Recently, the International Centre for Research and Documentation on African Languages and Traditions (CERDOTOLA) published a manifesto for structurally deconfinning Africa; with the title “Covid-19 and Africa: Heritage Medicines and Knowledge in the history”.

The book which was written by the Executive Secretary of CERDOTOLA, renowned Professor Charles Binam Bikoi, seeks to identify the place of African Traditional Medicine in the wake of COVID-19 and knowledge in the history.

However, the book identified the following lessons in questioning the logic of development and shatters the myth of the hegemony of established powers in the West:

2020, the time to pass the baton from an ending year to another that is about to begin

The author, while addressing the fact behind the COVID-19 that has ravaged the world, said it is high-time Africans fought all “colonial virus,” saying that “the corona virus spares no one: it “spreads terror” indiscriminately among people. The powerful and the weak, the rich and the miserable, the old and the young, the believer and the unbeliever, the free and the condemned are sucked into its dictatorship. Ignoring races, it targets, strikes and decimates humanity.”

He noted that, with the emergent of the new normal (COVID-19), Africans should be ready to help each other by saving lives.

As at the date of this declaration, the death toll, within seven months of the pandemic, is over one million two hundred DEATHS out of some 50,000,000 (fifty million) people affected.

According to Prof. Bikoi, the Corona virus pandemic has sufficiently informed on the volatility “fortified” world-system. Long deemed operational, sustainable and implacable, the post-modern world system has been consolidated over time with internal and contextual “anti-systemic movements” brought under control. “But humanity was still a thousand leagues away from imagining that a purely sanitary asymmetric insurrection could impose itself on global thinking and defeat it against all odds.”

Africa is summoned before History to shake and break the chains of the centuries-old Despotism of its subjugation through alienation and mimicry

The book has emphasized the need for Africa to get out of shame, the beautiful resources of its multi-millennial heritage, in terms of health management from its own environment and also to build, on the ruins of vexing claims, the pride, insurance and victories that is yet to come.

Africa’s post-colonial condition has been said to have saved its honour that has to do with a collectively developed survival instinct.

The book reads in part: “Today, Africa is much coveted and busy in terms of cooperation and development aid. And yet, it has nothing to lose, so far, except protecting its populations that for long have suffered from more deadly viruses than Covid-19.”

Despite the fact that the Western tagged Africa as a less developed continent, the Executive Secretary argued that Africa is emerging. This, he said as a result of its prestige as a people of solidarity and a community of sharing. “And what better does it have to share than its identity, history, humanity and the power of its heritage knowledge? It is here that we observe that the healthcare of 80% or even 90% of the continent’s men and women is still provided through heritage health systems that have, unfortunately, been sidelined in the national policies of states obsessed with the myth and illusions of imported modernism in this domain as in others.”

AFRICAN KNOWLEDGE MATTERS

On the issue of attaining knowledge, Prof. Bikoi posited that Africans should look beyond passing pandemic, by looking higher, further, stronger, toil to ensure that COVID-19 is seized as an Opportunity in the service of Africa’s liberation.

“More than ever before, under the shock of COVID-19, the founding urgency is to renew faith in the languages, cultures, habits, practices, in short, in African civilizations. But at the same time, we have to look beyond the passing pandemic, look higher, further, stronger, toil to ensure that COVID-19 is seized as an Opportunity in the service of Africa’s liberation.”

To achieve this, he said Africans need to rethink on the approaches in redefining the tools, mobilising the resources such as human, immaterial and material, that is, those within the continent and contributions from the friends of Africans.

He, however, charged African elites, decision-makers as well as Strategy makers to remember positively that this heritage knowledge of Africans, that treated and fed them without publicity, remain registered in the archives of oral tradition and in the memory of African languages, the very languages which, in the name of civilization, have been relegated to the margins of “modern” usage.

Mutualisation of endogenous knowledge (MUSE for Africa)

On its part, CERDOTOLA has been implementing in the last three years, a major project on the “Mutualisation of endogenous knowledge” - “MUSE.

This platform has been created for exchange and sharing of experiences between researchers and practitioners.

According to the book, among the major components of this MUSE project is traditional medicine which stands out, once again, as the royal road open to African States and Governments to move past the international pharmaceutical despotism over Africa.

Among the major components of MUSE is traditional medicine which stands out as the royal road open to African States and Governments to “Heal their development” and to think about culturally sustainable development. Within the framework of Africa’s industrialisation through its traditions, CERDOTOLA’s MUSE initiative falls more generally within the suggestion of a Social Development Contract advocated by the Institution in the form of an “African Development Pact for Emergence through Traditions”, PADETRA.

“MUSE” project; a call for mobilisation to act

As long as the MUSE project is created for exchange and sharing of experiences between researchers and practitioners, it is also a call for mobilisation to act and a sovereign commitment of a continent determined to project itself into prosperity.

“It is the ideal moment for Africa, more than ever before, to regain its permanent beauty, that of its traditions and culture, the only undisputed basis for potential positive, assumed and opposable power! Ultimately, Covid-19 should, at the very least, sound the death knell for the international pharmaceutical despotism over Africa!  And, for all accounts, when everywhere in the vast world the new corona virus will have been defeated or brought under control, there will remain a final word for Africa: eradicate the COLONIAL-VIRUS!”

Meanwhile, Prof. Bikoi has said Africans should help in the struggle of deconfining Africa by rethinking, reshaping and healing the continent through African heritage, medicines and knowledge.

“This is the time Africa! Not “the Africa’s Time” announced by predators with Africa as the object of their own coveting and appetites…, but the time of an independent, responsible and sovereign Africa, accountable for its failures and proud of its victories!”