About Us
Health Plants of Africa
Natural wellbeing for the world - Prosperity for Africa
"Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing ...Ezekiel 47:12
Why health plants?
Plants are fundamental not only for basic nutrition but also for general health.
“The use of plants and plant derivatives for preventing and treating human diseases and afflictions is as old as civilisation itself. History shows that every culture on Earth has benefited from the medicinal virtues of plants. Indeed plants are still the backbone of most medical and health care systems in place around the world.
Western medicine depends on plants for the active compounds in many of today’s most successful and widely used drugs. [1]”
But while the global population suffers from increasing ill-health and disease, many of the health properties of a wide variety of plants remain largely unknown to the global population. Meanwhile we discover that the products and practices of medical science and pharmaceutical companies don’t have all the answers to our health challenges.
Why Africa?
Several sub-Saharan African countries have an optimal climate and soil for the growth of a multitude of plants with health properties, some now well-known such as Avocado, Aloe Vera, Chia, but a large number known only to local village communities, and largely unknown in the world at large.
Understanding and making use of the healing properties of plants is an ancient African tradition. These have historically been largely disregarded by developed country medical science partly because that they have been associated with dark spiritual practices (aka witchcraft) for the personal gain of the practitioner. While these two aspects clearly have been connected, there is no reason why they need to be. And the world has effectively “thrown out the baby with the bathwater”. We can throw out the unhealthy dark spiritual “bathwater”, but keep the “baby” which is a huge variety of plants, many not well known, with health benefits.
Brief history of why this website
Founder, Jamie MacAlister lived in Uganda from 2017 with his wife, Jenny, where he helped set up the School of Business & Applied Technology (SoBAT) at Clarke International University (CIU), Uganda.
Clarke International University (CIU) was born in 2007 as International Health Science University, set up by the International Medical Group (IMG), Uganda’s largest private health organisation. In 2017, CIU set up the SoBAT faculty with a vision to develop Uganda’s capabilities to develop technology and business skills for export-oriented businesses.
Uganda is an equatorial country at high altitude, surrounded by fresh water and sandwiched between the eastern and western African rift valleys. This makes it fertile land, and an ideal place for a wide variety of different plants and trees to grow. Being on the equator means that the temperature stays fairly consistent throughout the year, between 15 degrees C and 30 degrees C and never drops to temperatures which can be the cause of failure for many plants. Combining this with altitude and the prevalence of water from inland lakes, most notably Lake Victoria, the second largest lake by surface area in the world, means that there is plenty of rain in much of the country. The growing season repeats twice in the year: two wet seasons and two dry seasons per year.
Finally, Uganda is the place where the longest river in the world, the Nile, starts from Lake Victoria the main part of its flow northwards, throughout northern Uganda, and beyond across the Sahara desert, eventually emptying into the Mediterranean Sea. The area of the “source” at Lake Victoria, Jinja, is one of the highly fertile areas in Africa.
Jamie's initial discussions about the idea behind this website started with friends, Nick & Cheryl, who run a large tree farm in Jinja, and a social enterprise "Our Trees Our Future" with a vision to plant a billion trees in sub-Saharan Africa.
We draw our inspiration from a verse in the Bible which describes trees growing along the side of a great river like the Nile.
"Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing ...Ezekiel 47:12
What does this website do?
This website offers visitors an easy way to explore the health properties of different plants, their constituent parts(fruits, leaves, roots, bark) and their associated "treatments".
First to say that the plants listed on this website are grown in many different parts of the world, and the information on this website is probably relevant wherever the plants can be found.
However, our starting point in this venture is plants that we know grow in Africa and our mission as expressed by our strapline “Natural wellbeing for the world – Prosperity for Africa”, is to support the economies of Africa, which still host some of the lowest-income countries in the world, by promoting not only its natural resources but also its growing expertise in the area of health and technology.
References
1. Dharani, N & Yenesew, A (2010) “Medicinal Plants of East Africa – An Illustrated Guide” Drongo Editing & Publishing
2. Hirt, H & M’Pia,B (2008) “Natural Medicine in the Tropics 1 - Foundation text” Marianum Press
3. Marcu, M (2005) “Miracle Tree” Sound Concepts