Making Scientific Sense of Traditional Medicine

Abstract

The search for medicinal plants often accompanied the expansion of empire in Africa during the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Although Ethiopia was never formally colonized, European naturalists carried out plant collecting expeditions within Ethiopia’s borders in ways that resembled the unequal power relationship between Europe and colonized African territories. Ethiopian plant material was sold to botanical gardens in Europe, studied, and even incorporated into European pharmacopeia with little credit given to local wisdom. By the mid-twentieth century, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health supported local efforts to transform endemic plants into standardized commercial products and into pharmaceuticals for domestic markets while limiting foreign bioprospecting. Ethiopian scientists struggled to have their local knowledge and scientific expertise recognized in the context of highly unequal global power relations. Meanwhile, gender and class inequalities built into the local institutions directing medicinal plant research and development in Ethiopia also reproduced exploitative relationships. This paper argues that the history of Ethiopia’s efforts to make “traditional medicine” legible to science demonstrates the complicated global politics of scientific knowledge production and highlights the problems of exploitation in medicinal plant research within African countries.