In 1773 a contest on the Caribbean island of Grenada was a life and had huge implications for our culture and ways of understanding the world. But most importantly it exposed a huge medical myth.
Yaws, a contagious skin, bone, and joint disease, ran rampant in the Caribbean. Enslaved Africans on the island of Grenada knew how to treat it, because they had seen it in their homeland. Western doctors, however, thought their methods were more effective than African ones. So a plantation owner decided to find the truth.
An enslaved man and a European-trained doctor were each given enslaved people with yaws and instructed to cure them. The enslaved man treated his patients with medicine made from boiling the bark of bois royale and hop hornwood trees like tea. The European-trained doctor treated his patients with mercury.
Two weeks later, the patients treated by the enslaved man had been cured. Those treated by the doctor had not. The results were astounding to the medical world. The “cure-off” showed the life-saving value of our ancestral knowledge. But it shows us something else.
Many people revere Western medicine but call African herbal medicine unscientific, but that is a falsehood created by mainstream society. Our ways of understanding life stretch across time, space, and oppression. And that’s what’s tea.