Handbook of Medicinal Plants of African

Contents: 1. Cultivation of medicinal plants in African region. 2. Medicinal plants of Kenya. 3. Medicinal plants of Ethiopia.

Traditional Medicine, as a major African socio-cultural heritage, obviously in existence for several hundreds of years, was once believed to be primitive and wrongly challenged with animosity, especially by foreign religions, dating back to the colonial days in Africa and subsequently by the conventional or orthodox medical practitioners. However today, Traditional Medicine has been brought into focus for meeting the goals of a wider coverage of primary health care delivery, not only in Africa but also, to various extents, in all countries of the world. Traditional Medicine is the first-choice healthcare treatment for at least 80% of Africans who suffer from high fever and other common ailments. Plants, which have formed the basis of sophisticated traditional medicine system for thousands of years, were originally instrumental to early pharmaceutical drug discovery and industry. Hence, the history of drug discovery and even drug chemistry is inexorably bound to the plant kingdom and the process of deriving drugs from plant sources is certainly not new.