![\"brain](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/brain-pickings.jpg\")
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Wole Soyinka, <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\nthe First African Writer<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n to Win the Nobel Prize <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\nin Literature, <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\non Faith, Medicine, <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\nand the Healing <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\nof the Human Spirit<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n <\/p>\n
by\u00a0Maria Popova<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What a continent\u2019s \u201crich tapestry of intuitive forces\u201d can teach us about healing, of body and of soul.<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.brainpickings.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/ofafrica_wolesoyinka.jpg\")
<\/a>Even though the term \u201cplacebo effect\u201d was coined in 1920 and the phenomenon itself has been studied since the 18th century, only recently have scientists begun to understand\u00a0the full extent to which our minds affect our bodies<\/a>. Of course, long before Western medicine was able to define and demonstrate it empirically, the world\u2019s ancient practitioners of traditional medicine have been reaping the benefits of this integrative mind-body approach to healing for centuries, if not millennia \u2014 under the dismissive, even scornful eye of the Western medical establishment. But in addition to betraying the very basic tenet of science as a discipline propelled not by the arrogance of what we know but by the humility of what we don\u2019t \u2014 by the\u00a0\u201cthoroughly conscious ignorance\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that transmutes curiosity into knowledge \u2014 such attitudes are mired in more complex sociocultural forces and power dynamics, especially in societies torn between two worlds by the soul-splitting aftermath of colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s precisely what\u00a0Wole Soyinka<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 the first African writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature \u2014 explores in his altogether excellent collection\u00a0Of Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Wole](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/wole-soyinka-01.jpg\")
<\/a>Wole Soyinka (Photograph: Peter Badge)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\nSoyinka writes in the introduction:<\/span><\/p>\nWhat does the continent known as Africa possess that the rest \u2014 or a greater part \u2014 of the globe does not have already in superabundance? These, obviously, cannot be limited to material or inert possessions \u2014 such as mineral resources, touristic landscapes, strategic locations\u2014 not forgetting the continent\u2019s centuries \u2014 old designation as human hatcheries for the supply of cheap labor to other societies, East and West. There also exist dynamic possessions \u2014 ways of perceiving, responding, adapting, or simply doing that vary from people to people, including structures of human relationships. These all constitute potential commodities of exchange\u2014 not as negotiable as timber, petroleum, or uranium perhaps, but nonetheless recognizable as defining the human worth of any people\u2014and could actually contribute to the resolution of the existential dilemma of distant communities, or indeed to global survival, if only they were known about or permitted their proper valuation.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nIt is its humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment\u2014 both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual) \u2014 that remain the primary, incontestable assets to which any society can lay claim or offer as unique contributions to the attainments of the world.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn an essay titled\u00a0\u201cNot a \u2018Way of Life,\u2019 But a Guide to Existence\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 particularly poignant in the wake of the world\u2019s frantic response to the Ebola crisis \u2014 Soyinka examines the larger secular structures and functions surrounding traditional religion, focusing on those aspects of society that reside not \u201cwithin the mysteries of the religion itself, but in those areas of mundane activities in which religion is implicated, however marginally, making our selection among the more pacific and unavoidable human occupation.\u201d He considers the disorienting intersection between traditional African spiritual traditions \u2014 traditions that have shaped \u201csocial conduct, human relations, and survival strategies\u201d \u2014 and their ambivalent disavowal by post-colonial society:<\/span><\/p>\nMy mother was what we call a petty trader. Next to her shop was a traditional healer, a\u00a0babalawo<\/em>, whose clinic was the verandah of his mud house, under a lean-to, thus making it quite visible from the frontage of our own shop, where I often sat. My father was a schoolteacher, and it struck me that his, and the babalawo\u2019s, operations appeared to share the activity of instruction, so I began to take an illicit interest in his methods. Illicit because, to a well-brought-up child from a Christian home, such activities were clearly the work of the devil. Beyond a neighborly good morning, there was hardly any social intercourse between the healer and our own corner of the block.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd yet despite this coolly detached public courtesy was only one half of the great ambivalence with which the community regarded the babalawo; the other half was enacted privately, in secret:<\/span><\/p>\nThe babalawo\u2019s clinic was the place for a more fascinating array of herbal concoctions dispensed for various illnesses\u2014potions from barks and roots, bitter and astringent, oily and\/or gritty, not too dissimilar from those that were dispensed by the bottle and spoon in western hospitals. I was also able to observe that the babalawo\u2019s consulting shack was patronized by practicing Christians and Moslems \u2014 a number of them sneaking in after dusk or in the early morning on their way to white-collar duties\u2026 My superimposing eyes also remarked that, in our own home, apart from the pills and potions dispensed from the government hospitals, there were also jars, clay pots, and gourds whose contents were suspiciously like the ones I saw being provided by the babalawo.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWith an eye toward the broader social and cultural implications of the community\u2019s response to African traditional medicine, Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\nOne deduction emerged effortlessly from those childhood experiences: a distinction between the passive and the active (participatory) curative methods\u2026 The \u201creturn to source\u201d with the full collaboration of western-trained doctors, is, however, making strides, perhaps propelled more by commercial stakes than conviction, but that return is on, and with full vengeance.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nBut perhaps the babalawo\u2019s greatest appeal \u2014 to young Soyinka, as well as to us today \u2014 was his role as a living reminder that, per\u00a0Carl Sagan\u2019s memorable admonition<\/a>, the closer we inch to the assumption that we know everything there is to know and have answered all the questions worth answering, the further we drift from our essential humanity. Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\nThe babalawo\u2019s clinic intrigued me far more than the starched, white-overall western clinics, where a most impressive looking doctor hung a stethoscope around his neck, listened to heartbeats, took pulses, and wrote down prescriptions in indecipherable script. He looked intimidatingly omniscient, and he clearly was in touch with all the dialects of the human body. The babalawo also exuded knowledge and mystery, but somehow he appeared closer to his patients. For a start, he sat cross-legged on a floormat and appeared to consult his patient as much as they consulted him.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAfter recounting the babalawo\u2019s process and his various divinations for patients, Soyinka considers the larger value of this practice \u2014 one remarkably similar to what Western medicine is only just beginning to discover about\u00a0the role faith plays in the patient\u2019s physical healing<\/a>. He writes of the babalawo\u2019s work with one woman from the community:<\/span><\/p>\nThe therapeutic value of this was to ally the suppliant, psychically, to forces within the entirety of her healing culture \u2014 including the history of her own people.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher Gaston Bachelard\u2019s beautiful reflection on\u00a0the poetics of reverie<\/a>, Soyinka considers the healing power of poetic form itself \u2014 the common thread between the chants of the babalawo\u2019s healing rituals and the liturgies of the world\u2019s organized religions \u2014 independent from any religious message it may transmit:<\/span><\/p>\nPoetry in liturgy is common to most religions, perhaps the most powerful element, far more powerful than any alleged intrinsic truths of the religions themselves. Poetry, or, sometimes, sheer lyricism and mesmerizing rhetoric, these are tools that are natural to or cultivated by charismatic leaders in any culture, irrespective of the purpose to which such attributes are turned, secular or religious.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn essence, what Soyinka describes is a kind of invaluable social work, and yet its fate in the hands of colonial oppressors has been a dismal one, denying its vitalizing social function and reducing it to useless superstition to be replaced by more convenient but no less damaging dogmas:<\/span><\/p>\nThis then is the binding network of mortals, deities, and nature that Christians and Moslems pronounced \u201cpagan,\u201d \u201cinfidel,\u201d \u201cdemonic,\u201d etc., and moved to proscribe and destroy on the African continent, substituting, often through violence, their own faiths, which are based no less on structures of superstition though are perhaps more elegant, architecturally imposing, or seductively packaged. At the heart of it all, however, is nothing more than an article of faith sustained by dogmatism.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nConsidering such dogmatic \u201cworld religions\u201d and their practitioners who \u201cpress wafers to the lips of their followers to ingest the body of their sainted god,\u201d Soyinka reflects on Africa\u2019s enduring humanistic values and what it stands to teach all of humanity:<\/span><\/p>\n[There are] those who, centuries after the Age of Reason and its underlying spirit of enquiry, still deem a continent backward and satanic, that had proved itself capable of weaving and sustaining such a rich tapestry of intuitive forces. But then, did they know of, or seriously penetrate, such systems of belief? No, their sources remained missionary missives. Despite them all, however, Africa survives to teach the world \u2014 even without proselytizing.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSoyinka is careful to acknowledge \u2014 \u201cwithout equivocation\u201d \u2014 \u201cthe progress that has been made in medicine through scientific research\u201d as he points to the broader cultural and creative importance of making visible the value of traditional African healing traditions:<\/span><\/p>\nOur interest here is simply to relate the science of healing to the holism of faiths, of which a most potent aspect is the Word, the lyricism and poetry of healing which acts both therapeutically and homeopathically.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nIt is from within such resources that not only the religion but the full richness of Africa\u2019s literary wealth \u2014 oral, ancient and contemporary, of the continent and the Diaspora, written and rhetorical \u2014 can best be appreciated.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nInsufficiently celebrated remains the fate of this continuity between such traditional resources and contemporary creative minds.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nOf Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is a beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with\u00a0Beneath the Rainbow<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a collection of ancient stories and poems from Kenya, illustrated by contemporary African artists.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
to Win the Nobel Prize <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\nin Literature, <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\non Faith, Medicine, <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\nand the Healing <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\nof the Human Spirit<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n <\/p>\n
by\u00a0Maria Popova<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What a continent\u2019s \u201crich tapestry of intuitive forces\u201d can teach us about healing, of body and of soul.<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>Even though the term \u201cplacebo effect\u201d was coined in 1920 and the phenomenon itself has been studied since the 18th century, only recently have scientists begun to understand\u00a0the full extent to which our minds affect our bodies<\/a>. Of course, long before Western medicine was able to define and demonstrate it empirically, the world\u2019s ancient practitioners of traditional medicine have been reaping the benefits of this integrative mind-body approach to healing for centuries, if not millennia \u2014 under the dismissive, even scornful eye of the Western medical establishment. But in addition to betraying the very basic tenet of science as a discipline propelled not by the arrogance of what we know but by the humility of what we don\u2019t \u2014 by the\u00a0\u201cthoroughly conscious ignorance\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that transmutes curiosity into knowledge \u2014 such attitudes are mired in more complex sociocultural forces and power dynamics, especially in societies torn between two worlds by the soul-splitting aftermath of colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s precisely what\u00a0Wole Soyinka<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 the first African writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature \u2014 explores in his altogether excellent collection\u00a0Of Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>Wole Soyinka (Photograph: Peter Badge)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\nSoyinka writes in the introduction:<\/span><\/p>\nWhat does the continent known as Africa possess that the rest \u2014 or a greater part \u2014 of the globe does not have already in superabundance? These, obviously, cannot be limited to material or inert possessions \u2014 such as mineral resources, touristic landscapes, strategic locations\u2014 not forgetting the continent\u2019s centuries \u2014 old designation as human hatcheries for the supply of cheap labor to other societies, East and West. There also exist dynamic possessions \u2014 ways of perceiving, responding, adapting, or simply doing that vary from people to people, including structures of human relationships. These all constitute potential commodities of exchange\u2014 not as negotiable as timber, petroleum, or uranium perhaps, but nonetheless recognizable as defining the human worth of any people\u2014and could actually contribute to the resolution of the existential dilemma of distant communities, or indeed to global survival, if only they were known about or permitted their proper valuation.