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Umhlonyane, also known as Artemisia afra, is one of the oldest and best-documented indigenous medicines in South Africa. This bush, which grows wild throughout the sub-Saharan region, smells and tastes like “medicine,” thus easily making its way into people’s lives and becoming the choice of everyday healing for Xhosa healer-diviners and Rastafarian herbalists. This “natural” remedy has recently sparked curiosity as scientists search for new molecules against a tuberculosis pandemic while hoping to recognize indigenous medicine. Laplante follows umhlonyane on its trails and trials of becoming a biopharmaceutical — from the “open air” to controlled environments — learning from the plant and from the people who use it with hopes in healing.
“Overall, Laplante’s Healing Roots, focusing on the tensions between the biomedical and traditional healing–based ways of making a medicine is an informative and important contribution to the literature [of] intrinsic value in the classroom, primarily for graduate-level students with specific interests in South Africa and the crossroads of ethnopharmacology and biomedicine.” • Medical Anthropology Quarterly
“Healing Roots should be compulsory reading for students of pharmacology in Africa. That statement summarizes the wealth of information and in-depth analysis contained in a book that set out to, and succeeded in articulating the dissonance that exists in attempts to validate indigenous medicine using completely alien and super-imposed standards.” • African Studies Quarterly
“This book represents an interesting addition to the emerging series of articles and books dedicated to the study of the interactions between Western and African systems of knowledge…[It] is very provocative and will no doubt provoke many intellectual debates.” • Gilles Bibeau, Université de Montréal
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Tracing the Preclinical Trial of an Indigenous Plant
Chapter 1. Knowing Umhlonyane/Artemisia afra
Chapter 2. Engaging in Medicine
Chapter 3. Tracing Medicine – Wayfaring
Chapter 4. Imagining Indigeneity
Chapter 5. Healing the Nation
Chapter 6. Dreams, Ancestors and Sound Healing
Chapter 7. Weaving Molecules in Life
Conclusion: Imagining the Clinical Trial
References