AFRIKAN TRADITIONAL MEDICINE DAY 2021

AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. JACK GITHAE

We had this interview in honor of Afrikan Traditional Medicine Day 2021 in Dr. Githae’s botanical garden of indigenous plants all of which are potent to protect the body from sickness and disease.

Dr. Githae, we have learnt from books, but now we want to learn from you about the history of the traditional medicine day and how it came to be and its state at the moment.

Afrikan Traditional Medicine Day was a day that was agreed upon by the WHO Regional Experts Committee on Traditional Medicine, based in Congo Brazzaville, around 2000, 2002-2003 or thereabouts, when the Afrikan heads of governments realized that we in Afrika need Afrikan Traditional Medicine more than anything else. That it is the medicine that has sustained us for long, and that it is the medicine of the future.

The Afrikan heads of government realized that there was need for us to create a forum within which we can celebrate our heritage, traditional medicine heritage, the medicinal plants of Afrika, the traditional medicine practitioners of Afrika, Afrikan indigenous knowledge and wisdom, because, without it we would not have been the cradle of the human race.

Afrika is the cradle of human civilization, it is the cradle of organized education, the oldest universities in the world are the University of Khartoum, University of Cairo, here in Afrika. The oldest organized medicine was started in the old empire of Ghana and spread to the Middle East. So, indeed, we are the initiators of humanity and human civilization and we celebrate Afrikan traditional medicine, especially we are celebrating at a time when we need it most.

With the Covid-19 crisis, a crisis that has no cure, a crisis where everybody is talking about vaccination, without realizing that indeed diseases are eliminated by treating them, not perpetual vaccination. We are celebrating the reality that indeed we have medicinal plants of Afrika that can cure any ailment: be it Ebola, be it Covid-19, be it HIV/AIDS, be it incurable TB. We are lucky to still have the remnants of the medicinal plants in natural forests and we are also lucky, as we celebrate this year’s Afrikan Traditional Medicine Day, because we still have people like me who have been practicing for the last 50 years, who were able to inherit some of the very original knowledge that has enhanced our survival on this continent. We are celebrating the fact that we have not only the resource, which is very diverse, but we have also a lot of indigenous knowledge that goes with Afrikan traditional medicine.

However, even as we celebrate Afrikan Traditional Medicine Day, we must demand that our government establishes an inventory of Afrikan indigenous knowledge, the stock of the knowledge within the Afrikan traditional knowledge spectrum and, in particular, Afrikan indigenous medical resources: be they plant, be they minerals, be they animals. That which we have used for millennia, when we didn’t have the conventional medicine the way we know it today. The realization that conditions like Ebola, conditions like Covid-19, conditions like incurable TB, quite a number of emerging diseases have no cure. In addition, we have many emerging non-communicable diseases like diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, epilepsy, a lot of which have no cure, globally. However, we have lived with them or we lived in an environment where they never occurred, because we ate right, we drank our medicinal teas, herbal teas and ate medicinal food when and as the need arises, the way the wild animals do in the forest today. As we talk here and now, we have a whole range of diversity of wild animals in the Aberdares, in Mt. Kenya in the background. These animals have been there for millennia without a vet, without hospitals, without vaccinations. How come they survive in an area where we are unable to survive? They survive, because they have maintained their instincts, they have enhanced their way of life in respect to coexisting with the reality and coexisting with nature.

My appeal, as we celebrate the Afrikan Traditional Medicine Day on the 31st August, this year, is that we get as close to nature as possible. As you are all aware, urbanization has terribly dehumanized us, in that, when we are confined to Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Kisumu and the rest of the areas, the setup is such that you eat what is available there, regardless of its purity, regardless of its balanced nature in terms of nutrition, regardless of its purity in respect to lack of toxicity. The foods we are eating in Nairobi are coming from commercial plantations where poisonous chemicals are used day in and day out to kill pests, to enhance the growth of the crops, to protect them when they are stored, and other chemicals are added to mitigate against their perishability. All those chemicals, once they are eaten in our food, they end up in our bloodstream, in our livers, in our kidneys, in our brains and it’s not surprising that we have a whole range of diseases that never existed four, five decades ago, which are emanating from constant intake of poisons in our food, in our water, in the contaminated air in urban settings. And even as we do what it takes to survive the Covid-19, we must start accepting the reality that we have hit the limit of the toxicity that our environment can take.  The limit is such that unless we start detoxifying our environment by avoiding usage of toxic fertilizer, toxic pesticides, toxic chemicals in our water, unless we stop polluting our air, sooner or later, the environment in our urban setting, like in Nairobi, will be uninhabitable. And indeed, our newspaper clearly indicated that unless we reverse what is going on in Nairobi, Nairobi will not be habitable in another 4 to 5 decades from now.

