Perspective from an Outside Insider

Sometimes the moments of greatest clarity of one’s personal identity hide in the most seemingly mundane of circumstances. I take pride in the knowledge that once I have completed my studies at Columbia I will return ‘home’ and use my quarter of a million dollar education on improving the development of the nation in some capacity. A goal that a Kenyan friend cynically retorted “is everyone’s plan”.

Last semester I found myself spending weeks piecing together the fragmented bits of information available to me on the history of medicine in West Africa. Afterwards I walked with the self-confident strut of someone who had “figured it out”. To give the spark notes version of my findings, I had discovered that the British and many other imperialists introduced allopathic medicine merely as a tool of colonialisation. By challenging our traditional ways of medicine they sought to convince us of our encompassing inferiority and convince us of our need for imperialist governance. They succeeded in creating dual, competing systems of medical care that not only represent secular versus religious interpretation of illness but for some represented a political act of cultural affirmation.

The controversies upon which our two healthcare systems were introduced to one another shed much light upon the current failures of both the traditional and allopathic medicinal fields to adequately serve the needs of the Ghanaian population. It unveiled why so many Ghanaian babies die so soon after birth. Before the sacred eight day where, like their ancestors before them, they would have tasted the nsa (spirits) and nsu (water) that would have initiated them into our community. However, it only took five minutes of being an interviewee for a friend’s senior thesis project to make me ask myself what it was that I had really discovered.

The interview was simple. Just a few routine questions on how I prevented illness and treated myself when I was sick. It was in that moment that it struck me that in my course of historicizing the problem with healthcare in Ghana I never bothered to question how I was affected by the historical legacy. How was it that I could so completely and obliviously remove myself from the issue? In my countless hours pent preening over my computer screen while injecting key words into CLIO and praying for a ‘hit’ not once did I look inward. Not once did I ask ‘Where do I fit in and how does the historical legacy of the issue influence me?’

Perhaps my friend was right to voice her cynicism at my plans of return. Perhaps there is something about living here that allows us to unconsciously ‘other’ our own people in a way we may not realize. That allows us to differentiate between ‘them’ and ‘us’ and hinders our actual understanding of our culture. At least when an ostensible outsider is looking in to make policy reforms we are conscious of the limitations on his perspective. What are the implications of our ‘intended’ return if we do unconsciously inhabit these biases? Leave your perspectives on this issue below.