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Abstract
During the COVID-19 outbreak – a paradigmatic global health challenge – multiple African countries, including Tanzania, mobilised indigenous forms of healing as both preventive and curative measures to curb the pandemic. However, despite this effort to curtail the crisis, the place of indigenous medical knowledge in decolonising global health interventions remains unexamined. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania, as well as political speeches and newspaper sources, this paper examines how the government, under the late President John Pombe Magufuli, responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper demonstrates that the late Magufuli’s approach to the pandemic, and especially the mobilisation of local practices of self-care like steaming with nyungu, stirred debates on decolonising global health and the role of African traditional medicines in the COVID-19 pandemic response. Building on scholarship regarding the efforts to promote indigenous healing knowledge in postcolonial states in Africa, I argue that colonial history and postcolonial political positionings towards this history were the ‘cause’ for Magufuli’s resistance towards global health interventions of COVID-19 in Tanzania. This draws our attention to the possibility of new thinking when it comes to how global health, colonialism, national politics, and local practices of self-care like nyungu, interact with one another in contemporary Tanzania.
Lors de l’épidémie de COVID-19 – un défi paradigmatique en matière de santé mondiale – plusieurs pays africains, dont la Tanzanie, ont mobilisé les formes autochtones de guérison comme mesures à la fois préventives et curatives pour freiner la pandémie. Cependant, malgré ces efforts pour endiguer la crise, la place des connaissances médicales autochtones dans les interventions de décolonisation en matière de santé mondiale reste inexistante. Cet article s’appuie sur un travail ethnographique de terrain en Tanzanie, ainsi que sur des discours politiques et des sources journalistiques, et examine comment le gouvernement, sous feu le président John Pombe Magufuli, a réagi face à la pandémie de COVID-19. L’article démontre que l’approche de feu Magufuli face à la pandémie, et en particulier la mobilisation de pratiques locales de soins personnels, comme le fait de fumer avec du nyungu, a suscité des débats sur la décolonisation de la santé mondiale et le rôle des médecines africaines traditionnelles dans la réponse à la pandémie de COVID-19. En m’appuyant sur les recherches concernant les efforts visant à promouvoir les connaissances autochtones en matière de guérison dans les États postcoloniaux d’Afrique, je soutiens que l’histoire coloniale et les positionnements politiques postcoloniaux par rapport à cette histoire ont été la « cause » de la résistance de Magufuli aux interventions de santé mondiale contre la COVID-19 en Tanzanie. Ceci nous indique la possibilité d’une nouvelle réflexion sur la façon dont la santé mondiale, le colonialisme, la politique nationale et les pratiques locales de soins personnels comme le nyungu interagissent les uns avec les autres dans la Tanzanie contemporaine.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was undertaken during my 2021 virtual research fellowship with the Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS), and the Leeds Arts & Humanities Research Institute (LAHRI). The author would like to thank Professor van Klinken and Benjamin Kirby for their inspiring mentorship during this fellowship. The author would also like to thank the University Research Ethics Committee at Leeds University and the University of Dar es Salamm for granting ethical clearance. Finally, the author would like to thank LUCAS-LAHRI for generously supporting this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Statement of Ethics
Ethical approval was obtained from the ethics committee at University of Dar es Salaam Permission to conduct the interviews for the purposes of this research was obtained from each community leader/local authority. All respondents were fully informed about the purposes of this research and how their responses would be used and stored. The interviewer clearly communicated the scope and purpose of the research project to all interviewees. All interviewees gave consent to be interviewed for the purposes of this research. All interviewees also consented to interviews being used for publication purposes.
Notes
1 According to Prof. Anna Tibaijuka, by the survival strategies she meant the use of tiba mbadala (Lit., alternative remedies), and tiba asili (Lit., indigenous forms of healing) to manage the pandemic (https://www.parliament.go.tz/hansards-list).
2 Makoye, K. (2021) ‘Tanzania Embarks on Steam Therapy to Fight the Coronavirus.’ Government launches nationwide campaign to promote steam inhalation, which experts say has no scientific basis. 2 February. Anadolu Agency. Retrieved from https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/tanzania-embarks-on-steam-therapy-to-fight-coronavirus/2130552.
3 Steaming with nyungu is hereby used to refer to someone covering himself or herself, usually with a blanket or bed sheet, over a boiled or boiling mixture of medicinal herbs in a pot/pan (chungu), to remedy the experienced/perceived ill-health condition. This practice is also known as kujifukiza in Kiswahili (Kamazima, Kakoko, and Kazaura Citation2020).
4 President Magufuli was the fifth president of Tanzania, serving from 2015 until his death on March 17, 2021. He died from heart complications at Mzena hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
5 ‘Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences. Institute of Traditional Medicine-ITM’ Retrieved from https://itm.muhas.ac.tz/.
6 ‘John Magufuli: Tanzania’s late president in his own words’ (2021). BBC News. 18 March. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56441421.
7 According to John Nkengasong, the Africa’s Director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the COVID-19 testing kits had been supplied by the Jack Ma Foundation, a charity founded by a Chinese billionaire. It is important to note that China may, under Magufuli, have been framed with the same anti-colonial lens that was applied to Western nations – which was not clearly the case under Nyerere’s regime. As such, the Magufuli regime challenged the growing ‘multipolarity’ of the global political system and China’s growing influence.
8 ‘Tanzania president questions coronavirus kits after animal tests’ (2020). Aljazeera. 3 May. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/5/3/tanzania-president-questions-coronavirus-kits-after-animal-test.
9 ‘Tanzania president questions coronavirus kits after animal tests’ (2020). Aljazeera. 3 May. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/5/3/tanzania-president-questions-coronavirus-kits-after-animal-test.
10 ‘Tanzania’s president shrugs off COVID-19 risk after sending fruits for tests’ (2020). The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/19/tanzanias-president-shrugs-off-covid-19-risk-after-sending-fruit-for-tests.
11 ‘Coronavirus: John Magufuli declares Tanzania free of COVID-19’ (2020). BBC News. 8 June. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-52966016.
12 ‘Tanzanian president expresses doubt on coronavirus vaccines’ (2021). Voice of America. 27 January. Retrieved from https://www.voanews.com/a/africa_tanzanian-president-expresses-doubt-coronavirus-vaccines/6201304.html.
13 ‘Magufuli warns Tanzanians against foreign COVID-19 Vaccines’ (2021). The East African. 27 January. Retrieved from https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/news/east-africa/magufuli-warns-tanzanians-covid-19-vaccines-3270732.
14 ‘Ghosts of (colonial) vaccines past: Why East Africans shun clinical trials’ (2020). The East African. 19 May. Retrieved from https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/science-health/ghosts-of-colonial-vaccines-past-why-east-africans-shun-clinical-trials-1441590.
15 Covid-Organics refers to a drink that the President of Madagascar, Andry Rajoelina, claimed could prevent and cure the cornona virus.
16 Magic-bullet approaches – the delivery of health technologies (usually new drugs or devices) that target one specific disease without regard to the myriad societal, political, and economic factors that influence outcomes – have been the norm in international health interventions for decades (Biehl and Petryna Citation2013, 3).
18 It is worth mentioning that at / for most of the time of conducting this study, COVID-19 vaccines hadn’t yet been released for rollout anywhere in the world, let alone Tanzania.