Mwafrika doesn’t have to die. She can be saved by the wisdom of her ancestors

Namibia is one of the better-governed African countries with a law-based order, but faced with a climate change crisis, it resorted to an old-fashioned bush solution.

Southern Africa is reeling from a severe climate-fuelled drought, the worst in 70 years, which has left nearly 68 million people on the back foot. Over 17 percent of people in the region need aid amid climate change-fuelled drought.

By July, Namibia had exhausted 84 percent of its food reserves. In its parks and open grasslands, the numbers of animals far exceed available grazing land and water supplies.

As a result, the government announced plans to slaughter over 720 wild animals, including 83 elephants, and to distribute the meat to people struggling to feed themselves.

It seems like a sensible solution, but is also quite an embarrassing primordial approach harking back to the time when Africa’s forefathers hunted wild animals in the bush for their food.

Read: Namibia to slaughter 723 wild animals as hunger crisis worsens

To be fair, in parts of Central Africa like the Democratic Republic of Congo, and West Africa, some people still live off bushmeat. That, though, has brought its perils, including Ebola and, presently, mpox (previously known by the politically incorrect name of Monkeypox virus).

An otherwise bright light like Namibia should have a solution based on modern climate and agricultural sciences. If not, it should study African history, for from that bushmeat-eating past, there were simultaneously many remarkably clever solutions to the ravages of drought and crop damage.

In the scorched and dusty lands of the Sahel and West Africa, where rain is scarce but fierce on the day it comes, farmers have fallen to the genius of the past to green deserts and produce bumper harvests.

As a lengthy report by the World Economic Forum put it, “Armed with their daba (traditional pickaxe), [peasant farmers] dig the red laterite earth. In a vigorous choreography, the peasants crisscross the plot with these regular holes. They slip in a handful of compost, a few sorghum seeds, a film of light soil: and voila, the field is ready to welcome the next rainstorm!

“Sowing seeds like this in the middle of the dry season, in a field that is strewn with holes, the idea may seem counter-intuitive to the outside eye, but it is in fact part of the centuries-old expertise of the inhabitants of Yatenga: the zai. This revolutionary agricultural technique has made them masters of the art of capturing rain. Oral history tells that in ancient times, the technique was used by families with very small areas and poor land, before falling into oblivion in the 1950s, a period marked by abundant rains.

”Once ignored, the secrets of Sahelian farmers are now attracting the attention of researchers and decision-makers…they inspire new ways of adapting to climate change for African agriculture, and beyond.”

This is the wisdom of the ancestors, so the rest of Africa can steal the technology without fear of the ancestors’ retribution.

Read: About 68m facing drought in Southern Africa

Another problem, not as old as drought, but demanding a newer solution, is upon the continent.

Just over two weeks ago, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that the upsurge of mpox in the DRC and the growing number of countries in Africa constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).

On August 27, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said there were more than 22,800 mpox cases and 622 deaths on the continent and that infections had jumped 200 percent in the last week.

The majority of cases and deaths are in DRC, where on August 28, the Ministry of Health reported that the ongoing mpox outbreak had led to more than 17,801 suspected cases, including 610 deaths, in the country.

Mpox can be warded off with vaccines, but in a story similar to that during the Covid-19 pandemic, Africa doesn’t have the vaccines. It doesn’t make them, and can’t afford to buy them.

Health experts have estimated Africa needs about 10 million mpox vaccine doses but will likely receive only about 500,000 (just five percent of the need) – and no one is sure when they might arrive.

The hat is being passed around. The European Union has promised some, as has the US, the Nordic countries, and Spain. Japan, the US and Germany have already donated a few.

Barely two years after the worst of the pandemic, the struggles with vaccines, Africa should have learnt its lesson and been better prepared. Some steps have been taken. BioNTech opened a commercial-scale vaccine manufacturing facility in Kigali, Rwanda, in December 2023.

In a couple of African countries, funding for vaccine development has been “eaten” by corrupt officials and politicians. Many African Treasuries have been bankrupted by war, corruption, waste, incompetent economic management, and heavy debt payments. There is no money for mpox vaccines.

Here, too, there is inspiration from the past. Onesimus, an enslaved African from West Africa, in 1721 was instrumental in alleviating a smallpox outbreak in Boston, Massachusetts. Using the knowledge he had learnt in Africa, Onesimus introduced his “master”, the New England Puritan minister Cotton Mather, to the principle and procedure of variolation (introducing material from an infected person into the body of one who isn’t) method of inoculation to prevent the disease, saving thousands of lives.

It laid the foundation for the development of vaccines. There is a vaccine equivalent of zai buried in the annals of West African history somewhere. It can’t be hard to find if we looked hard enough.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3