PHILOSOPHY AND PRAXIS

The centrality and importance of primary healthcare for a virile, productive and prosperous people and nation cannot be overstated. Primary Health Care is understood as the organized provision of medical care to individuals or a community of people whether it has a state policy backup or not. This medical care cuts across efforts to maintain and restore the individual or people's mental, emotional, psychological and physical well-being by trained or licensed professionals. To this end, primary health care is vital to everyone as a right to quality of life. Consequently, in this paper, an attempt is made towards answering two basic questions thus: (i) how did African forebears survived without Western medicine? (ii) How can traditional medicine be made more vibrant and functional in order to meet primary health care needs in today's contemporary Africa? To do justice to the questions, the qualitative methods of historical analysis and dialogism are adopted in order to carry out the conversation. The aim is to show how traditional African medicine can be made to meet the primary health care needs of Africans thereby saving foreign exchange on Western drugs importation. The essay recommends for a decolonization of the African healthcare system, if Africa is to have any hope of meeting the primary healthcare needs of her citizens through investment in traditional medicine

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