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nIt is its humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment\u2014 both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual) \u2014 that remain the primary, incontestable assets to which any society can lay claim or offer as unique contributions to the attainments of the world.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn an essay titled\u00a0\u201cNot a \u2018Way of Life,\u2019 But a Guide to Existence\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 particularly poignant in the wake of the world\u2019s frantic response to the Ebola crisis \u2014 Soyinka examines the larger secular structures and functions surrounding traditional religion, focusing on those aspects of society that reside not \u201cwithin the mysteries of the religion itself, but in those areas of mundane activities in which religion is implicated, however marginally, making our selection among the more pacific and unavoidable human occupation.\u201d He considers the disorienting intersection between traditional African spiritual traditions \u2014 traditions that have shaped \u201csocial conduct, human relations, and survival strategies\u201d \u2014 and their ambivalent disavowal by post-colonial society:<\/span><\/p>\nMy mother was what we call a petty trader. Next to her shop was a traditional healer, a\u00a0babalawo<\/em>, whose clinic was the verandah of his mud house, under a lean-to, thus making it quite visible from the frontage of our own shop, where I often sat. My father was a schoolteacher, and it struck me that his, and the babalawo\u2019s, operations appeared to share the activity of instruction, so I began to take an illicit interest in his methods. Illicit because, to a well-brought-up child from a Christian home, such activities were clearly the work of the devil. Beyond a neighborly good morning, there was hardly any social intercourse between the healer and our own corner of the block.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd yet despite this coolly detached public courtesy was only one half of the great ambivalence with which the community regarded the babalawo; the other half was enacted privately, in secret:<\/span><\/p>\nThe babalawo\u2019s clinic was the place for a more fascinating array of herbal concoctions dispensed for various illnesses\u2014potions from barks and roots, bitter and astringent, oily and\/or gritty, not too dissimilar from those that were dispensed by the bottle and spoon in western hospitals. I was also able to observe that the babalawo\u2019s consulting shack was patronized by practicing Christians and Moslems \u2014 a number of them sneaking in after dusk or in the early morning on their way to white-collar duties\u2026 My superimposing eyes also remarked that, in our own home, apart from the pills and potions dispensed from the government hospitals, there were also jars, clay pots, and gourds whose contents were suspiciously like the ones I saw being provided by the babalawo.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWith an eye toward the broader social and cultural implications of the community\u2019s response to African traditional medicine, Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\nOne deduction emerged effortlessly from those childhood experiences: a distinction between the passive and the active (participatory) curative methods\u2026 The \u201creturn to source\u201d with the full collaboration of western-trained doctors, is, however, making strides, perhaps propelled more by commercial stakes than conviction, but that return is on, and with full vengeance.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nBut perhaps the babalawo\u2019s greatest appeal \u2014 to young Soyinka, as well as to us today \u2014 was his role as a living reminder that, per\u00a0Carl Sagan\u2019s memorable admonition<\/a>, the closer we inch to the assumption that we know everything there is to know and have answered all the questions worth answering, the further we drift from our essential humanity. Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\nThe babalawo\u2019s clinic intrigued me far more than the starched, white-overall western clinics, where a most impressive looking doctor hung a stethoscope around his neck, listened to heartbeats, took pulses, and wrote down prescriptions in indecipherable script. He looked intimidatingly omniscient, and he clearly was in touch with all the dialects of the human body. The babalawo also exuded knowledge and mystery, but somehow he appeared closer to his patients. For a start, he sat cross-legged on a floormat and appeared to consult his patient as much as they consulted him.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAfter recounting the babalawo\u2019s process and his various divinations for patients, Soyinka considers the larger value of this practice \u2014 one remarkably similar to what Western medicine is only just beginning to discover about\u00a0the role faith plays in the patient\u2019s physical healing<\/a>. He writes of the babalawo\u2019s work with one woman from the community:<\/span><\/p>\nThe therapeutic value of this was to ally the suppliant, psychically, to forces within the entirety of her healing culture \u2014 including the history of her own people.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher Gaston Bachelard\u2019s beautiful reflection on\u00a0the poetics of reverie<\/a>, Soyinka considers the healing power of poetic form itself \u2014 the common thread between the chants of the babalawo\u2019s healing rituals and the liturgies of the world\u2019s organized religions \u2014 independent from any religious message it may transmit:<\/span><\/p>\nPoetry in liturgy is common to most religions, perhaps the most powerful element, far more powerful than any alleged intrinsic truths of the religions themselves. Poetry, or, sometimes, sheer lyricism and mesmerizing rhetoric, these are tools that are natural to or cultivated by charismatic leaders in any culture, irrespective of the purpose to which such attributes are turned, secular or religious.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn essence, what Soyinka describes is a kind of invaluable social work, and yet its fate in the hands of colonial oppressors has been a dismal one, denying its vitalizing social function and reducing it to useless superstition to be replaced by more convenient but no less damaging dogmas:<\/span><\/p>\nThis then is the binding network of mortals, deities, and nature that Christians and Moslems pronounced \u201cpagan,\u201d \u201cinfidel,\u201d \u201cdemonic,\u201d etc., and moved to proscribe and destroy on the African continent, substituting, often through violence, their own faiths, which are based no less on structures of superstition though are perhaps more elegant, architecturally imposing, or seductively packaged. At the heart of it all, however, is nothing more than an article of faith sustained by dogmatism.