INTRODUCTION

Ethics in the practice of medicine was not an alien concept in much of African history (see Chapter 19). Most African traditional healers had closely guarded codes of ethics, which were passed down from one generation to the next. Some of these codes embodied concepts found in the Hippocratic tradition such as confidentiality and privacy. Similarly, bioethics, broadly defined, is not an entirely new notion in Africa. Many African cultures understood the sacred interdependency among the health of individuals, communities, and ecological systems. It was a common belief that the morality of one's actions had consequences, positive or negative, on one's own health, the collective health of the populace, and the environment.

Godfrey Tangwa, an African philosopher–bioethicist asserts that African ethical and metaphysical ideas have over the ages been shaped and colored by its ecological, biological and cultural diversity. He argues that within the African world view, the distinction among plants, animals, and inanimate material, and between the sacred and the profane, matter and spirit, and the communal and the individual is a slim and flexible one. Similarly, metaphysical conceptions, ethics, customs, laws, and taboos form a single continuum (Tangwa 1999, 5).

A discussion of the “emergence” of bioethics in Africa is therefore slightly misleading because bioethics has always been a part of the African way of life. In reality, the emergence refers to the globalization of bioethics (Knowles 2001, 254).