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| Commelina sp, Mongo wa Mono, March 2011 |
It's surprisingly easy these days to find information on the medicinal use of plants (there's a great list for the Samuru people
here, for example), such as the
Commiphora uses we covered last week, but many plants have cultural significance beyond the simple medicinal uses and it's often much harder to find information about these uses. One of the
10 things I like to get people talking about when there are no lions is all to do with
people, and talking about cultural uses of plants is often quite interesting. I was seriously impressed when one of the guides on our training course in November said that in 'circumcisim school' he'd had to learn to identify about 200 plant species and know their cultural and medicinal uses, so this knowledge is still very much alive out here - though he did confess to having forgotten many (before going on to hive an example of a rather harrowing use for one of the
Euphorbia species that really isn't suitable for polite company...). So it's rather surprising how shy people can be about sharing the information, perhaps thinking it's not interesting, or somehow backward.