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nConsidering such dogmatic \u201cworld religions\u201d and their practitioners who \u201cpress wafers to the lips of their followers to ingest the body of their sainted god,\u201d Soyinka reflects on Africa\u2019s enduring humanistic values and what it stands to teach all of humanity:<\/span><\/p>\n[There are] those who, centuries after the Age of Reason and its underlying spirit of enquiry, still deem a continent backward and satanic, that had proved itself capable of weaving and sustaining such a rich tapestry of intuitive forces. But then, did they know of, or seriously penetrate, such systems of belief? No, their sources remained missionary missives. Despite them all, however, Africa survives to teach the world \u2014 even without proselytizing.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSoyinka is careful to acknowledge \u2014 \u201cwithout equivocation\u201d \u2014 \u201cthe progress that has been made in medicine through scientific research\u201d as he points to the broader cultural and creative importance of making visible the value of traditional African healing traditions:<\/span><\/p>\nOur interest here is simply to relate the science of healing to the holism of faiths, of which a most potent aspect is the Word, the lyricism and poetry of healing which acts both therapeutically and homeopathically.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nIt is from within such resources that not only the religion but the full richness of Africa\u2019s literary wealth \u2014 oral, ancient and contemporary, of the continent and the Diaspora, written and rhetorical \u2014 can best be appreciated.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nInsufficiently celebrated remains the fate of this continuity between such traditional resources and contemporary creative minds.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nOf Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is a beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with\u00a0Beneath the Rainbow<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a collection of ancient stories and poems from Kenya, illustrated by contemporary African artists.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
on Faith, Medicine, <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\nand the Healing <\/a><\/span><\/h2>\nof the Human Spirit<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n <\/p>\n
by\u00a0Maria Popova<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What a continent\u2019s \u201crich tapestry of intuitive forces\u201d can teach us about healing, of body and of soul.<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>Even though the term \u201cplacebo effect\u201d was coined in 1920 and the phenomenon itself has been studied since the 18th century, only recently have scientists begun to understand\u00a0the full extent to which our minds affect our bodies<\/a>. Of course, long before Western medicine was able to define and demonstrate it empirically, the world\u2019s ancient practitioners of traditional medicine have been reaping the benefits of this integrative mind-body approach to healing for centuries, if not millennia \u2014 under the dismissive, even scornful eye of the Western medical establishment. But in addition to betraying the very basic tenet of science as a discipline propelled not by the arrogance of what we know but by the humility of what we don\u2019t \u2014 by the\u00a0\u201cthoroughly conscious ignorance\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that transmutes curiosity into knowledge \u2014 such attitudes are mired in more complex sociocultural forces and power dynamics, especially in societies torn between two worlds by the soul-splitting aftermath of colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s precisely what\u00a0Wole Soyinka<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 the first African writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature \u2014 explores in his altogether excellent collection\u00a0Of Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>Wole Soyinka (Photograph: Peter Badge)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\nSoyinka writes in the introduction:<\/span><\/p>\nWhat does the continent known as Africa possess that the rest \u2014 or a greater part \u2014 of the globe does not have already in superabundance? These, obviously, cannot be limited to material or inert possessions \u2014 such as mineral resources, touristic landscapes, strategic locations\u2014 not forgetting the continent\u2019s centuries \u2014 old designation as human hatcheries for the supply of cheap labor to other societies, East and West. There also exist dynamic possessions \u2014 ways of perceiving, responding, adapting, or simply doing that vary from people to people, including structures of human relationships. These all constitute potential commodities of exchange\u2014 not as negotiable as timber, petroleum, or uranium perhaps, but nonetheless recognizable as defining the human worth of any people\u2014and could actually contribute to the resolution of the existential dilemma of distant communities, or indeed to global survival, if only they were known about or permitted their proper valuation.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nIt is its humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment\u2014 both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual) \u2014 that remain the primary, incontestable assets to which any society can lay claim or offer as unique contributions to the attainments of the world.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn an essay titled\u00a0\u201cNot a \u2018Way of Life,\u2019 But a Guide to Existence\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 particularly poignant in the wake of the world\u2019s frantic response to the Ebola crisis \u2014 Soyinka examines the larger secular structures and functions surrounding traditional religion, focusing on those aspects of society that reside not \u201cwithin the mysteries of the religion itself, but in those areas of mundane activities in which religion is implicated, however marginally, making our selection among the more pacific and unavoidable human occupation.\u201d He considers the disorienting intersection between traditional African spiritual traditions \u2014 traditions that have shaped \u201csocial conduct, human relations, and survival strategies\u201d \u2014 and their ambivalent disavowal by post-colonial society:<\/span><\/p>\nMy mother was what we call a petty trader. Next to her shop was a traditional healer, a\u00a0babalawo<\/em>, whose clinic was the verandah of his mud house, under a lean-to, thus making it quite visible from the frontage of our own shop, where I often sat. My father was a schoolteacher, and it struck me that his, and the babalawo\u2019s, operations appeared to share the activity of instruction, so I began to take an illicit interest in his methods. Illicit because, to a well-brought-up child from a Christian home, such activities were clearly the work of the devil. Beyond a neighborly good morning, there was hardly any social intercourse between the healer and our own corner of the block.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd yet despite this coolly detached public courtesy was only one half of the great ambivalence with which the community regarded the babalawo; the other half was enacted privately, in secret:<\/span><\/p>\nThe babalawo\u2019s clinic was the place for a more fascinating array of herbal concoctions dispensed for various illnesses\u2014potions from barks and roots, bitter and astringent, oily and\/or gritty, not too dissimilar from those that were dispensed by the bottle and spoon in western hospitals. I was also able to observe that the babalawo\u2019s consulting shack was patronized by practicing Christians and Moslems \u2014 a number of them sneaking in after dusk or in the early morning on their way to white-collar duties\u2026 My superimposing eyes also remarked that, in our own home, apart from the pills and potions dispensed from the government hospitals, there were also jars, clay pots, and gourds whose contents were suspiciously like the ones I saw being provided by the babalawo.