Traditional healers' practices for collecting and identifying medicinal plants in the Lubumbashi region, Haut-Katanga, DR Congo

Medicinal plants identification during harvesting is a key element for the safety of patients using phytotherapy (Williamson et al., 2015; Yamani et al., 2015). This study aims to understand what traditional healers do to identify medicinal plants, both those they collect and those that are harvested by other people. A survey was conducted in Lubumbashi, by semi-structured interview, among 114 traditional practitioners among whom 23 were legally recognized and 91 were identified by a snowball survey (Nzuki et al., 2013). To identify plants to be harvested, most of the surveyed traditional healers observe morphology of whole plant (50%), shape, color and odor of leaves (40%) or roots (13%) and some other organoleptic elements. To differentiate similar species, most refer to odor (23%), color of leaves, roots or flowers. Traditional healers who sometimes use plants harvested by other people (30%) also refer to color (82%), odor (74%) or flavor, for identifying drugs. A large part of the surveyed traditional healers (48%) perform ceremonies during the harvest of medicinal plants. These ceremonies consist of depositing money or white kaolin at the foot of the plant, pronouncing incantatory words or being naked. The main reasons given for these ceremonies were to give the therapeutic power to the plant (62%) and/or buy it from nature (22%). Traditional healers mainly refer to morphological and organoleptic characteristics to identify plants and vegetables material they collect in the wild and those brought in by the harvesters. Reliability of these crude identification practices should be tested, especially for easy-to-confuse plants.