Before ‘Wellness’ Was a Brand: How African Grandmothers Defined Health

“She didn’t call it self-care. She called it staying alive for her people.”

Long before the wellness industry turned grief into a spa day and ancestral plant knowledge into a supplement line, African elder women were holding communities alive. Not as practitioners of a trademarked methodology. As grandmothers. As the ones who knew which leaf to boil, which prayer to say, which body needed touch before it said so. Their definition of health was never individual. It was never for sale. And it was never separate from love.

Before the Industry, There Was a System

The word “wellness” dates to the 1650s in English, but the concept as a consumer category barely predates the internet. The Global Wellness Institute now values the global wellness economy at over $5.6 trillion — a figure built substantially on the repackaging of practices African, Indigenous, and Asian communities have held for generations.

The grandmother did not need the industry’s word for what she was doing. She had her own vocabulary: maintenance of right relationship. Care of the communal body. The work of staying whole enough to stay useful. In Yoruba cosmology, scholar Oyerónkẹ́ Oyẹwúmí documents how elder women held structural authority not through hierarchy but through knowledge — the accumulated knowing of bodies, plants, seasons, and kin relationships that kept a community moving through its cycles of health and illness together.

The grandmother’s health system was not alternative. It was primary. The community health center was her kitchen. The pharmacy was the garden at the doorstep. The diagnostic tool was her hands, her eyes, the way she watched someone walk through a room.

Health as a Communal Condition

The Ubuntu philosophy — I am because we are — is not a motivational poster. It is a medical framework. In communities across sub-Saharan Africa, health was understood as relational: you could not be fully well while your neighbor was suffering. Illness was not simply a malfunction of an individual body; it was a disruption of communal harmony that required communal response.

The WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy acknowledges that traditional medicine — the broad umbrella covering everything the grandmother knew — remains the primary healthcare system for a significant portion of African communities. But the language of “traditional medicine” flattens something that was never merely medicinal. The grandmother’s practice was simultaneously nutritional, spiritual, social, and environmental. She did not separate these categories because her people did not experience illness in separate categories.

The elder women held knowledge of plants. But they also held knowledge of relationships — who was estranged from whom, which family was carrying grief, which young body had taken on a burden it had not named yet. bell hooks, in Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (1993), articulates how Black women’s caring labor — the attention, the witnessing, the tending — has always been a form of communal healing that the dominant culture first extracted and then sold back in diluted form.

And beneath all of it: the ancestor dimension. Health was not disconnected from right relationship with those who had come before. When a body fell ill in ways the visible world could not explain, the grandmother did not stop at the body. She inquired into lineage. She asked who was owed something. She carried the conversation into territory the clinic does not map.

What the Industry Took — and What It Left Behind

Here is what the wellness industry extracted from ancestral traditions: the aesthetics. Crystals. Smudging. Herbs. Breathwork. Sound bowls. Meditation. The industry lifted the practices and dropped the cosmology — kept the leaf, discarded the grandmother who knew it.

This extraction follows a pattern older than the wellness industry. The pattern of biopiracy — documented extensively in cases like the neem patent battles and the commercialization of traditional plant knowledge — is one in which the intellectual and practical work of communities becomes profitable for entities that had no part in developing it. In wellness, this takes a softer form: nobody patents a breathing technique. But the system that charges $45 for a ceremonial cacao drink while the Amazonian women who taught that ceremony earn nothing is extractive by another name.

The deeper loss is not money. It is meaning. When health practices are lifted from their relational context and sold as individual self-optimization, they stop being medicine in the grandmother’s sense. They become product. And product cannot hold what the grandmother’s circle held: accountability to one’s people, integration of the spiritual and the physical, the understanding that your healing is inseparable from the healing of your community.

The wellness industry did not simply borrow from grandmothers. It borrowed the form and erased the frame — then sold the frame as optional, premium, for those who could afford to “go deeper.”

Ubuntu Village works to honor what ancestral elder women knew — supporting community health in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria through frameworks that begin with dignity, not charity.

The Grandmother’s Language the Market Cannot Translate

There are things the market genuinely cannot sell because they cannot be separated from their communal ground. The grandmother knew this. What she held required witnesses. Relationship. Accountability across generations.

She knew, for instance, that some illness was grief that had not been given a proper ceremony. That a body holding unexpressed mourning would eventually speak through pain. That the work of health was sometimes the work of permission — permission to be ill, to rest, to be known in weakness. The grandmother could grant that permission in a way no app can, because it required her physical presence, her authority, her recognition of you.

She knew that health required land — particular land, with particular plants, with particular memory. The commercialization of wellness has largely severed health from place, allowing practices to be purchased regardless of one’s relationship to the earth where those practices developed. The grandmother’s practice was inseparable from a specific ecology. Her remedies came from what grew nearby. Her seasonal practices were calibrated to local cycles. Her knowledge was cumulative, particular, and inherited.

She knew, above all, that the measure of health was never individual flourishing. It was communal survival. Are we still here? Are we still in relationship? Can we still sit in a circle together? These were the health metrics. They still are.

Recovering the Grandmother’s Definition

This is not an argument against wellness practices. It is an argument for their origin — and for returning the relational context without which they become decorative.

To recover the grandmother’s definition of health means asking different questions. Not what practices will optimize me but what practices am I doing in community, in accountability, in relationship to specific knowledge and specific land? Not what is my wellness budget but who in my community is not well, and what does my health have to do with theirs?

The grandmother’s definition holds a structural challenge the wellness industry cannot absorb: that you are not the primary unit of health. The community is. Your body is the instrument through which you do your communal work — and its health is in service to that work. This is not self-erasure. It is Ubuntu. I am because we are. My health is real. It matters deeply. And it is inseparable from yours.

The elders who held this definition are still among us, in many communities. The ones who are gone left knowledge in the plants at the doorstep, in the recipes that contain more than nutrition, in the ceremonies that are still being practiced because someone decided they were worth carrying forward. The recovery is not reinvention. It is attention. It is asking the grandmothers — the living ones, and the ones who speak through what they left behind — what they actually meant.

A Note on Plant Knowledge

Plant medicine and healing traditions carried down through generations — African, diasporic, and otherwise — are shared here as cultural memory, historical record, and ancestral knowledge, not as a substitute for medical care. Herbs can interact with medications, pregnancy, chronic conditions, and individual bodies in ways that a general article cannot account for. Before using any plant or remedy mentioned here, especially medicinally, talk to a healthcare provider who knows your health history. Honoring this knowledge means using it wisely.

The Grandmother Remembered. The Land Remembered. The Work Continues.

Ubuntu Village’s community health programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria are built on the integrated, relational understanding of health that elder women carried. Partner with us.

Sources & Research

• Global Wellness Institute. The Global Wellness Economy. 2023. Global Wellness Institute.
• World Health Organization. WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2014–2023. 2013. WHO Press.
• Oyerónkẹ́ Oyẹwúmí. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. 1997. University of Minnesota Press.
• bell hooks. Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. 1993. South End Press (reprinted Routledge).
• Ubuntu Village. The Neem Patent That Fell: Biopiracy, Mwarubaini, and Who Owns Plant Knowledge. 2026. ubuntuvillageusa.org.

Related Reading

• Elders as Medicine: The Science and Spirit of Intergenerational Wisdom
• The Body Keeps the Ancestors: What Science Is Learning About Inherited Memory
• Decolonizing Mental Health: Honoring Ancestral Healing Practices
• Community-Led Health Infrastructure: What It Is and Why It Matters
• Sacred Rest Is Resistance: Why Sunday Stillness Is Ancestral Medicine

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.