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWith an eye toward the broader social and cultural implications of the community\u2019s response to African traditional medicine, Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\nOne deduction emerged effortlessly from those childhood experiences: a distinction between the passive and the active (participatory) curative methods\u2026 The \u201creturn to source\u201d with the full collaboration of western-trained doctors, is, however, making strides, perhaps propelled more by commercial stakes than conviction, but that return is on, and with full vengeance.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nBut perhaps the babalawo\u2019s greatest appeal \u2014 to young Soyinka, as well as to us today \u2014 was his role as a living reminder that, per\u00a0Carl Sagan\u2019s memorable admonition<\/a>, the closer we inch to the assumption that we know everything there is to know and have answered all the questions worth answering, the further we drift from our essential humanity. Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\nThe babalawo\u2019s clinic intrigued me far more than the starched, white-overall western clinics, where a most impressive looking doctor hung a stethoscope around his neck, listened to heartbeats, took pulses, and wrote down prescriptions in indecipherable script. He looked intimidatingly omniscient, and he clearly was in touch with all the dialects of the human body. The babalawo also exuded knowledge and mystery, but somehow he appeared closer to his patients. For a start, he sat cross-legged on a floormat and appeared to consult his patient as much as they consulted him.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAfter recounting the babalawo\u2019s process and his various divinations for patients, Soyinka considers the larger value of this practice \u2014 one remarkably similar to what Western medicine is only just beginning to discover about\u00a0the role faith plays in the patient\u2019s physical healing<\/a>. He writes of the babalawo\u2019s work with one woman from the community:<\/span><\/p>\nThe therapeutic value of this was to ally the suppliant, psychically, to forces within the entirety of her healing culture \u2014 including the history of her own people.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher Gaston Bachelard\u2019s beautiful reflection on\u00a0the poetics of reverie<\/a>, Soyinka considers the healing power of poetic form itself \u2014 the common thread between the chants of the babalawo\u2019s healing rituals and the liturgies of the world\u2019s organized religions \u2014 independent from any religious message it may transmit:<\/span><\/p>\nPoetry in liturgy is common to most religions, perhaps the most powerful element, far more powerful than any alleged intrinsic truths of the religions themselves. Poetry, or, sometimes, sheer lyricism and mesmerizing rhetoric, these are tools that are natural to or cultivated by charismatic leaders in any culture, irrespective of the purpose to which such attributes are turned, secular or religious.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn essence, what Soyinka describes is a kind of invaluable social work, and yet its fate in the hands of colonial oppressors has been a dismal one, denying its vitalizing social function and reducing it to useless superstition to be replaced by more convenient but no less damaging dogmas:<\/span><\/p>\nThis then is the binding network of mortals, deities, and nature that Christians and Moslems pronounced \u201cpagan,\u201d \u201cinfidel,\u201d \u201cdemonic,\u201d etc., and moved to proscribe and destroy on the African continent, substituting, often through violence, their own faiths, which are based no less on structures of superstition though are perhaps more elegant, architecturally imposing, or seductively packaged. At the heart of it all, however, is nothing more than an article of faith sustained by dogmatism.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nConsidering such dogmatic \u201cworld religions\u201d and their practitioners who \u201cpress wafers to the lips of their followers to ingest the body of their sainted god,\u201d Soyinka reflects on Africa\u2019s enduring humanistic values and what it stands to teach all of humanity:<\/span><\/p>\n[There are] those who, centuries after the Age of Reason and its underlying spirit of enquiry, still deem a continent backward and satanic, that had proved itself capable of weaving and sustaining such a rich tapestry of intuitive forces. But then, did they know of, or seriously penetrate, such systems of belief? No, their sources remained missionary missives. Despite them all, however, Africa survives to teach the world \u2014 even without proselytizing.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSoyinka is careful to acknowledge \u2014 \u201cwithout equivocation\u201d \u2014 \u201cthe progress that has been made in medicine through scientific research\u201d as he points to the broader cultural and creative importance of making visible the value of traditional African healing traditions:<\/span><\/p>\nOur interest here is simply to relate the science of healing to the holism of faiths, of which a most potent aspect is the Word, the lyricism and poetry of healing which acts both therapeutically and homeopathically.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nIt is from within such resources that not only the religion but the full richness of Africa\u2019s literary wealth \u2014 oral, ancient and contemporary, of the continent and the Diaspora, written and rhetorical \u2014 can best be appreciated.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nInsufficiently celebrated remains the fate of this continuity between such traditional resources and contemporary creative minds.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nOf Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is a beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with\u00a0Beneath the Rainbow<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a collection of ancient stories and poems from Kenya, illustrated by contemporary African artists.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
of the Human Spirit<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n <\/p>\n
