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Zanzibar Herbalist Finds Business Partners in Seattle
Madawa checks a vanilla plant on one of 15 Zanzibar farms that supply him with herbs. |
Said, 48, is known as Madawa ("Ma-DAH-wah"), a Swahili nickname meaning "medicine man." He is renowned for his healing work with culinary spices and herbs, based on "hands-on" knowledge passed from father to son over five generations.
Schiltz, 36, a nurse practitioner and certified herbalist with a Master’s in Gerontology, first met Madawa while vacationing in Zanzibar. She and Seattle paramedic Penelope Stone, 38, had just finished a spice tour when they noticed a small sign pointing to his clinic.
"I spoke to him for five minutes and knew I’d be coming back," she says. Since 1997 Schiltz has returned three times, for a month at a stretch, to apprentice with Madawa.
Today, four years later, she and Stone have realized their dream of making Madawa’s time-tested herbal formulas available in Seattle and around the world.
Breakfast in Zanzibar
Zanzibar is a small island located off the coast of Tanzania, East Africa. The island, about the size of Maui, once provided four-fifths of the world’s clove supply, and is traditionally known as "Spice Island."
For Schiltz, breakfast in Madawa’s home is an experience of lively conversation and laughter. She joins the women in preparing breakfast, including rice or millet porridge cooked over an open fire and tea made with fresh lemongrass and basil picked from the family garden. Cassava, a potato-like staple of Zanzibar, is pounded into flour and made into bread.
Madawa encourages his foreign guests (including many apprentices) to stay in his home, to help his children learn about different cultures. He lives with his two wives, Fatima and Hadiji, both 47, and their 18 children, aged 4 to 22, in a simple home made of concrete. Their home is considered middle-class, with modern amenities like TV and air-conditioning. There are three bathrooms, with toilets, and a central gathering place, but no kitchen.
A painful split of very poor and very rich exists in Zanzibar, and there are few middle-class families. For Madawa, these economic differences are a major concern, in both his practice and community life.
Madawa’s "family" extends into the community, where he is active with his mosque and with the villagers who greet him on the street. Trips on the dali dali (bus) to Stone Town can be very social, with encounters ranging from the traditional "Jambo Hamboree" ("Hello, how are you?") to informal appointments and on-the-spot house calls.
A Day in the Life of the Medicine Man
The clinic is modest: a small waiting room, an office for the clinic’s business manager, Dr. Ali, and an exam room, which consists of two chairs and an exam table. When Madawa arrives in the morning, two or three patients might be waiting, holding cardboard signs identifying their patient numbers. Madawa has treated more than 5,000 patients and keeps detailed records in numbered notebooks.
Dressed simply in jeans and a cotton shirt, Madawa talks at length with his patients, listening closely to their problems and offering a cup of herbal tea. As part of her apprenticeship, Schiltz sits in on his consultations—unlike Madawa, she may use her stethoscope and blood-pressure meter. Madawa and Schiltz confer on the diagnosis, then give a prescription to Madawa’s eldest son, Said, to fill in the dispensary.
At age 22, Said represents the sixth generation to carry on the Madawa tradition. Five of Said’s siblings help Dr. Ali with the packaging and sale of the herbal soaps, creams, teas and syrups, while the 12 youngest children stay at home with their mothers, filling spice baskets, wrapping soaps and bagging teas. Their herbal products also are sold in Stone Town, a tourist mecca in Zanzibar City, 10 to 15 miles from Kibewa.
Madawa is well aware of the limits of herbal medicine and works in partnership with both Western-style doctors and spiritual healers. He sends patients to the hospital for serious illness or injury as well as tests and X-rays, and will not deliver babies. A practical man, he considers the emotional side of illness as well as the physical, but will not use prayers or chanting for healing purposes. He leaves the spiritual healing to another professional healer down the road.
For Schiltz, the greatest joy of the job is hanging out with Madawa and letting his good nature fill up the atmosphere. "He is very confident about what he does. He likes being Madawa and loves his work. He’s very logical," she says.
Anita Schiltz (right) and Penelope Stone are partners in Madawa's Pure and Natural Herbal Products. |
According to Schiltz, Madawa believes that good health stems from a healthy digestive tract, and this belief is the mainstay of his herbal formulas. "Food should be your first medicine. People cooked with spices for a reason," she says. During her stays in Zanzibar, Schiltz observed no ill health in Madawa’s family, other than one toothache. She feels this is due to the teas and spices his family uses in their daily curries, and also a slower, family-oriented lifestyle.
His herbal prescriptions arise from his direct contact with 15 local farmers who grow organic spices and herbs such as lemongrass, basil, clove, cinnamon, fennel and black caraway. Neem leef, flowers of the ylang-ylang tree, and leaves of the mykanyuki tree are also harvested and dried. Madawa determines crop quality through taste, touch, and smell. The crops are packaged into 18 products, including soaps, teas, and honey-based syrups.
As a member of the African Chamber of Commerce, Madawa is active in fair-trade issues for local farmers. He had hoped to institute widespread organic farming on Zanzibar, but project funds ran dry.
Bringing Zanzibar to Seattle
Back home in Seattle, Schiltz found few opportunities to use the intuitive skills she learned from Madawa, so she decided to bring Zanzibar to the Northwest.
The experience of living with Madawa and his family convinced Schiltz of the need for more simplicity in Western lifestyles, and less "chaos of technology" in Western medicine. She feels fortunate to have studied with a traditional herbalist, saying, "A lot of herbalists don’t even know what their products look like. Herbals have become a lot more pharmaceutical."
In 1998 she set about marketing Madawa’s herbal supplements in the United States. For three years, she worked with the Zanzibar Ministry of Agriculture and the US Food and Drug Administration to determine the quality of his products for export. Schiltz started Madawa’s Pure and Natural Herbal Products with help from business partner Penelope Stone.
Schiltz also brought a little Seattle to Zanzibar: she bought computers for the clinic and solar herb dryers for the farmers. She also arranged to teach the farmers about the equipment and got Madawa online—he now stays in contact with her via e-mail.
"I never intended to go into business. It’s hard to believe I’m really doing this. I never would have guessed growing up in Iowa that I would end up in Zanzibar." Schiltz was raised on a Black Angus cattle farm, and her experience with Madawa and his community left her determined to bring fair trade prices for the farmers.
Schiltz describes herself as a distributor for Madawa’s products, and works under exclusive contract with him. Madawa’s Pure and Natural Herbal Products—teas, soaps, creams and supplements, all priced between $5 and $20—are available at www.madawas.com and at several area health food stores.
Reader Comments
Discuss this article in the forums!
| Mshenga Nasseb | Nov 17, 2002 | Canton-Ohio | Business |
| Hi, I was happy to see that you have discover me best and natural medicines of my country, please contact me i would like to join in this venture. | |||
| Muadh Ali | Apr 06, 2003 | Mombasa,KENYA | self employed |
| I read we great interest the article on your website.I am interested in learning about herbal medicine for diffrent cures.If you would like to sell your medicine here in Mombasa,may i then request you that i am interested in being your agent! | |||
| Dickson Humphrey | Apr 30, 2003 | Moshi,Tanzania | Pharmacist |
| I am happy to find out this concern.I was looking for the updates on cultivation of vanilla,a project I am extremely interested with.Could you please update me on that? I will be very thankful.I am also interested to involve myself with you in the business. Please let me informed. | |||
| rasheed | Nov 26, 2005 | businees | |
| I want a herbal product from ZANZIBA for Cough, its brown color nut. very hard. Please send me mail if anybody can provide me from there. | |||
