Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

I’ve only lately begun to sip from the firehose that is Twitter. Many things about it puzzle me, but not unduly. One thing I do find odd is the feed called Prota4U. It’s an arm of The Prota Foundation, and Prota stands for Plant Resources of Tropical Africa. The Foundation’s aims are entirely laudable:

It intends to synthesize the dispersed information on the approximately 7,000 useful plants of Tropical Africa and to provide wide access to the information through Webdatabases, Books, CD-Rom’s and Special Products. … The objectives are to bring the published information, now accessible to the resourceful happy few, into the public domain. This will contribute to greater awareness and sustained use of the ‘world heritage of African useful plants’, with due respect for traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights.

One could quibble with the details, but the overall idea is sound. Prota4U — groovy to the nth degree — publishes an endless stream of tweets, roughly one every three minutes while it is awake, that don’t link to anything, often don’t say much, and frequently have nothing to do with useful plants of Tropical Africa. This particular rant was occasioned by this tweet:

Avena sativa — It has a floury texture and a mild, somewhat creamy flavour.

Fascinating. Just the thing to nibble on with my breakfast oats. But so what? And the tweet doesn’t go anywhere either. Annoyed, I Googled that descriptive phrase. And found it in two places. One, Plants for a Future’s database entry for Avena ludoviciana. The other, this tweet from Prota4U:

Avena byzantina – It has a floury texture and a mild, somewhat creamy flavour.

That too goes nowhere.

Of course in the greater scheme of things what Prota does with its information is no concern of mine, and I could simply stop following. I’m just totally puzzled by what it thinks it is doing. Someone, anyone, put me out of my misery, please.