by\u00a0Maria Popova<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What a continent\u2019s \u201crich tapestry of intuitive forces\u201d can teach us about healing, of body and of soul.<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>Even though the term \u201cplacebo effect\u201d was coined in 1920 and the phenomenon itself has been studied since the 18th century, only recently have scientists begun to understand\u00a0the full extent to which our minds affect our bodies<\/a>. Of course, long before Western medicine was able to define and demonstrate it empirically, the world\u2019s ancient practitioners of traditional medicine have been reaping the benefits of this integrative mind-body approach to healing for centuries, if not millennia \u2014 under the dismissive, even scornful eye of the Western medical establishment. But in addition to betraying the very basic tenet of science as a discipline propelled not by the arrogance of what we know but by the humility of what we don\u2019t \u2014 by the\u00a0\u201cthoroughly conscious ignorance\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that transmutes curiosity into knowledge \u2014 such attitudes are mired in more complex sociocultural forces and power dynamics, especially in societies torn between two worlds by the soul-splitting aftermath of colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s precisely what\u00a0Wole Soyinka<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 the first African writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature \u2014 explores in his altogether excellent collection\u00a0Of Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>Wole Soyinka (Photograph: Peter Badge)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\nSoyinka writes in the introduction:<\/span><\/p>\nWhat does the continent known as Africa possess that the rest \u2014 or a greater part \u2014 of the globe does not have already in superabundance? These, obviously, cannot be limited to material or inert possessions \u2014 such as mineral resources, touristic landscapes, strategic locations\u2014 not forgetting the continent\u2019s centuries \u2014 old designation as human hatcheries for the supply of cheap labor to other societies, East and West. There also exist dynamic possessions \u2014 ways of perceiving, responding, adapting, or simply doing that vary from people to people, including structures of human relationships. These all constitute potential commodities of exchange\u2014 not as negotiable as timber, petroleum, or uranium perhaps, but nonetheless recognizable as defining the human worth of any people\u2014and could actually contribute to the resolution of the existential dilemma of distant communities, or indeed to global survival, if only they were known about or permitted their proper valuation.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nIt is its humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment\u2014 both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual) \u2014 that remain the primary, incontestable assets to which any society can lay claim or offer as unique contributions to the attainments of the world.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn an essay titled\u00a0\u201cNot a \u2018Way of Life,\u2019 But a Guide to Existence\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 particularly poignant in the wake of the world\u2019s frantic response to the Ebola crisis \u2014 Soyinka examines the larger secular structures and functions surrounding traditional religion, focusing on those aspects of society that reside not \u201cwithin the mysteries of the religion itself, but in those areas of mundane activities in which religion is implicated, however marginally, making our selection among the more pacific and unavoidable human occupation.\u201d He considers the disorienting intersection between traditional African spiritual traditions \u2014 traditions that have shaped \u201csocial conduct, human relations, and survival strategies\u201d \u2014 and their ambivalent disavowal by post-colonial society:<\/span><\/p>\nMy mother was what we call a petty trader. Next to her shop was a traditional healer, a\u00a0babalawo<\/em>, whose clinic was the verandah of his mud house, under a lean-to, thus making it quite visible from the frontage of our own shop, where I often sat. My father was a schoolteacher, and it struck me that his, and the babalawo\u2019s, operations appeared to share the activity of instruction, so I began to take an illicit interest in his methods. Illicit because, to a well-brought-up child from a Christian home, such activities were clearly the work of the devil. Beyond a neighborly good morning, there was hardly any social intercourse between the healer and our own corner of the block.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd yet despite this coolly detached public courtesy was only one half of the great ambivalence with which the community regarded the babalawo; the other half was enacted privately, in secret:<\/span><\/p>\nThe babalawo\u2019s clinic was the place for a more fascinating array of herbal concoctions dispensed for various illnesses\u2014potions from barks and roots, bitter and astringent, oily and\/or gritty, not too dissimilar from those that were dispensed by the bottle and spoon in western hospitals. I was also able to observe that the babalawo\u2019s consulting shack was patronized by practicing Christians and Moslems \u2014 a number of them sneaking in after dusk or in the early morning on their way to white-collar duties\u2026 My superimposing eyes also remarked that, in our own home, apart from the pills and potions dispensed from the government hospitals, there were also jars, clay pots, and gourds whose contents were suspiciously like the ones I saw being provided by the babalawo.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nWith an eye toward the broader social and cultural implications of the community\u2019s response to African traditional medicine, Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\nOne deduction emerged effortlessly from those childhood experiences: a distinction between the passive and the active (participatory) curative methods\u2026 The \u201creturn to source\u201d with the full collaboration of western-trained doctors, is, however, making strides, perhaps propelled more by commercial stakes than conviction, but that return is on, and with full vengeance.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nBut perhaps the babalawo\u2019s greatest appeal \u2014 to young Soyinka, as well as to us today \u2014 was his role as a living reminder that, per\u00a0Carl Sagan\u2019s memorable admonition<\/a>, the closer we inch to the assumption that we know everything there is to know and have answered all the questions worth answering, the further we drift from our essential humanity. Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\nThe babalawo\u2019s clinic intrigued me far more than the starched, white-overall western clinics, where a most impressive looking doctor hung a stethoscope around his neck, listened to heartbeats, took pulses, and wrote down prescriptions in indecipherable script. He looked intimidatingly omniscient, and he clearly was in touch with all the dialects of the human body. The babalawo also exuded knowledge and mystery, but somehow he appeared closer to his patients. For a start, he sat cross-legged on a floormat and appeared to consult his patient as much as they consulted him.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nAfter recounting the babalawo\u2019s process and his various divinations for patients, Soyinka considers the larger value of this practice \u2014 one remarkably similar to what Western medicine is only just beginning to discover about\u00a0the role faith plays in the patient\u2019s physical healing<\/a>. He writes of the babalawo\u2019s work with one woman from the community:<\/span><\/p>\nThe therapeutic value of this was to ally the suppliant, psychically, to forces within the entirety of her healing culture \u2014 including the history of her own people.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher Gaston Bachelard\u2019s beautiful reflection on\u00a0the poetics of reverie<\/a>, Soyinka considers the healing power of poetic form itself \u2014 the common thread between the chants of the babalawo\u2019s healing rituals and the liturgies of the world\u2019s organized religions \u2014 independent from any religious message it may transmit:<\/span><\/p>\nPoetry in liturgy is common to most religions, perhaps the most powerful element, far more powerful than any alleged intrinsic truths of the religions themselves. Poetry, or, sometimes, sheer lyricism and mesmerizing rhetoric, these are tools that are natural to or cultivated by charismatic leaders in any culture, irrespective of the purpose to which such attributes are turned, secular or religious.