So, we are appealing to our people, with or without Covid-19, with or without Ebola, with or without HIV/AIDS, I think it’s a high time we start a campaign of urban to rural migration, where we lower the density of population in urban settings, to mitigate against endemic contamination of the environment, the water and the soil. And also, to get closer to our nature, so that we have more people producing organic foods, more people producing indigenous foods, which has enhanced our survival prior to colonization.

The dependence on maize and maize meal, as the basic food, is very new to many communities in Afrika, and yet it is the order of the day in Kenya, in Uganda, in Tanzania. However, maize is one of those commodities that grows fast, yields a lot, but is very demanding to the soil, very demanding to the environment. It requires deep plowing, deep harrowing, constant weeding, which disturbs the soil to an extent that we destroy the soil structure. The maize we are growing now are hybrids, they require a lot of fertilizers. Those fertilizers are chemical toxins. Besides the fertilizer, there is demand for pesticides to fight stalk borers and others that inflict the crop. So, we are depending on crops that demand application of toxic chemicals, while crops like bananas, sweet potatoes, arrowroots never needed any of those chemicals, in spite of the fact that they grow literally everywhere, and in spite of the fact that they are even more nutritious, more balanced than the maize crop.

Meaning we have lost our balance; we have lost our capacity to coexist with reality and the need is such that we go back to our indigenous knowledge. As we celebrate Afrikan Traditional Medicine Day, we recognize there is other indigenous knowledge that complements the traditional medicine: diet, shelter, lifestyle, they all add up to giving us holistic health. By holistic health I mean a scenario where you have a whole normal healthy body, supported by a whole healthy mind and supported by a whole healthy, clean spirituality. Spirituality implies linkage with nature. The forces that create us, the forces that create life on earth, they are part and parcel of us and there’s no way we can separate one of these healthy elements from one another. That gives us a scenario of collecting that indigenous knowledge that contributed to a normal healthy body, and we also collect that indigenous knowledge that enhance a healthy mind we avoid the trend towards the dependence on alcohol, tobacco and these other narcotic drugs that are known to poison the mind, to retard the thinking and eventually to kill the capacity of a human being to link up spiritually with his ecosystem and his environment.

Lastly, we didn’t create ourselves, we are created by a force that created the universe. The very force that supports the heavenly bodies that rotate around one another, without banging into one another. Those forces constitute the ecosystem. And the minute we recognize that we need our plants, just as we need our animals, just as we need our other fellow human beings within Kenya, Afrika and the rest of the world… the minute we acknowledge that, we start nurturing peaceful coexistence with one another.

With Covid-19, this is the wrong time for anybody to rise up and go to the street to demonstrate because of lack of money, lack of employment. It is not our government that has created that. It has been created by forces that are beyond us. The crisis we are going through needs each one of us to do whatever it takes to mitigate against the impact of the crisis, as we team up to survive it. We know that the crisis we are going through was designed, disseminated to enhance global population extermination, that is oriented to leaving the world to those that are ‘better than the ordinary people’, that’s a fact nobody can challenge. And we know that the condition is one of the many that will be used against us.

With that realization we should start to do whatever it takes to accommodate one another within our own communities, within our own counties, within our own country, regardless of our ethnic discrepancy, because when countries melt down with violence – like it has happened in Somalia, in Sudan, in Ethiopia – nobody gains. Those who started violence in Sudan are all dead, literally. Those who started it in Somalia are all gone, and Somalia has never been able, and may never be able to stand up on its own.

Meaning, once we allow external forces to create conflict among ourselves, we commit suicide, because eventually that is what they want; a scenario where Covid-19 kills as many as it can kill, a scenario where it can cripple our economy to an extent people are discontented with our government, and to an extent where they all rise up in arms against their government, to create the conflict through which the weapons of those who manufacture weapons can be sold, can be marketed, given to negative forces to create an ideal ground for self-extermination.

My appeal to Afrikans, my appeal to Afrika: a time has come when we should reason together, a time has come when we should refuse to be incited against one another, and a time has come when we realize that we have a common enemy and the work of the common enemy is to exterminate us and in the extermination strategy, the world over we, in Afrika, are target number one. Even though we haven’t died the way they have died in India, we haven’t died the way they have died in Brazil, I am appealing to our people to take it from me that the real killer is on the way.

The game is such that you are fooled that you are tough, you don’t die as fast as them, so that you relax. So that when they release the real virus that is supposed to wipe you out en masse, you are wiped out the way the Aborigines were wiped out in Australia, the way the Red Indians were wiped out in North America, and the way the Mayan civilization was wiped out in South America. We are not the first to be targeted but, unfortunately, we are the target now and – whether we like it or not – the ball is in our court.

