Long-Standing Herbal Medicinal Traditions from the Prehistoric Harar Town and the Surroundings, Eastern Ethiopia

Abstract

Ethiopia is home to a remarkable diversity of more than 1000 species of medicinal plants. The Harari and Oromo communities living in the prehistoric town of Harar and the surroundings have long history of knowledge and practices of treating human and livestock ailments using medicinal plants. However, this has remained little or no empirically studied. Semi-structured interviews, discussions and guided field walks were used to collect data from 80 randomly and systematically selected informants among who 16 were traditional herbalists. Relative Frequency of Citation (RFC), Cultural Importance Index (CII), Informant Consensus Factor (ICF), Use Diversity (UD), Non-parametric Kruskal Wallis, and Wilcoxon tests were conducted using R software version 3.3.4. A total of 142 wild and cultivated traditional medicinal plant species belonging to 124 genera and 57 families of which leaves are favoured by traditional healers were identified as herbs. Concoction, or filtering, and infusion, or boiling, were the most practiced methods of remedial preparations of the wild and cultivated medicinal plants, respectively. The highest ICF value was recorded for treating toothache and mouth infections (0.93) followed by gastritis, heartburn/pyrosis (0.84). The most culturally important and the highest diversity index were found to be Ocimum lamiifolium and Allium sativum. There were valuable and diversified wild and cultivated ethno-medicinal plant species associated with indigenous knowledge. The reputability of the indigenous knowledge should be corroborated with phytochemical and pharmacological analyses. Moreover, the status of conservation of these plant species and associated ethnomedicinal knowledge needs further investigations.