Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa

Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa. By Abena Dove OsseoAsare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. vii, 300; illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography. $35.00/£ 24.50 paper.In this book Abena Dove Osseo-Asare examines how medicinal plants became subjects of pharmaceutical research by looking at the long history of bioprospecting of six different African plants which she terms "bitter roots"-rosy periwinkle, Asiatic pennywort, grains of paradise, Strophanthus, Cryptolepis, and Hoodia. These plants literally taste bitter, but they also reflect a sometimes bitter and contested history. While these herbs have been commercialized globally, proven profitable, and in some cases gained international patents, the originators of such herbal remedies often remained unacknowledged, unknown, and thus uncompensated. Such inequities emerged due to global markets that favored the rich and powerful, and are perpetuated by scientific and legal regimes of the North. Consequently, African communities that seek acknowledgement and benefit sharing for medical knowledge must do so through international laws and patent licensing that require "proof' of their originality. This creates a number of "evidentiary problems," most obviously that much of local African medicinal knowledge has historically been transmitted orally rather than in writing. Yet Osseo-Asare challenges the basic premise that claims to originality should and can be obtained for medicinal plants or that "indigenous" knowledge is in fact local. By rejecting simplistic divisions between indigenous and biomedical knowledge, this work contributes to and complicates the literature on medical pluralism and indigenous knowledge.Osseo-Asare uses careful historical detective work in archives, botanical gardens, museums, African medicinal plant markets, and through oral interviews with healers and scientists, to demonstrate that knowledge and use of these bitter roots occurred in multiple places, in multiple ways and by a mix of people. For instance she shows that periwinkle, a common weed in Madagascar has pan-tropical distribution from Jamaica to the Philippines, while pennywort also from Madagascar, can be found in Ayurvedic medicines. Sometimes these herbal medicines find similar use globally as in the case of periwinkle as a folk remedy for diabetes, or completely differently as with grains of paradise. The latter from West Africa, had an early global distribution, being used as a spice in Europe since medieval times, and yet is used differently in places as close as Ghana and Nigeria and between men and women. Medicinal plants could be the specialized knowledge of healers, the folk medicine of grandmothers, adopted by European settlers, or the subject of laboratory testing by African and northern scientists. …