What we knew before we were told to forget — and what we must remember now more than ever.
Our ancestors did not survive by accident. They survived because they knew things — about food, about rest, about community, about spirit — that were passed down in gardens and kitchens and front porches. Now & Then is a living record of those things: not as relics, but as tools for the present.
This section begins with a simple question: What did we do before? Before the modern medical system told us not to trust our grandmothers' remedies. Before the digital economy convinced us we could sustain ourselves alone. Before convenience became a substitute for connection.
The answers are not hard to find. They are still alive in the way certain grandmothers plant their gardens by the moon. In the way church communities still organize a meal train when someone is sick. In the quilts that carry family histories. In the way the music still makes the body remember what the mind forgot.
Now & Then does not romanticize the past. It asks the past to teach the present — one practice, one story, one remedy at a time.
Before the pharmacy, before the prescription pad, before the supplement aisle — there was the kitchen. And the women who knew every root, seed, and leaf by name and by purpose.
Walk through any open-air market in Nairobi, Accra, or Lagos and you will find women selling things that most Americans have never seen: dried moringa leaves sold by the handful, turmeric root the size of a fist, fresh ginger braided into thick ropes, bitter melon hanging in neat rows. Ask any of these vendors what something is for and they will tell you without hesitation — this is for the stomach, this is for the blood, this is for when you cannot sleep.
That knowledge did not stay on the continent. It crossed the Atlantic in the bodies of enslaved Africans who kept it alive in the only way they could — by practicing it quietly, in their own yards, in whatever they were permitted to grow.
"Granny's garden was her pharmacy. She had something for everything. We just didn't know at the time that she was practicing something ancient."
Moringa, long called the "miracle tree" across Sub-Saharan Africa, has been documented to contain more vitamin C than oranges, more calcium than milk, and more potassium than bananas. Modern nutritional science is only now publishing what African grandmothers have always known: the leaves, the seeds, and the pods are all medicine.
Turmeric's curcumin — the compound that gives it its deep gold color — is now the subject of hundreds of clinical trials for its anti-inflammatory properties. Ginger's effectiveness for nausea and digestive distress is medically established. The bitter herbs that West and East African traditions have used to regulate blood sugar for generations are now being investigated as type-2 diabetes treatments.
None of this is a discovery. It is a confirmation of what was already known — just not by people with university degrees who could publish it.
Practiced across East Africa for centuries, this simple morning routine nourishes the body before the day begins. Moringa powder is available at most health food stores and many African grocery stores.
How well do you know the ancestral wisdom that crossed the ocean? Test your knowledge of African and Black American traditions — and learn something new along the way.
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