In Zambia, to those who still believe in the power of food to heal, gourds act as a penicillin. According to legend, the gourd fruit, also known as Mphonda in the Nyanja language, can help cure it all from helping with blood pressure to supporting blood flow to all parts of the body. Many of these narratives are passed down orally through folklore and legend demonstrating the ability of the human to act as an archive, yet these stories are often absent from museum archives and displays where gourds are featured.
In the African context the gourd is used for utilitarian purposes like carrying water or beer but it also serves a higher purpose as the diviner between the physical and spiritual realm. Food is not just food for the body in this sense, but for the soul. However, the profundity of the gourd in African spiritual life has been neglected and sometimes overlooked in Western institutions. In many museums the gourd is presented as a primitive vessel or othered as a tool for mystic practices performed in places afar, but in much of the African continent, and in my native Zambia specifically, its use as a food, its presence in folklore, and its cultural importance are as alive as ever.
My return to Zambia after twenty-two years away has been an exploration of my own diverse culture to understand and collect the stories that are often missed in institutional narratives. It is fitting that my own knowledge of gourds has been shared through storytelling. In visits with my mother and niece, stories and insights about the gourd were shared as casual knowledge attesting to its enduring importance.
In Decolonising The Mind (1986), Ngugi Wa Thiong'o describes how cultural institutions such as academia and the law are vassals for colonial norms. They are also the standard that Africans have been taught to judge our own thinking and knowledge, and the standard by which we are often judged. The dominant roles Western scholarship and media play in how knowledge systems are evaluated means that African cultures and cultural practices are often viewed as inferior or backwards. As International Relations scholar Clive Gabay describes in Imagining Africa : Whiteness and the Western Gaze (2018): “Africa is, in these accounts, and to greater and lesser extents, emptier, more savage, more childlike, less modern, and less civilised than the West''. These sentiments, often held by recognised experts in various disciplines, continue to erase the importance and complexity of the spiritual, social and knowledge systems of people across the African continent.