Recipes and Treatments in Traditional Herbal Medicine to the Kaamba Community of Madingou, Congo

Aims: Studying the recipes in popular use of medicinal plants by Kaamba community settled in savannah and their analyses.

Study Design: It highlights the socio-cultural basis of this society through phytotherapeutic data.

Place and Duration of Study: The ethnobotanical study was carried out in Madingou (in the South Congo) within the Kaamba community. Data obtained from direct interviews conducted in August and September 2015 in Madingou.

Methodology: For each health problem cited, the plant name, the used parts, the modes of preparation and administration of recipes were recorded. The plants were identified in the herbarium (IEC), Brazzaville. The relative importance of the plants was established based on the number of citations and events occurred in the recipes. There are 32 informants, including 22 women, age range being 15 to 70 years, delivered their knowledge unconditionally.

Results: This survey concerns 80 vascular plants harvested in the savannah, along the rods, and around the houses. The analysis shows that 70 medicinal recipes in simple and complex. These potions cover 43 diseases and symptoms corresponding to 11 spheres of diseases and organs. The decoction (44.4%) is the dominant and de facto pharmaceutical form (65.3%). The most cited diseases have a prevalence ranging from 31.3 to 68.8% and are related to childhood.

Conclusion: Therapeutic knowledge is very immense in primary health care, but this potential is eroded by several factors, such as the anarchic urbanization of the environment favouring the depletion of taxa by the destruction of habitats and the rural exodus responsible for the exile of young people in search of a better well-being.