Mkaumwa, Calumba, and Miami Columbo: Slavery and Expropriated Pharmacology from the Swahili Coast to the Ohio Valley

Abstract

This article examines calumba root as a mobile scientific object in global history. The narrative begins with the first mention of calumba as an antidote from the "Indies" by an Italian physician in 1671. In the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, European healers prescribed the root for gastrointestinal diseases. These authors believed the plant to be indigenous to South Asia, particularly Colombo, Ceylon.By the late eighteenth century, most doctors knew it as the "Mozambique root." However, Europeans denied the plant's southeast African provenance until 1808. Europeans disavowed calumba's origins in Africa while appropriating it into their own pharmacology. American physicians likewise searched for calumba in the trans-Appalachian west by simultaneously plundering the science of Indigenous American nations. These two strands of calumba's history illuminate how Euro-American medicine relied on and obscured African and Amerindian knowledge.Calumba root, Jateorhiza palmata, is a multiplicity: it exists as specimens pressed and mounted onto herbarium sheets, as medicinal teas sold online, as an aesthetic object in botanical prints, and as a research subject for biodiversity ecologists. While calumba's many forms are remarkable, Christopher M. Blakley is a non-tenure-track professor at Occidental College, where he teaches first-year writing and research methodology seminars.