tranzit.sk/

October 13, 2023, 8.00 pm, tranzit
Film screening:
The Crown against Mafavuke, 18 mins, 2016
Imbizo Ka Mafavuke, 28 mins, 2017
Learning from Artemisia, 14 mins, 2019

With a video introduction by Uriel Orlow
Event will be held in English.


Medicinal plants and their entanglement with history and politics are at the heart of the three films presented in this program.


The Crown Against Mafavuke (2016) is based on a South African trial in 1940 in which Mafavuke Ngcobo, a traditional herbalist, was accused by the local white medical establishment of ‘untraditional behavior.’ The film explores the ideological and commercial confrontation between two different yet intertwining medicinal traditions and their use of plants, which overlaps gender and race and further questions the notions of purity and origination.


Imbizo Ka Mafavuke (Mafavuke’s Tribunal, 2018) is the sequel which follows Mafavuke Ngcobo’s travel through time and arrives in the present to oversee the preparations for a people’s tribunal where traditional healers, activists, and lawyers come together to discuss indigenous knowledge and contemporary bio-prospecting by the Western pharmaceutical industry and inquire about who benefits when plants become pharmaceuticals, given the multiple claims to ownership, priority, locality, and appropriation.


Learning from Artemisia (2019) focuses on a single plant, Artemisia afra, which has been shown to effectively treat and prevent malaria and can simply be taken as an infusion. However, it not recommended as a treatment by the World Health Organization which appears to favor the pharmaceutical industry and its global reach. Working with a women’s cooperative in Lumata, south of Lubumbashi, DRC, Uriel Orlow planted a small Artemisia afra garden in Lubumbashi.