Volume 143, Issue 3, 11 October 2012, Pages 840–850
In search of the perfect aphrodisiac: Parallel use of bitter tonics in West Africa and the Caribbean
Abstract
Ethnopharmacological relevance
Enslaved
Africans in the Americas had to reinvent their medicinal flora in an
unknown environment by adhering to plants that came with them, learning
from Amerindians and Europeans, using their Old World knowledge and
trial and error to find substitutes for their homeland herbs. This
process has left few written records, and little research has been done
on transatlantic plant use. We used the composition of aphrodisiac
mixtures across the black Atlantic to discuss the adaptation of herbal
medicine by African diaspora in the New World. Since Africans are
considered relatively recent migrants in America, their healing flora is
often said to consist largely of pantropical and cultivated species,
with few native trees. Therefore, we expected Caribbean recipes to be
dominated by taxa that occur in both continents, poor in forest species
and rich in weeds and domesticated exotics.
Materials and methods
To
test this hypothesis, we compared botanical ingredients of 35 African
and 117 Caribbean mixtures, using Dentrended Correspondence Analysis,
Cluster Analysis, Indicator Species Analysis and Mann–Whitney U tests.
Results
Very
few of the 324 ingredients were used on both continents. A slightly
higher overlap on generic and family level showed that Africans did
search for taxa that were botanically related to African ones, but
largely selected new, unrelated plants with similar taste, appearance or
pharmacological properties. Recipes from the forested Guianas contained
more New World, wild and forest species than those from deforested
Caribbean islands. We recorded few ‘transatlantic genera’ and weeds
never dominated the recipes, so we rejected our hypothesis.
Conclusions
The
popularity of bitter tonics in the Caribbean suggests an African
heritage, but the inclusion of Neotropical species and vernacular names
of plants and mixtures indicate Amerindian and European influence. We
show that enslaved Africans have reinvented their herbal medicine
wherever they were put to work, using the knowledge and flora that was
available to them with great creativity and flexibility. Our analysis
reveals how transplanted humans adapt their traditional medical
practises in a new environment.
Graphical abstract
Keywords
- Ethnobotany;
- Erectile dysfunction;
- Plant mixtures;
- Slave trade;
- Traditional medicine Africa
- Corresponding author. Tel.:
+31 71 5273585; fax: +31 71 5273511.
