The Plants Always Knew: African Animist Traditions and the Science That Is Finally Agreeing

Cornell University researchers made headlines in 2024 when they published findings suggesting that plants demonstrate cognitive abilities — communication, memory, adaptive behavior — that challenge the assumption that intelligence is the exclusive province of animals with nervous systems. The paper proposed that what we call “intelligence” may need to be radically redefined to account for life forms that exhibit its hallmarks without anything resembling a brain.

This was presented as revolutionary. For the cultures whose cosmological traditions have always understood plants as sentient, communicating, remembering, and relating — it was confirmation of what their ancestors had named in the only frameworks available to them: spiritual ones.

What African Animism Always Understood

Across African spiritual traditions, the natural world is not inert material awaiting human use. It is alive, relational, and communicating. In Yoruba cosmological understanding, every element of the natural world — plants, rivers, stones, winds — carries àṣẹ, the divine force that animates all things and through which all things are connected. The iroko tree is not merely a tree; it is a spiritual presence, an elder, a site of ancestral gathering. To harvest from it without permission, without ceremony, without reciprocity, is not just bad practice — it is a relational violation.

In Akan tradition, certain trees and plants are understood as abode of spirits — not metaphorically, but literally. The sacred grove is sacred because the plant intelligences within it are recognized as deserving of the same relational respect as human elders. In Central African Bantu traditions, the healer’s relationship with medicinal plants is relational: the plant has given you its power, and you owe it acknowledgment, reciprocity, and the proper ceremonial conditions for the medicine to work.

These were not primitive anthropomorphisms to be replaced by scientific understanding. They were sophisticated epistemologies for engaging with a world that Western science is only now instrumentalizing the capacity to describe: a world in which plants signal, remember, communicate, and respond in ways that functionally resemble cognition.

The Grandmother as Empirical Scientist

The African herbalist — and her grandmother, and her grandmother before her — built a pharmacopeia from relationship with plants. This is not folk wisdom in the diminutive sense Western science tends to use that phrase. It is empirical knowledge accumulated over generations through systematic observation: which plant, in which season, prepared in which way, given in which combination, produces which effect in which kind of body. The grandmother healer who spent fifty years in relationship with the forest knew things about plant behavior and medicinal application that a laboratory study of isolated compounds misses entirely — because she was studying the whole organism in relationship to a whole person in a whole community context.

The Cornell research on plant intelligence is intellectually important precisely because it validates the underlying premise that made African plant medicine possible: that plants are not passive resources but active agents, capable of forming relationships, of responding to context, of operating with something that functions like intention. The healer who approached a plant with ceremony and reciprocity was working with that agency, not despite it. The medicine was a collaboration.

What the Underground Network Knows

Research on mycorrhizal networks — the fungal webs that connect plant root systems beneath the soil, allowing the transfer of nutrients and chemical signals across large distances — has given Western science a new metaphor for what African traditions have always described: a living, communicating web that connects the visible world above ground with the invisible intelligence below. Trees share resources with neighbors under stress. They signal danger through chemical messengers. They remember previous contact with pathogens and calibrate future responses.

African sacred grove traditions preserved these networks intuitively, by refusing to clear-cut, by maintaining diversity, by treating the forest as a community rather than a resource. The grove was protected not because its maintainers understood mycorrhizal networks in the biochemical sense — they didn’t need to. They understood through a different epistemological frame that the forest was alive as a system, that its health was the community’s health, that disturbing it without respect and reciprocity was dangerous. That understanding was correct. The mechanism is what science is now tracing.

The Decolonization of Intelligence

The deeper implication of the plant intelligence research is not just that plants are smarter than we thought. It is that the Western framework for defining intelligence — as something that requires a brain, that is individual, that is measurable by certain kinds of problem-solving — was never an objective description of intelligence. It was a culturally specific definition that excluded most of the living world and, not coincidentally, was also used to exclude African and Indigenous people from the category of full rational personhood.

The traditions that recognized intelligence in plants, in rivers, in stones, in the ancestors — these were not pre-scientific. They were post-individualist. They described a world of distributed, relational, networked intelligence that Western science is, slowly and incompletely, beginning to catch up with. The iroko does not need validation from Cornell. But it is satisfying when the instrument finally reads what the tradition always heard. —MM

References

Nature Plants: Cognition in Plants — Rethinking Intelligence Across Life Forms

PMC: Mycorrhizal Networks and Plant Communication

PMC: African Ethnobotany and Traditional Knowledge Systems

Related Reading

• ‣ What Our Grandmothers Knew: African Herbalism
• ‣ Epigenetics and Ancestral Memory
• ‣ When the Land Returns to Its Keepers
• ‣ Gut Health and Ancestral Wisdom

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, 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.