Waja

P. J Ezeh
Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria.

Introduction
Professor Bassey Andah’s innovative approach to African archaeology brought
fresh thoughts to the subject of technology in days before the prevailing views on
the subject. Scholars did not use to go beyond the everyday meaning of the term,
technology, which limited it to the application of tools and machinery to
manufacture and workaday needs of the service sector, home and other domains of
social life. Such basic view of technology sees it as only tool making and tool using
as a distinctive phenomenon of humans and some related species. Critical views of
technology predate Andah’s archaeology and Afrocentric scholarship, although it
must be conceded that such have not always been well known.
Chandler and Munday (2011) note that Plato included writing as a form
technology because he considered that to be serving certain communication needs
of humans in an extra-natural form that was different from speech. The implication
of this is that once the device or strategy is of human design to help a group or
humanity to act on their environment or serve social needs, it is technology. For the
sociologist, Jacques Ellut, technology is “all rational methods of doing things
(skills, methods, procedures, routines)” (parentheses in the original) (Chandler &
Munday, 2011: 423). Cresswell (2004: 698) writing from anthropological
perspectives acknowledges the material dimension of the term, but also recognises
that it is wide semantic field. Other aspects he adds are “knowledge, know-how,
[and] acts”, as long as these contain technical and social values.
The Greek etymology of the term seems also to justify such a broad view. It
comes from the root, ôÝ÷íç (techne), which Saunier (1977: 140) has glossed as
“handwork, art, vocation, profession”. The suffix, ëüãïò (logos), carries its usual
meaning in such terms as sociology, ethnology, psephology and so on where it
indicates a field of intellectual interest, without bothering about its many other
denotations in the source language.
This way of looking at technology will therefore accommodate the
repertoire of knowledge and know-how which a human group employs in dealing
with health and illness. It will be seen in the cases of the Orring and the Igbo that in
the absence of such autochthonous strategy it would have been impossible to handle
the challenges that they addressed at a time when other medical options were non-
existent. To put those strategies in high relief, I have focussed on how the ethnomedicines
of these groups deal with the problems of life-threatening conditions.
It may be advisable to give a small ethnographic sketch of each of the two
groups that are being reported: Igbo and the Orring.