marcus garvey pan african university - Blackherbals.com

Continued from page 37 –– Applied Afrikology, Restorative
Practices and Community Resilience in the Mt. Elgon Area
Adusele na; abatir na; ebangana- Aduso chorus; enyami
ikorom x2
This song literary meant that Aduso was stupid, though
healthy was stupid. The elders on realizing the motive of
the colonialists and their enforcers decided as a means to
preserve the Edusa plant have its name changed to
Elekumare (which means bring out the cow) which the
enforcers could not know as they were not able to either
identify or differentiate thus preserving the plant and
knowledge up-to-date. All the two plants have been
validated as very nutritious by modern science.
Pi’Kwii is engaged in reviving its Iteso community’s
interest in indigenous and traditional food crops as
fundamental sources of food nutrition and security.
With the introduction of modern cash crops, traditional
crops in Iteso have been marginalized and excluded by
modern conventional agricultural practices. Their value
as food sources has declined, as they have been
superseded by commercialized hybrid food varieties such
as groundnuts and cassava in the Iteso region. This has
been accompanied by the stigmatization of traditional
foods as inferior crops or ‘foods for the poor’.
Its members’ adaptive capacity, their ability to tolerate
and deal with change, to respond to their prevailing
contexts of environmental risk in order to meet their food
needs, is evidenced through their self- organizing, selfdriven
agency to mobilize prior knowledge on traditional
food crops. Linked to this is the ability of its
community’s elderly members to predict weather changes
through the gathering and interpretations of information
based on traditional cosmological predictions. During
their meetings on Tuesday and Thursday, Key Farmer
Trainers (KFTs) with the help of their elderly members
discuss their traditional foods, social, cultural and
agricultural methods- mobilizing knowledge through
afrikological memory capital which is then applied to
revive and resuscitate previous traditional agricultural,
social, cultural and agricological practices. The
afrikological application of traditional knowledge by
P’Kwii community site of knowledge is implemented in
the growing, harvesting and value-additional processing
of traditional food crops and in the storage of seeds for
future use by the community members- this is in response
to the threat of genetically modified seeds (GMOs) posed
to the indigenous organic seed. As observed by a visiting
African scholar, Dr Andreas Velthuizen: “the persistence
of this community in conserving and preserving their
inherited heritage has enabled them to survive and
continue to apply their knowledge and resist impositions
such as genetically modified seeds and plants which are
continually forced down the throats of those
communities”.
Case Study three:
Iwokodan Community Site of Knowledge
Post-conflict communities are increasingly turning their
attention to the legacy of indigenous practices of dispute
settlement and reconciliation. The argument is that
traditional and informal justice systems may be adopted
or adapted to develop an appropriate response to a history
of civil war and oppression. Iwokodan community site of
knowledge based in Palisa, eastern Uganda captures well
this change.
At this site of knowledge organized as a clan, the
community has incorporated strong elements of
modernity in order to preserve their traditional justice
system and traditional clan governance structure. The
Iwokodan Clan is modeled on a modern government
structure, it has a written constitution, with modern
governance structures featuring ministries and ministers
and assistant ministers in its structure. It has opted for
restorative justice in the event of conflict adjudication.
The consequence is that modern courts are not able to
deal with this increasing mass of criminal cases. This has
led to increased cost and delay with self-evident injustice
being caused to individuals and hence a feeling of
injustice. The other problem Iwokodan’s local
government minister Mr. Joseph Okwalinga pointed out
is that criminal litigation is particularly dependent on
individual memory. Documents that can objectively
refresh memory ordinarily play a small part in the usual
kind of criminal case. Witnesses must rely solely on their
recollection. When it takes more than a year, and
sometimes three years, for a case to come to trial,
memory becomes highly suspect. There is a particular
case concerning a land dispute between Iwokodan’s clan
members, the Clan made a successful application to the
high court of Uganda for permission to revert it back to
its local jurisdiction, the Clan resolved the case (which
had taken twenty years in the high court) amicably within
two weeks. There are a number of inter and intracommunities
murder cases that the Clan has resolved
cordially without reference to the high courts.
Consequently, there is an increasing demand for
afrikology’s holistic approach to justice among
communities across the east African region, which seeks
to shift the focus of the trial from the battle between the
lawyers to the discovery of truth by modifying the
complex rules of evidence, encouraging the defendant to
contribute to the search for truth, and requiring full and
open discovery for the prosecutor. Continued on page 39
-38- Traditional African Clinic August 2013