Impepho is an important holistic, ritualistic, cultural and medicinal herb. The scientific name for impepho is Helichrysum, it has many uses in the African context, including burning it to awaken the ancestors when the living wish to communicate or receive messages from them. Impepho is also used by individuals, sangomas or traditional healers, allowing them to communicate between different realms.
Impepho can be used in various ways, from burning it, to drinking it as a tea, taken raw, in bath water, using it as an ingredient in traditional beer and many other methods. The medicinal uses are just as diverse.
The versatility of this and many other African herbs is impressive. Even though a herb like impepho and many others can cure a whole host of illnesses in ways that few Western medicines can, it is still sidelined or used as an “alternative” form of healing.
A herb like impepho is cheap, holistic, easily accessible and has many medical functions. With South Africa’s health challenges and expensive healthcare systems, it would be a huge advantage to have the knowledge of the medical uses of this herb more commonly known and encouraged by medical practitioners, government, researchers and society.
Additionally, it would be useful to create interdisciplinary discourse around something like impepho between the traditionalists, sciences and social sciences. The traditionalists can provide valuable information on its cosmological and health uses, which the health scientists can research further, and the representatives of the social sciences can analyse the way this herb creates better access to healthcare, unity and social cohesion from its use in rituals.
Healthcare in South Africa and globally is also responsible for a lot of pollution, waste and environmental degradation. While African indigenous health practices such as the use of impepho are far more sustainable. The environment is important in African ritualist healing, where some practices are even performed out in nature.
So while finding solutions for public health in African systems, we indirectly address ecological degradation.
African Knowledge systems are interdisciplinary contributions are a kind of “epistemic anarchy”, which breaks the western scholarship rules which bond academics to a single field or discipline, as if life happens in these predetermined categories the academy creates. Life does not take place in these vacuums; whatever shifts and changes happen in ecology, for example, will have an impact in other spaces as the current environmental crisis has demonstrated to us. The current environmental crisis affects public health, social cohesion as communities are forced to dissolve and migrate in search for healthier spaces, even the economy is greatly impacted by ecological degradation.
This example is very specifically South African, though it can influence decolonial discussions around the globe, the case studies draw a lot more on the South African context. It is a limitation, but it was also done intentionally because the South African higher education sphere excessively draws from international, often western discourse and then tries to squeeze it into our context, which often causes more challenges than solutions.