ABSTRACT

After decades of repression, neglect and occasional verbal support, the Kenyan authorities are now actively seeking to modernize and reconstruct both traditional medical practice and the manner in which traditional medical knowledge is utilized and transmitted. This chapter examines the most important of these initiatives, setting them in the context of broader legal developments at national level and relating them to changes in global governance and in international political economy more broadly. The chapter is structured as follows. Section II reflects on the definition of traditional medicine, highlighting its conceptually residual nature as the subordinated other of Western biomedicine. Section III examines the history of official attitudes to traditional medicine from the early colonial period at the end of the nineteenth century to the early decades of independence since 1964. Surprisingly, perhaps, it will be seen that there was a significant degree of continuity between the colonial association of traditional medicine with witchcraft and the post-colonial desire to modernize health care by eliminating indigenous practices. Section IV provides an overview of the nature and extent of traditional medical practice in contemporary Kenya. Though a vital source of health care for a majority of the population, particularly the poor and those living in remote areas, practice is increasingly stratified. Urban clinics present a commercial face to patients quite at odds with the popular image of the individual healer embedded in a rural community. The rest of the chapter considers three significant aspects of the legal engagement with traditional medicine. Section V reviews the current, weak system for licensing practitioners, as well as recent policy and legislative initiatives to discipline traditional practice by integrating it into the national health system. These plans lay at least as much emphasis on the materials used in treatment as on the work of healers themselves. This theme is elaborated in Section VI, which considers the pressure placed on wild plant resources by the growing commercialization of traditional healing. Section VII examines a further resource-related problem, namely the threat that traditional knowledge and genetic resources will be appropriated by foreign researchers or companies without due consent being obtained or compensation being rendered. International agreements have significantly influenced Kenyan law on this area, though considerable problems of implementation remain and there have been a number of documented cases of unauthorized appropriation. Intellectual property (IP) reforms, proposed in response to this problem, are also considered, along with 181recent projects to develop a herbal products industry on the basis of extant traditional medical knowledge. Section VIII reflects on the broad trend of regulation in the sector with reference to the model of bio-political governance developed by Rose and Miller. Considered thus, diverse initiatives can be said to problematize different aspects of traditional medicine and to propose a rationalization of practice or medical products in response. I argue that the law plays a two-fold role in these problematizations, functioning as a technical means of reform, but also as a normative source of the goals to which reform programmes are oriented.