Medicinal plants of the mountain region of kahuzi-biega in the democratic republic of congo :uses, accessibility and consensus among traditional therapists

For ethnobotanists, aspects such as the influence of a plant's accessibility on its frequency of use, consensus among traditional therapists over the relationships between plants and diseases and the degree of fidelity to a plant for a given category of ailments are essential to assess a medicinal tradition, but difficult to interpret. We explored these aspects through a study based on semi-structured interviews with 88 traditional therapists from the Batwa, Havu, Shi and Tembo communities near the montane forests of the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, in South Kivu Province in eastern DRC. Our survey showed that 77 plant species are used to treat pathologies grouped into 18 categories of ailments, the most frequent being digestive disorders and infections. Leaves and bark are the parts most frequently used, usually in recipes involving a single plant and mainly prepared as aqueous solutions. Although there is a positive correlation between the accessibility of plants and the frequency of their use (H = 17.64; p < 0.001), some less accessible forest plants have very high use frequencies. Consensus between traditional therapists is high overall, especially for musculo-skeletal disorders (= 0.83) and infections (= 0.80). Although the degree of fidelity to a plant for a given category of ailments is low overall, it is always high for at least one plant in all categories. Our results, although exploratory, suggest that certain medicinal traditions are well rooted in the region's local communities. This assumes a good local knowledge of medicinal plants, intergenerational transmission of that knowledge and a degree of cooperation between traditional therapists. Further studies are needed to assess these different aspects with greater precision.SCOPUS: ar.j