BEYOND SHAMANISM: THE RELEVANCE OF AFRICAN TRADITIONAL MEDICINE IN GLOBAL HEALTH POLICY

This article explores the tension between African traditional medicine and orthodox medicine, and argues for a cosmopolitan and inclusive health policy that integrates ethnomedical therapies into the core framework of global health architecture. The paper argues that age-old traditional therapies in Africa are relegated to the peripheries of orthodox health policy. The paper briefly discusses the accelerating pace of globalization of intellectual property rights (patents) as a factor that would continue to perpetrate bio-piracy and threaten traditional herbal therapies with extinction. The search for an inclusive global health policy opens a new vista in the interaction of traditional and orthodox medicine. The paper concludes that a sustained relegation of African traditional medicine to the margins of orthodox health policy is a phenomenon that would likely project the globalization of public health as predatory, discriminatory and unfair.