Beverly Oliver
Wherever natural healer Dr Sebi spoke or lectured, his habitual recitation of a particular Bible verse accompanied him. It served, as a testament to his long-time teachings that plants are ideally man’s food and medicine: Herbs are for the healing of the nation.
To demonstrate the validity of the verse and his own adherence to herbs and a plant-based diet, he often dropped his slim, limber body—kneecaps first—to the floor of the lecture hall or church. Concrete or wood, it didn’t matter. He rose with the ease of a ballet dancer. Mind you, even in his late 70s he did this, courtesy of his sea moss and bladderwrack herbal compounds. The book Sojourn to Honduras Sojourn to Healing (2010) shows just how deep the affair is between Dr Sebi and plants.
I watched him leap from his truck, leave it idling in traffic, and dash his limber legs to an open field to inspect a plant that caught his eye. He examined his diamond-in-the-rough in what appeared to be widespread patches of weeds. Drivers in traffic must have been familiar with his hyperactivity. No car or truck horns blew at Dr Sebi’s sitting vehicle and passengers-in-waiting.
I met Dr Sebi in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s, when I produced public affairs features for radio station WHUR, 96.3 FM and shortly after his transition from Alfredo Bowman the steam engineer at Martin Luther King Hospital in Los Angeles to Dr Sebi the herbalist.
When I saw him for the first time at the Community Warehouse in D.C., Dr Sebi stood tall, slender, and statuesque, much like a Maasai tribesman in East Africa. When he spoke, English words flowed clearly and robustly from his Yul Brynner-sounding voice even though his first language was Spanish. And his persona, as I recall, resembled Mr Brynner’s character, the King of Siam, in the film The King and I.
Words about natural and unnatural foods and the effects of both on the body pulsated throughout the room. No microphone or bullhorn needed when Dr Sebi spoke. Some listeners in his audience who whispered sighs of doubt sat surprised by Dr Sebi’s lecture, especially his comment that carrots are hybrids (the orange one is).
Others willingly and intently received the message. I was one of them, and because I felt an even larger audience should hear Dr Sebi’s perspective on alkaline herbs, health and nutrition, I invited him to WHUR to speak in a four-part radio series on herbs and natural healing. He came.
We recorded a session a little over an hour and as I think back, it was a difficult edit. You just can’t put it all in the program, no matter how informative. The final cut yielded four 10-minute shows with theme music by Lonnie Liston Smith, Colors of the Rainbow. WHUR broadcast the series in the newsmagazine The Sunday Digest.
Subsequently, throughout the mid-80s I travelled to New York City to hear Dr Sebi’s lectures. Twenty years would pass before Dr Sebi and I reconnected. That happened in 2005 in Los Angeles, two years after I moved to the West Coast to continue my career as a writer and creative artist.
Perhaps it’s fate that detoured my pursuit of the dramatic arts and connected me, as a writer, to herbalist and natural healer Dr Sebi. The past 16 years of my life have been wrapped in his expertise. I’m all the better for it, grateful that I learned new food ways and health care tips. I am grateful for the opportunity, for the past 16 years, to share them with the public, and now here at TCN.video. When Dr Sebi died in 2016, I wrote a blog article https://www.sojourntohonduras.com/blog that asked the question “Who will pick up his torch and continue his work?” It hadn’t crossed my mind then that I was the torchbearer, one of them anyway, living the answer for the past 16 years.
