INTEGRATION BETWEEN INDIGENOUS AND CONVENTIONAL MEDICINES IN ETHIOPIA: UNRESOLVED HISTORICAL CONUNDRUM

Since the late 1970s the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended the integration of traditional medicine’ practitioners into primary health care systems in Africa and elsewhere. Numerous studies have examined the integration efforts that followed this recommendation, and by the 1980s, it had become evident that integration faced significant challenges. Besides using oral data gathered from more than twenty indigenous medical practitioners over an extended period and a limited amount of secondary source materials, this historically-informed and analytical study looks at the pluralistic Ethiopia’s medical landscape staring from the early 20th century, when Menilik II made a modest attempt to utilize indigenous therapeutics alongside modern western medical services, to the 1990s, focusing in particular on the efforts made and the major challenges that obstructed cooperation and/or collaboration, let alone integration, between indigenous and western allopathic medicines. Despite the absence of archival materials in the dossiers of government offices and the existence of a handful of workshop proceedings and ethnological/ anthropological studies on the alleged importance of integration, no historical study has been conducted to look into the underlying reasons why the insurmountable challenges facing integration was not given due consideration in the social/medical history of Ethiopia. This historical research work tries to answer why integration attempts had been sidelined or totally abandoned. Finally, some important remarks are proposed on how to approach and tackle this vital, largely neglected and hitherto unsettled historical question.