Dr. Irene Honam Tsey, University of Health and Allied Sciences, Ghana
In my culture, there is a proverb: wisdom is like a Baobab tree and no one person can embrace it. The Baobab grows so wide that a single pair of arms, however determined, will never reach all the way around its trunk. The proverb's lesson follows from that simple physical fact: no one person, however wise, can hold the whole of what a community knows. Wisdom, like the tree, is something many hands must reach around together. I have been sitting with this proverb for years, long before I encountered the Global Health Solidarity Project's draft principles. But reading them, I found myself returning to it with new urgency, because it captures something the principles gesture toward without quite naming: that solidarity is a relational and intergenerational wisdom to be inherited.
I participated in the Anglophone regional workshop in 2023, where we shared our different conceptualisations and practices of solidarity. During the regional feedback webinar in June 2026, when the draft principles were brought back to us for reflection, I raised a tension that has stayed with me since the tension between institutionalising solidarity and preserving its relational character. This is, in many ways, the Ujamaa question. Julius Nyerere's vision of Ujamaa was an attempt to build solidarity into the architecture of a nation, into policy, into collective ownership, into the machinery of the state. It failed for many reasons: political pressures, economic constraints, and external shocks all played their part. But among these, I want to dwell on one that is less often named: something happens to relational wisdom when it is formalised. The warmth of an obligation freely felt between people becomes, too easily, the coldness of an obligation enforced by a system. The principles this project is developing face a version of the same risk. We are asking what it would mean to make solidarity an organisational obligation — and we should ask it. But we must also ask what we lose when we move from solidarity as something people do for one another to solidarity as something institutions are required to demonstrate.
The Baobab offers a different model. Under its shade, elders did not legislate wisdom into existence. They gathered, generation after generation, and the tree held what no single sitting could hold alone — not through enforcement, but through accumulation. Every conversation added to what the tree already knew. Every generation inherited more than it could have discovered on its own.
This is what I mean by the spiritual and intergenerational dimension that I think remains underrepresented in our current principles. Solidarity, in many African traditions, is not only a horizontal relationship between contemporaries between funders and grantees, between Global North and Global South institutions, between researchers and the communities they study. It is also vertical. It reaches backward to ancestors and forward to descendants. It asks not only "what do I owe the person beside me" but "what do I owe the ones who came before, and the ones not yet born." A funding mechanism can be redesigned in a fiscal year. A spiritual obligation to one's lineage operates on a different timescale entirely, and I think our principles are stronger when they can hold both.
I do not say this to romanticise tradition or to suggest that ancestral obligation can substitute for structural reform. The funders and policymakers in this project's workshops are right that clarity, accountability, and institutional mechanism matter — goodwill alone has never been sufficient. But I want to offer a caution alongside that work: institutionalisation without relational memory risks producing exactly the kind of solidarity that looks complete on paper and feels hollow in practice. The Ujamaa lesson is that we can build the structure and still lose the spirit it was meant to hold.
Perhaps what we need is not a choice between the institutional and the relational, but a discipline of returning regularly and deliberately to the tree. Building the frameworks our field needs, yes. But also remembering, as every generation that has gathered under a Baobab has had to remember, that no single person, no single institution, and no single set of principles can embrace the whole of what solidarity asks of us. We hold it together, or we do not hold it at all.