24/10/2020
The Kalahari Bushman Anecdote
by Dylan Warren-Davis,
Whilst still a student of herbal medicine in London in the late ‘70’s I was invited with my mother, Ann Warren-Davis, FNIMH, who was only one of three herbalists in London at the time, to the pre-opening of my brother’s night club in South Kensington. We were graciously ushered in and immediately got to meet my brother’s business partner. He was a South African millionaire and my first impression of him suggested he was the type of guy who would just laugh at herbal medicine. To my amazement when he found out we were herbalists, he became intensely interested in what we were doing. He interjected, “If it was not for herbal medicine he would not be alive today.”
Over the meal he could not wait to tell us his personal story of languishing in a Johannesburg Hospital for several months with a particularly virulent form of malaria. He was given all the anti-malarial drugs going and yet nothing worked. The fevers kept coming back every few days and he was just getting weaker and weaker. A friend who had kept visiting his bedside daily witnessing his decline said one day, “This is no good, these drugs are not helping. You are going to die here. I will have to take you to see the Bushmen.”
After a couple of days his friend had organised a Land Rover with a mattress in the back, along with provisions for a long journey to the Kalahari. He was bundled by his friend into the back and they drove several hundreds of miles towards a village where his friend knew a healer lived. After several days of arduous travel they finally approached the village when, with a few miles to go, they were stopped by a bushman walking on the road towards them. It was the healer. He looked at the patient in the back of the Land Rover and then pointed to a large fungus growing from the base of a nearby tree. The bushman then gesticulated that they should gather all of it, boil it up and then drink all the broth. He then just disappeared into the bush.
His friend set up camp, built a fire and set about boiling up the fungus. After drinking the broth the guy had a massive fever and 24 hours later became free of the malaria - never to return. After convalescing for a few weeks, the South African guy was so impressed with his recovery that he gave a donation to the pharmacology department at Johannesburg University to chemically analyse the fungus. They found alkaloids present similar to quinine, extracted from Cincona bark, formerly used for treating malaria successfully but by then it had become ineffectual.
It was a remarkable story that made me think deeply about herbal medicine as I was then studying it. The trend at the time was to explain herbs purely in terms of their constituents and corresponding pharmacology. This tale fulfilled that, yet to my mind the skill of the bushman was even more remarkable, for here was a healer who would not have had any scientific education, yet knew a sick man was coming to the village, knew what was wrong with him and set off to meet him at the precise location of where the fungus needed for his treatment was growing and communicated that knowledge without speaking English. He did all that and fixed the malaria in one hit when all the resources of a high tech modern hospital, with full knowledge of the plasmodium parasite’s life cycle, had failed. This story made me question, just how much reductionist chemical analysis of plants was really helping us understanding the nature of herbal medicine? The conclusion I came to was not a lot!! Whilst chemistry is important there is a lot more to herbal medicine than just defining herbs in terms of their active constituents and corresponding pharmacological actions.
It is noteworthy too that the bushman did not want money for saving this person’s life; he was simply motivated by compassion to heal this person irrespective of race or bank balance. However the most important part of this story, demonstrates that the bushman’s understanding of plants was based upon respecting nature and living his life in tune with it, so that the knowledge of the plant world was revealed to him through understanding the inter-connections of life. Because he was attuned to nature, it enabled him to know that a sick person was coming to see him. It also illustrates another important point that herbal knowledge belongs to the culture from whence it has evolved. Defining a herb’s chemical composition does not mean that the herb no longer belongs to the culture.
As a post script to this story, developments in glycobiology in the last 25 years may provide further insights into why this fungus was so stunningly successful. A number of fungi, such as sh*take and mitake mushrooms, are known to produce a simple sugar compound called beta-glucan. It is made in the fungal cell walls and is released when the fungus is cooked or boiled. Beta-glucans are well recognised as being powerful stimulants of the immune system, orchestrating immune response and promoting healing. Though the exact fungus in this story is unknown, I strongly suspect it was one that contains beta-glucan, so that the boiled broth is likely to have contained it in solution. The plasmodium parasite would have been hit by a double whammy of a range of alkaloids inimical to it and immediately followed by a powerful immune response in the fever.
