This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The African Condition, given by Ali Masrui, was originally broadcast in 1979.

Not so long ago, I had lunch with a French-speaking African friend of mine.

As a child, he was attacked by polio, and his limbs were beginning to give way.

A debate started in his family as to whether he should be thrown into the river.

He had come into the world, apparently in an imperfect condition,

and the idea of throwing him into the river and letting him be carried away by the river

was in order to allow him to return in better condition as a subsequent child.

A theory of reincarnation had been converted into a form of therapy for a child deformed by polio.

As the debate within the family was raging,

my friend's condition fortunately began to improve.

This improvement finally tilted the balance

in favor of those who saw therapy in terms of offerings and prayer

rather than in the drastic surgical decision of throwing the baby into a river to drown.

My friend is now a learned scholar in both French and English. He shows almost no sign of his polio

affliction apart from a partial stiffening of his right arm and hand. His personal history

is part of the history of medical science in Africa. His family has learned a lot during his single

lifetime. Yet Africa is still in a state of transition. In the field of scientific explanation, Africans are having to change their minds about a lot of things. What causes rain, for example? We are beginning to be converted to the proposition that droughts are not caused by a surplus of twin babies born in a particular year.

What causes disease?

Whenever I have indigestion, I'm still puzzled as to whether it might not have been caused by the evil eye

of either somebody hungry or somebody greedy who caught a glimpse of my jaws chewing away.

And yet I do find relief when I turn to Alka-Salsa.

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