings of code (Unit). This code is then developed into a variety of drugs: Emisinins, treatment for highly resistant strains of malaria, from sweet wormwood extracts; Galantamine, treatment for Ahlzhiemers, from snow drop; Hoodia Gordonii, a weight loss supplement, from Hoodia (Corinnecluis). This is seen as one of the great accomplishments of western medicine: the harnessing of the insentient natural world for its benevolent and practical purposes. But there were people collecting sweet wormwood, galantamine, and hoodia long before they were put under a microscope. So the knowledge that the gene rush is built upon is not as new as it claims to be, nor as innocent in its foundations. Many western medicines are created through traditional medicinal methods, yet the public’s sense of traditional medicines’ credibility is low. All the while it is a source of knowledge that is collected and abused by a routiley deemed credible opposition: The sterile, objective world of western biotechnology and pharmacology. This is known as biopiracy.
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My brother and I collect mud in handfuls from the ground and cover our hands in it so the geckos will not see us coming. The geckos scale the hot cracked walls that contain us and are so fast that we must be patient for them to approach us if we want to catch them. When my brother finally grabs one, its tail falls off between his fingers and it scuttles away. He drops the tail and we watch it squirm bloody on the mulch, with no sign of the rest of the gecko. I wipe the tears that rush from his eyes looking around for the culprit, thinking that this must surely be the cruel work of the witch doctor.
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The gene rush is driven by profit. Currently, 29,000 plant based substances, gathered mainly from Asia, Africa, and South America, pull in an annual revenue exceeding $60 billion in the United States. This money is split between 1,000 or so pharmaceutical companies (Yoonus). Only a fraction of all plants have useful medicinal properties, so to advance efficiency, companies approach people with traditional knowledge of the plants to narrow the search. This knowledge is then patented and used to manufacture drugs that will pull in millions of dollars, but not a cent will be given to the original holders of the knowledge (DeGeer). Biopiracy is the appropriation of indigenous plant knowledge. Gene harvesting of medicinal plants is built upon biopiracy. It is now possible to claim ownership of a genetic sequence and it is possible to patent the natural world, turning abundance into forced scarcity.
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Somewhere in the Amazon forest, making its claim to life among the abundance, there is a plant that can fix us. Its biomechanisms are complex and elusive and will be the cure to this cancer we hold. We will destroy life to find it, but it will make us rich. We will let the forests it grows in fall, and then it will be too late. We will watch it burn at our own hands.
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Outside the platinum mines there were fires that ran through the tall dry grass almost as if they were alive. They licked the railing of the edge of the road we drove on, and lapped perilously close to the gas stations where petroleum had baked into the cracked concrete between the pumps. I could feel the heat, dry and hard on my cheeks as I stuck my head out of the car window to watch the embers and smoke rise tall and ominous before me. We sped past until the red could only be seen as a small glow against the blue blooming dusk. You told me that the witchdoctor had created the flames and I closed the window.
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The closed view of science is that it is objective in nature. In reality, it should be viewed as anything but objective, because humans are the innately subjective force that move the hand of science forward. The fundamental difference between modern medicine and traditional medicine is a difference in structural thought: a difference in reckoning of objectivity versus subjectivity. Robin Wall Kimmer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants is an exploration of bridging these differences in thought. She states that in Western science, the hierarchy of beings exists with “human being on top — the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation — and the plants at the bottom” (Kimmer), so that plants are something that can be extracted and eliminated. In Western science eyes, plants are only a vehicle to understand the world, and don’t offer insight beyond it. However, Kimmer claims that in Native modes of scientific understanding, people are the younger, less experienced counterparts to plants, a flip in the objective narrative of order: “They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.” (Kimmer). The Native view of medicinal plants is that they have a story to tell, and that these stories are far more important to uncover than just the physical structures they contain. Traditional medicinal plants were all discovered through this mode of thought: through questioning, discovery, and experimentation. They harbor a legacy of narrative and healing passed through generations, however, medicinal plants are still only viewed as scientifically sound if they are “re-discovered” through a western lens and its guise of objectivity. So if both are drawing from the same plant source, why is only one method deemed plausible?
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I draw my sword which is actually just a stick and hit my brother who has also armed himself with a sword that is actually just a stick. We run around the pool which is our ocean and eat rations from the fig tree that reaches to us from over the neighbors fence. A hoopoe sits in the tree and I claim it as my parrot. My brother does the same and we fight again. We pull up weeds in search of treasure chests. We are pirates. Not the modern kind. We pretend to be marauders, that despite the atrocities they can be accredited for, we consider cool. We are the cool pirates.
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Traditional methods of medicine are considered invalid because the people who built these systems of knowledge are deemed invalid. Within the hierarchy of beings that Kimmer describes, our western world also ranks humans. Those who are invalidated by western scientific systems are done so because biopiracy is a modern form of colonialism. This modern colonialism builds upon circles of already constructed spheres of colonialism, so that it exponentially compounds to diminish whole ways of being and thought. The story of the witch doctor, the dark and inhuman being, is a story which perpetuates the White Afrikaans views of Apartheid. In a country separated by race and creed, a grandfather’s experience is passed to his son, which is passed to his daughter, in the form of a fable. The witch doctor is a perpetuation of this divide extrapolated on a generational scale. The White man’s fear of the Black man turns healing into horror. My brother and I live a childhood weary of the fictitious witch doctor, which will keep us contained within white concrete walls and locked car doors.
The gene rush as it is progressing now, is something that cannot be contained. However, it presents itself as an opportunity to amend the cycle of biopiracy and break the spiral of colonialism as it extends to STEM, and build it anew. Kimmer asks a fundamental question about the use of traditional and western science: “Might we see the world more fully when we use both?” (Kimmer). Imagine a world where the granting of intellectual patents to the people that the knowledge comes from could help undeveloped countries grow. Where the incentive of keeping plants in biodiverse areas alive would lead companies to help fund their preservation rather than their destruction. Where reckoning with western sciences failures relating to the perpetuation of colonialism will be a step in the right direction to breaking down the structural barriers colonialism constructs.
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The inyanga and sangoma are the traditional Zulu healers of South Africa. They are also commonly known as witch doctors. They concern themselves with spirituality as a mode of healing as well as the physical, using plants, herbs, and minerals discovered through traditional knowledge passed down through generations. The witch doctor is just a man.
Works Cited:
- Biopiracy: The Appropriation of Indigenous Peoples’, ipmall.law.unh.edu/sites/default/files/hosted_resources/PLANT_PATENT_ARTICLES/biopiracy_and_indigenous_knowledges.pdf. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.
- Corinnecluis. “Bioprospecting: A New Western Blockbuster, after the Gold Rush, the Gene Rush.” SCQ, 6 Sept. 2006, www.scq.ubc.ca/bioprospecting-a-new-western-blockbuster-after-the-gold-rush-the-gene-rush/.
- Imran, Yoonus, et al. “Biopiracy: Abolish Corporate Hijacking of Indigenous Medicinal Entities.” TheScientificWorldJournal, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 18 Feb. 2021, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7910072/.
- Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. 2022.
- Unit, Biosafety. “About the Nagoya Protocol.” Convention on Biological Diversity, Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 9 June 2015, www.cbd.int/abs/about.