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nIn essence, what Soyinka describes is a kind of invaluable social work, and yet its fate in the hands of colonial oppressors has been a dismal one, denying its vitalizing social function and reducing it to useless superstition to be replaced by more convenient but no less damaging dogmas:<\/span><\/p>\nThis then is the binding network of mortals, deities, and nature that Christians and Moslems pronounced \u201cpagan,\u201d \u201cinfidel,\u201d \u201cdemonic,\u201d etc., and moved to proscribe and destroy on the African continent, substituting, often through violence, their own faiths, which are based no less on structures of superstition though are perhaps more elegant, architecturally imposing, or seductively packaged. At the heart of it all, however, is nothing more than an article of faith sustained by dogmatism.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nConsidering such dogmatic \u201cworld religions\u201d and their practitioners who \u201cpress wafers to the lips of their followers to ingest the body of their sainted god,\u201d Soyinka reflects on Africa\u2019s enduring humanistic values and what it stands to teach all of humanity:<\/span><\/p>\n[There are] those who, centuries after the Age of Reason and its underlying spirit of enquiry, still deem a continent backward and satanic, that had proved itself capable of weaving and sustaining such a rich tapestry of intuitive forces. But then, did they know of, or seriously penetrate, such systems of belief? No, their sources remained missionary missives. Despite them all, however, Africa survives to teach the world \u2014 even without proselytizing.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nSoyinka is careful to acknowledge \u2014 \u201cwithout equivocation\u201d \u2014 \u201cthe progress that has been made in medicine through scientific research\u201d as he points to the broader cultural and creative importance of making visible the value of traditional African healing traditions:<\/span><\/p>\nOur interest here is simply to relate the science of healing to the holism of faiths, of which a most potent aspect is the Word, the lyricism and poetry of healing which acts both therapeutically and homeopathically.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nIt is from within such resources that not only the religion but the full richness of Africa\u2019s literary wealth \u2014 oral, ancient and contemporary, of the continent and the Diaspora, written and rhetorical \u2014 can best be appreciated.<\/span><\/p>\n[\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\nInsufficiently celebrated remains the fate of this continuity between such traditional resources and contemporary creative minds.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nOf Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is a beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with\u00a0Beneath the Rainbow<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a collection of ancient stories and poems from Kenya, illustrated by contemporary African artists.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What a continent\u2019s \u201crich tapestry of intuitive forces\u201d can teach us about healing, of body and of soul.<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s precisely what\u00a0Wole Soyinka<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 the first African writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature \u2014 explores in his altogether excellent collection\u00a0Of Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n Wole Soyinka (Photograph: Peter Badge)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n Soyinka writes in the introduction:<\/span><\/p>\n What does the continent known as Africa possess that the rest \u2014 or a greater part \u2014 of the globe does not have already in superabundance? These, obviously, cannot be limited to material or inert possessions \u2014 such as mineral resources, touristic landscapes, strategic locations\u2014 not forgetting the continent\u2019s centuries \u2014 old designation as human hatcheries for the supply of cheap labor to other societies, East and West. There also exist dynamic possessions \u2014 ways of perceiving, responding, adapting, or simply doing that vary from people to people, including structures of human relationships. These all constitute potential commodities of exchange\u2014 not as negotiable as timber, petroleum, or uranium perhaps, but nonetheless recognizable as defining the human worth of any people\u2014and could actually contribute to the resolution of the existential dilemma of distant communities, or indeed to global survival, if only they were known about or permitted their proper valuation.<\/span><\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n It is its humanity, the quality and valuation of its own existence, and modes of managing its environment\u2014 both physical and intangible (which includes the spiritual) \u2014 that remain the primary, incontestable assets to which any society can lay claim or offer as unique contributions to the attainments of the world.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In an essay titled\u00a0\u201cNot a \u2018Way of Life,\u2019 But a Guide to Existence\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 particularly poignant in the wake of the world\u2019s frantic response to the Ebola crisis \u2014 Soyinka examines the larger secular structures and functions surrounding traditional religion, focusing on those aspects of society that reside not \u201cwithin the mysteries of the religion itself, but in those areas of mundane activities in which religion is implicated, however marginally, making our selection among the more pacific and unavoidable human occupation.\u201d He considers the disorienting intersection between traditional African spiritual traditions \u2014 traditions that have shaped \u201csocial conduct, human relations, and survival strategies\u201d \u2014 and their ambivalent disavowal by post-colonial society:<\/span><\/p>\n My mother was what we call a petty trader. Next to her shop was a traditional healer, a\u00a0babalawo<\/em>, whose clinic was the verandah of his mud house, under a lean-to, thus making it quite visible from the frontage of our own shop, where I often sat. My father was a schoolteacher, and it struck me that his, and the babalawo\u2019s, operations appeared to share the activity of instruction, so I began to take an illicit interest in his methods. Illicit because, to a well-brought-up child from a Christian home, such activities were clearly the work of the devil. Beyond a neighborly good morning, there was hardly any social intercourse between the healer and our own corner of the block.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n And yet despite this coolly detached public courtesy was only one half of the great ambivalence with which the community regarded the babalawo; the other half was enacted privately, in secret:<\/span><\/p>\n The babalawo\u2019s clinic was the place for a more fascinating array of herbal concoctions dispensed for various illnesses\u2014potions from barks and roots, bitter and astringent, oily and\/or gritty, not too dissimilar from those that were dispensed by the bottle and spoon in western hospitals. I was also able to observe that the babalawo\u2019s consulting shack was patronized by practicing Christians and Moslems \u2014 a number of them sneaking in after dusk or in the early morning on their way to white-collar duties\u2026 My superimposing eyes also remarked that, in our own home, apart from the pills and potions dispensed from the government hospitals, there were also jars, clay pots, and gourds whose contents were suspiciously like the ones I saw being provided by the babalawo.