The survival will be determined by us, not them, their will is that we die out, our resolve is that we team up, use whatever God has given us in terms of knowledge, in terms of medicinal resources. I am talking as a practitioner of Afrikan traditional medicine for more than 50 years, I am also talking as a consultant with WHO for more than a decade, I have also done consultancy for the Commonwealth Secretariat. I am saying I know what is going on, I know what resources we have in terms of traditional medicinal material, in terms of Afrikan indigenous medical knowledge, and these resources, pooled together, and supported by positive government goodwill, we can survive Covid-19, we can survive Ebola, we can survive incurable TB, and we can survive whatever else they are conceiving to use against us to exterminate us in Afrika, so that they take it over.

We survived where many others never survived. We survived because we respect our God, we survived because our cultural dynamic is such that we have the capacity to reason together, even at a time when we are at arms against one another. My appeal is now is the time for our leaders, our politicians to sit down and talk together. It is the wrong time for anybody to shout at one another and it is the wrong time for any community to accept to be incited against another, because, that is suicidal and it means you are creating a scenario where you exterminate yourself and you give leeway to the Covid to kill you in bigger numbers than is happening in India.

What are your thoughts on the injection that they are giving in the world?

I have said it severally, and I want to repeat it again that diseases world over, throughout human history are eliminated by being treated, not vaccination. Vaccination is a temporary measure to mitigate against aggressive spread of a disease, as the cure is developed and massively administered to those who are sick. The campaign for our people to be vaccinated en masse, when nobody is talking about a cure, makes me suspicious; it is unethical. Because a lot of resources should have gone to developing a cure and embracing the cure we are telling them we have, which is cheap, readily available, then vaccine would go to those where it is spreading, as we cure the disease. The massive campaign to vaccinate everybody, with a vaccine that was developed within less than a year, means it is not safe, we do not know a lot about it and in any case, it is not effective.

It is common knowledge that many who are dying in the hospital as I talk are those who have been vaccinated, some with the first, many more with the second dose. In Britain, in Europe, in the Americas, the same thing is happening. If the vaccine is working, and if our vaccine has been coming from India, why are the Indians dying the way they are dying and why have they died the way they have died during the last few months? Because, it is not working, because it is not meant to prevent us from getting the disease. It is meant to get at those who don’t contract the Covid-19.

In my own analysis as a practitioner, Covid-19 is not as bad as the vaccine, so even as you give out your hand to be vaccinated, think twice: Is it safe? Is it effective? Safety must be short-term, mid-term, long-term. It is hardly a year since we started being vaccinated. Within less than a year, we have seen that even those who are vaccinated are getting infected with the disease, just like anybody else, and they are even dying faster and we are being told the contrary to the truth, while we on the ground are observing something to the contrary.

My appeal is come for the herbal medicine we have, it is curing. Ask anybody in Nairobi, at the Ngong’ Road clinic, every day we give out (medicine) and those we give are not dying. We can prevent the condition through herbal tonified teas that boost your immunity, detoxify you and can challenge mild viral load. Teas are cheaper, they are easier to access, we will have them readily available from this week in Nairobi, in Nyeri and wherever else our people might need. I am saying it is up to us to develop a cure. It is up to us to very quickly develop a local strategy of surviving the Covid-19. Otherwise, it will be ironical for us to expect those who developed the disease, who spread the disease to us, whose agenda is to exterminate us; it is ironical to expect them to help us prevent dying from the same cause. Commonsense.

In addition to teas, what else can they get from the clinic?

We are encouraging our people to develop habits of eating organic foods, we are telling our people a lot of the chemical foods they are eating are compromising their immunity, they are compromising the functioning of their major organs: the liver, the heart, the kidneys and the brain etc. And that by eating chemical-free food, you nourish your body without poisoning it, and you enhance your body to develop enough immunity to quell whatever emerging diseases may come along, such that even if you get Covid-19 it will be just like another flu. The truth is, those who have a dying condition, those noncommunicable diseases: diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, are most vulnerable and they are the ones who are dying fastest. So, the healthier you live, the healthier you eat, the more you run away from the polluted urban setting to rural areas, the higher your chance of surviving Covid-19 and many of those other emerging diseases that are before us.

At the very least, think about these things and research them. I know some people feel uncomfortable with this whole conversation and they would rather trust that the information that they are getting is a 100% accurate. But there is a lot of information out there that you can look at to find options and alternatives in this whole Covid-19 scenario that you may not have heard of from your mainstream media. It is no joke what we are facing, but together, as you have heard him say, we can more than overcome, we can thrive.

Watch the interview with Dr. Githae on Msingi Afrika Tv at the link below:

Afrikan Traditional Medicine Day 2021: Interview with Dr Jack Githae