by Anna Badkhen at Aeon Magazine: Amadou is always tapping into a global knowledge of what keeps us alive, a people’s pharmacopoeia honed over millennia. When we first met, in 2013, Amadou and I travelled with a family of Fulani cowboys as they led their cattle along a migration route that cut across central Mali. The Fulani are the largest nomadic ethnic group on Earth, and may have been mobile since man first domesticated the cow. I had come to Mali because I was working on a book about transhumance – the seasonal migration of livestock by nomadic peoples – at a time of urbanisation and climate change. I hoped to learn from the Fulani what it means to live in cycles of separation and reunion.
During the transhumance season, worried that the water in my flask wouldn’t last till the next well, I began to conserve, and for days drank too little until my thirst condensed into a terrible headache. When Amadou found out, he pulled from his pocket a small, homunculus-looking nub of myrrh resin wrapped in plastic torn from a shopping bag, set it to smoulder in the red-hot nest of a wire brazier, and taught me to lean over it to inhale the smoke.
Traditional doctors in China have used myrrh for centuries to treat arthritis and fractures; India’s ayurvedic healers recognise its anti-inflammatory powers and effectiveness against coronary artery diseases; ancient Egyptians used myrrh as an antiseptic. The self-taught American herbalist Samuel Thomson, in the 19th century, used a mixture of brandy, cayenne and myrrh to ‘remove pain, prevent mortification, and promote a natural heat’. He describes these and other uses of myrrh in a book he titled, exhaustively, New Guide to Health; or, Botanic Family Physician: Containing a Complete System of Practice, Upon a Plan Entirely New; With a Description of the Vegetables Made Use of, and Directions for Preparing and Administering Them to Cure Disease; to Which Is Prefixed a Narrative of the Life and Medical Discoveries of the Author (1822). The 21st-century French botanist Michel Arbonnier recommends myrrh as a soporific, a tranquiliser and a treatment against gastric problems. Malians use myrrh as a disinfectant, an anticonvulsant, a dewormer, an aphrodisiac, an antimalarial and a treatment for migraines. In the Malian bush, Commiphora africana, African myrrh, is always at your fingertips: it grows everywhere.
At one point or another, we all knew something about how to heal ourselves using the plants and animals that surround us, at least somewhat. We treated pain with willow bark and terminated pregnancies with abortifacient herbs. We treated insomnia with lettuce and halitosis with parsley – according to a 10th-century cookbook from Baghdad, which devotes an entire chapter to the humoral properties of different vegetables. Many of us still know something about these treatments: studies estimate that as much as 80 per cent of the world’s population, roughly 6 billion people, still use traditional plant- and animal-based medicines. Such bonds that once existed between all humans and the rest of the natural world were born of scarcity, which dictates need. As a child in Soviet Russia, I made plantain weed poultices for skinned knees, ate raspberry jam to bring down fever, picked the sweet-smelling linden blossoms and dried them on newspaper in the sun to brew later as an expectorant.
Lately, we often relegate this kind of intelligence to laboratories: who needs myrrh when there is aspirin? My childhood herbalist memory, for instance, is fading. I remember picking fireweed and goatweed, but I have forgotten what they are for. It seems portentous that we should lose the memories of how to maintain our bodies: it is as if we are unremembering how to stay alive, and our forgetting what sustains us allows us to neglect and abuse the resources we no longer know how to use. In the process, we neglect and abuse something less easily defined but arguably more important: decency, morality, community, ourselves.
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