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n With an eye toward the broader social and cultural implications of the community\u2019s response to African traditional medicine, Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\n One deduction emerged effortlessly from those childhood experiences: a distinction between the passive and the active (participatory) curative methods\u2026 The \u201creturn to source\u201d with the full collaboration of western-trained doctors, is, however, making strides, perhaps propelled more by commercial stakes than conviction, but that return is on, and with full vengeance.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n But perhaps the babalawo\u2019s greatest appeal \u2014 to young Soyinka, as well as to us today \u2014 was his role as a living reminder that, per\u00a0Carl Sagan\u2019s memorable admonition<\/a>, the closer we inch to the assumption that we know everything there is to know and have answered all the questions worth answering, the further we drift from our essential humanity. Soyinka writes:<\/span><\/p>\n The babalawo\u2019s clinic intrigued me far more than the starched, white-overall western clinics, where a most impressive looking doctor hung a stethoscope around his neck, listened to heartbeats, took pulses, and wrote down prescriptions in indecipherable script. He looked intimidatingly omniscient, and he clearly was in touch with all the dialects of the human body. The babalawo also exuded knowledge and mystery, but somehow he appeared closer to his patients. For a start, he sat cross-legged on a floormat and appeared to consult his patient as much as they consulted him.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n After recounting the babalawo\u2019s process and his various divinations for patients, Soyinka considers the larger value of this practice \u2014 one remarkably similar to what Western medicine is only just beginning to discover about\u00a0the role faith plays in the patient\u2019s physical healing<\/a>. He writes of the babalawo\u2019s work with one woman from the community:<\/span><\/p>\n The therapeutic value of this was to ally the suppliant, psychically, to forces within the entirety of her healing culture \u2014 including the history of her own people.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In a sentiment that calls to mind philosopher Gaston Bachelard\u2019s beautiful reflection on\u00a0the poetics of reverie<\/a>, Soyinka considers the healing power of poetic form itself \u2014 the common thread between the chants of the babalawo\u2019s healing rituals and the liturgies of the world\u2019s organized religions \u2014 independent from any religious message it may transmit:<\/span><\/p>\n Poetry in liturgy is common to most religions, perhaps the most powerful element, far more powerful than any alleged intrinsic truths of the religions themselves. Poetry, or, sometimes, sheer lyricism and mesmerizing rhetoric, these are tools that are natural to or cultivated by charismatic leaders in any culture, irrespective of the purpose to which such attributes are turned, secular or religious.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In essence, what Soyinka describes is a kind of invaluable social work, and yet its fate in the hands of colonial oppressors has been a dismal one, denying its vitalizing social function and reducing it to useless superstition to be replaced by more convenient but no less damaging dogmas:<\/span><\/p>\n This then is the binding network of mortals, deities, and nature that Christians and Moslems pronounced \u201cpagan,\u201d \u201cinfidel,\u201d \u201cdemonic,\u201d etc., and moved to proscribe and destroy on the African continent, substituting, often through violence, their own faiths, which are based no less on structures of superstition though are perhaps more elegant, architecturally imposing, or seductively packaged. At the heart of it all, however, is nothing more than an article of faith sustained by dogmatism.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Considering such dogmatic \u201cworld religions\u201d and their practitioners who \u201cpress wafers to the lips of their followers to ingest the body of their sainted god,\u201d Soyinka reflects on Africa\u2019s enduring humanistic values and what it stands to teach all of humanity:<\/span><\/p>\n [There are] those who, centuries after the Age of Reason and its underlying spirit of enquiry, still deem a continent backward and satanic, that had proved itself capable of weaving and sustaining such a rich tapestry of intuitive forces. But then, did they know of, or seriously penetrate, such systems of belief? No, their sources remained missionary missives. Despite them all, however, Africa survives to teach the world \u2014 even without proselytizing.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Soyinka is careful to acknowledge \u2014 \u201cwithout equivocation\u201d \u2014 \u201cthe progress that has been made in medicine through scientific research\u201d as he points to the broader cultural and creative importance of making visible the value of traditional African healing traditions:<\/span><\/p>\n Our interest here is simply to relate the science of healing to the holism of faiths, of which a most potent aspect is the Word, the lyricism and poetry of healing which acts both therapeutically and homeopathically.<\/span><\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n It is from within such resources that not only the religion but the full richness of Africa\u2019s literary wealth \u2014 oral, ancient and contemporary, of the continent and the Diaspora, written and rhetorical \u2014 can best be appreciated.<\/span><\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n Insufficiently celebrated remains the fate of this continuity between such traditional resources and contemporary creative minds.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0is a beautiful read in its entirety. Complement it with\u00a0Beneath the Rainbow<\/em><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a collection of ancient stories and poems from Kenya, illustrated by contemporary African artists.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a>Even though the term \u201cplacebo effect\u201d was coined in 1920 and the phenomenon itself has been studied since the 18th century, only recently have scientists begun to understand\u00a0the full extent to which our minds affect our bodies<\/a>. Of course, long before Western medicine was able to define and demonstrate it empirically, the world\u2019s ancient practitioners of traditional medicine have been reaping the benefits of this integrative mind-body approach to healing for centuries, if not millennia \u2014 under the dismissive, even scornful eye of the Western medical establishment. But in addition to betraying the very basic tenet of science as a discipline propelled not by the arrogance of what we know but by the humility of what we don\u2019t \u2014 by the\u00a0\u201cthoroughly conscious ignorance\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that transmutes curiosity into knowledge \u2014 such attitudes are mired in more complex sociocultural forces and power dynamics, especially in societies torn between two worlds by the soul-splitting aftermath of colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>