Letters

AGENDA welcomes letters. Please send your comments, opinions, and criticisms to: AGENDA Editor, 220 S. Main St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104.

Shamba Missing I read with great pleasure and interest the article by Renée Rutz and Lisa Gottlieb-Clark ("Alternative Health Care: An Active Approach") in the April edition of AGENDA. The article was well written and thoughtful. I'm sure it will encourage some people who might never have considered alternative medical approaches to take a second look. However, I think the article overlooked an important alternative approach, one that unfortunately has been overlooked all too often, largely because of Eurocentric efforts to deny the validity of (or steal the credit for) things of African origin. I refer to Shamba, a school of healing that has been practiced for more than 20 centuries by the peoples of Eastern Africa. Integrating diet, meditation, massage, herbal ointments and a system of antidotes similar to what we in the West now know as homeopathy, Shamba is perhaps the oldest, most evolved and most sophisticated school of medicine in the world. In the 18th century, European missionaries witnessed the tremendous effectiveness of Shamba but their accounts were disregarded. To get an idea of the lack of regard given Shamba (which then was healing people of diseases that at the time still baffled the West) consider that some linguists believe the English word "sham" to have been derived from the word "Shamba." It's just another example of our"advanced" civilization standing on pride, to the disadvantage of all of us. Hopefully newspapers like yours, by raising awareness, will help reverse the tide. Keep up the good work.