Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa by Abena Dove Osseo-Asare (review)

Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa is a deeply compelling history of the diverse ways six critical African botanicals move through time and space on the plant-to-pharmaceutical pipeline. Abena Dove Osseo-Asare fluidly narrates how transnational, transeconomic, and transcultural parties compete to corner the ownership of periwinkle, pennywort, grains of paradise, Strophan-thus, Cryptolepis, and hoodia. She offers a rigorously researched and finely tuned account for each specimen and cast of players in the drama of herbs and plants as the green “gold” of global resources. These real and metaphorical bitter plants symbolize the “bitter memories” of foreign drug companies’ broken promises for patents and profit, as well as rightful recognition of the indigenous healers, African scientists, and communities who serve as points of discovery for these medicinal plants (1).

In this study of the trade and negotiation of property rights for herbal medicines, Osseo-Asare asks the following questions: (1) Who was the first to use the medicinal plant? (2) Was the traditional medicine only used locally? (3) What was the path from plant to pharmaceutical? (4) Who benefitted or, more important, how can claims to benefits be established based on the complex histories of these plants? The larger story of how global epistemological imperialism extends into the realm of plant medicine is Osseo-Asare’s central argument. Focusing on knowledge—revealed, shared, and stolen—and the exploitation of ethnicity, class, and global position, the book shows how the world’s “favored” benefit at the expense of the “least favored.” She successfully argues that, “The stories of each plant remedy destabilize hierarchies of knowledge that privilege ‘scientific’ authority over ‘traditional’ medical expertise” (6). Covering three different regions of Africa, she concentrates on bioprospecting and biopiracy, revealing the triadic conflict of healers, African and Western scientists, and their affiliated drug companies, an approach unexplored in previous biopiracy studies.

Osseo-Osare argues that class fissures, fomented during the late colonial and early days of independence, helped to underpin the global systems of Western resource domination in Africa at the expense of African intellectual innovation. However, the book is primarily devoted to contemporary case studies of “the social life of plants”—how indigenous herbalists contributed knowledge and creativity to the houses of “Big Pharma.” For example, there is a clear-cut case of biopiracy by drug giant Eli Lilly with pennywort and periwinkle from Madagascar; but widespread plant distribution in “healing plant Diasporas” refutes Malagasy claims to medicinal invention (205). Patents erased the historical memory of the first plant medicine innovators, thereby denying intellectual property rights to the African originators. In West Africa, another commonly utilized plant, “grains of paradise,” circulated in open knowledge networks as a common aphrodisiac. In answer to another of Osseo-Osare’s key questions, “Was traditional medicine always local?” The answer is “no.” According to the logic of the scientific community and pharmaceutical companies, usage by too many people, in too many places dulls indigenous claims to ownership. Thus, in another case of stolen knowledge, Peya Biotech filed the patent for the fiery grains of paradise to be marketed as a treatment for erectile dysfunction.

Prior to the colonial era, Ghanaians used the plant Strophanthus for poison arrows. As colonial subjects, they rebelled against the ban on their deadly projectiles, only to have those same chemical elements converted into a “bitter” pill that was rebranded as strophantin and appropriated as a heart medication by British colonial authorities (126). This tale speaks to the larger issue of resource exploitation embedded in the “scramble for Africa.” Also in Ghana, the plant-to-pharmaceutical pathway of Cryptolepis sanguinolenta presents a four-way tussle between healers, Ghanaian scientists, the postcolonial Ghanaian government, and drug companies. The young Ghanaian government recruited physician Oku Ampofo to find alkaloid properties in plants and start a database dedicated to creating medicinal drugs. Ampofo collaborated with Albert Nii Tackie, Ghana’s first pharmacology Ph.D., and...