When Knowledge Lives in Silence: The Crisis Facing African Indigenous Medicine

I was recently asked on LinkedIn: “Where can I read more about African Indigenous Medicinal Systems in detail?”

The truth is, you can’t. Not easily, anyway. Not because the knowledge doesn’t exist, but because it was never written down.

Why Our Knowledge Is Missing from the Page

Traditional Health Practice and Indigenous Knowledge Systems are underdeveloped, under-documented, and under-researched. This isn’t an accident; it is history.

The practitioners who carried this wisdom before us often could not write. And when writing was possible, they avoided it. Why? Because to record was to risk theft. Knowledge was guarded jealously, kept oral, transmitted in ceremony, in practice, in apprenticeship.

They were right to be cautious. Too often, our people have had their medicines studied, renamed, patented, and sold back to us. What remained sacred became commodity.

But this caution had consequences: today we stand on the edge of losing practices not because they failed, but because they were never documented.

The Double Burden on Today’s THPs

In South Africa, we face another reality: professional immobility.

Traditional Health Practitioners are legally recognized under the Traditional Health Practitioners Act 22 of 2007. Yet in practice, we are still treated as outsiders in the health system. A biomedical nurse or doctor has pathways for professional growth, structured career ladders, access to funded research, and institutional protection. A THP? We often have none of that.

We work, we heal, we carry, but without recognition in education frameworks, without proper documentation of our skills, without mobility. The system locks us in place.

What This Means for Knowledge

This combination - undocumented past and immobilized present - is dangerous. It means:

  • We risk losing vast libraries of medicine because our elders’ knowledge was never captured.
  • We risk producing a new generation of THPs who cannot grow beyond survival-level practice because the system doesn’t allow it.
  • We risk seeing African Indigenous Medicinal Systems reduced to fragments in academic journals, without their full context, meaning, or integrity.

But There Is Hope

Conversations like the one I had with Tebalelo, a biomedical researcher, give me hope. He said he wants to understand the mechanisms of action in African medicinal approaches, especially for conditions with multifactorial causes that need multi-target therapies. That tells me we are slowly entering a new moment: a hunger to engage, not dismiss.

But engagement must be ethical. It must be led by THPs, in partnership, not extraction. It must protect our sacred knowledge while finding ways to document and teach that ensure its survival.

This is why I work through the Kwa Dabulaluvalo School of Traditional Health. It’s why I spend my energy aligning Indigenous education with the Occupational and Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Frameworks. It’s why I push for regulatory frameworks that don’t just recognize THPs on paper but create real professional mobility.

Because if we don’t act now, our children may wake up one day with nothing left to inherit.

My Call

The crisis is real: we are losing what was never written. But it’s not too late.

We can document without stealing.

We can research without stripping away sacredness.

We can build mobility into the profession of THPs.

We can bring our medicine into dialogue with science, not to erase it, but to strengthen it.

That is the work. That is my life.

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