Long before the first tourists arrived at Bwindi to see mountain gorillas, long before the Uganda Wildlife Authority erected gates and trained rangers, and long before conservation scientists began documenting the forest’s biodiversity, the people of the Kigezi highlands were using Bwindi’s plants as medicine. The forest contains several hundred plant species with documented medicinal properties, many of them known only within the traditional knowledge systems of the Bakiga and Batwa peoples who have lived alongside this ecosystem for generations. This ethnobotanical knowledge is as much a part of Bwindi’s heritage as the gorillas themselves.
For gorilla trekking visitors, medicinal plants are a dimension of the forest rarely highlighted during the one-hour gorilla encounter but consistently present on the approach trek. Ranger guides who have grown up in the communities surrounding Bwindi carry substantial botanical knowledge, and many are happy to point out and explain medicinal plants along the trail when asked. This guide introduces the concept of forest medicine in Bwindi, some of the most important plant species, and the conservation questions that traditional plant use raises in a protected forest context.
The Batwa and traditional forest knowledge
The Batwa are the indigenous forest people who inhabited Bwindi Impenetrable Forest before it was gazetted as a national park in 1991. As hunter-gatherers who lived inside the forest — not at its edge — the Batwa developed an intimate knowledge of forest resources over millennia. Their understanding of which plants heal, which poison, which attract game, and which provide materials for tools and shelter was a survival technology no less sophisticated than the agricultural knowledge of settled farming communities.
The eviction of the Batwa from the forest when the national park was established severed the connection between this community and the living landscape where their knowledge was embedded. Much traditional botanical knowledge exists in the memories of older Batwa community members who learned from the forest directly; younger generations grew up outside the forest and have limited access to the ecosystem where the knowledge was contextually meaningful. Ethnobotanists have worked with Batwa communities to document this knowledge, but the effort is a race against time as elder knowledge holders age.
Batwa-led cultural walks near Bwindi — available from several community enterprises around the park gates — include demonstrations of traditional plant use as part of the forest skills the guides share. These walks provide both an income opportunity for Batwa guides and a vehicle for preserving and transmitting traditional knowledge to both community members and visitors. The botanical component of these walks is one of their most intellectually rich elements.
Important medicinal plants of the Bwindi ecosystem
Prunus africana, known as African cherry or red stinkwood, is one of the most commercially significant medicinal trees in the Bwindi forest and across East and Central Africa. Its bark contains compounds — particularly beta-sitosterol and phytosterols — that have been shown in clinical studies to reduce symptoms of benign prostatic hyperplasia (prostate enlargement). The bark is harvested both for traditional medicine and for export to European pharmaceutical manufacturers who produce Pygeum-based prostate health supplements. Unsustainable commercial bark harvesting has severely reduced Prunus africana populations in some parts of its range; in Bwindi, the tree is protected within the national park, making the forest a refuge for a species under pressure outside park boundaries.
Warburgia ugandensis, the East African greenheart or pepper-bark tree, has one of the longest histories of documented medicinal use across the region. The bark contains compounds with antimicrobial, antifungal, and anti-inflammatory properties. Traditional applications include treatment of respiratory infections, skin conditions, and stomach ailments. The Batwa used it to treat fever and cough. Clinical pharmacological research has validated several of the traditional applications, finding that bark extracts inhibit growth of pathogenic bacteria and fungi in laboratory settings.
Ocotea usambarensis — Usambara camphor — is a forest tree used across East Africa for its aromatic properties. The leaves and bark contain camphor-related compounds that have antimicrobial and analgesic properties. Traditional uses include treatment of headache, fever, and muscle pain through both internal preparations and topical application of heated leaves. The tree produces a beautiful, fragrant timber that has historically been subject to unsustainable exploitation; within Bwindi’s protected area, mature specimens survive that have largely disappeared from unprotected forests in the region.
Plants used for wound treatment and pain relief
Tropical forests have historically been a primary source of wound-treatment and pain-relief plants for communities without access to pharmaceutical medicine. Bwindi’s forest contains several species used for these purposes. Bidens pilosa — commonly known as black-jack or beggarticks — is found at the forest edge and in disturbed areas around Bwindi. Traditional applications across Africa include poultices from crushed leaves applied to wounds, cuts, and skin infections. Scientific analysis has confirmed antimicrobial properties in the leaf extracts.
Leaves of several Acanthus species — the large, architecturally dramatic plants with deeply lobed leaves that line many Bwindi trails — are used in traditional medicine for pain relief and as general anti-inflammatory treatments. The same Acanthus species also provides one of the mountain gorilla’s favourite food plants; their leaves are consumed regularly by gorilla groups in Bwindi. The convergence of gorilla food plants and human medicinal plants is not coincidental — both gorillas and people are drawn to plant species with high bioactive compound concentrations, though for different purposes and with different applications.
Plants for malaria treatment and fever reduction
Malaria has been endemic in the Great Lakes region for millennia, and traditional medicine systems developed plant-based treatments long before quinine was identified in South American Cinchona bark. In Bwindi’s surrounding communities, several plant species are used for fever reduction and malaria-like symptoms. Vernonia amygdalina — bitter leaf — is widely used across sub-Saharan Africa for this purpose. The bitter compounds it contains (sesquiterpene lactones and steroid glycosides) have demonstrated antiparasitic activity against Plasmodium falciparum in laboratory studies.
Artemisia species have attracted international research attention since the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2015 for the development of artemisinin — derived from Artemisia annua — as a malaria treatment. Several Artemisia species grow in Uganda, including in highland areas around Bwindi. Community health workers in some areas around the park use Artemisia-based teas as part of malaria management protocols. The relationship between traditional plant knowledge, community health practice, and pharmaceutical research represents one of the most direct examples of traditional medicine contributing to global medicine.
Plants that gorillas self-medicate with
One of the most fascinating intersections between plant pharmacology and gorilla behaviour is the phenomenon of zoopharmacognosy — the use of plants by non-human animals for medicinal purposes. Research on mountain gorillas in Bwindi has documented behaviours consistent with self-medication. Gorillas occasionally consume plants that are bitter, astringent, or otherwise unpalatable in normal feeding contexts, in ways and quantities that suggest purposeful ingestion rather than accidental inclusion in normal foraging.
Specific examples include the consumption of Vernonia amygdalina leaves at specific times of year — particularly before dawn, when stomach contents are lowest — which corresponds with patterns documented in chimpanzees at Gombe where bitter-leaf consumption is associated with reduction of intestinal parasite loads. The leaves appear to function as an antiparasitic agent that gorillas access deliberately. This behaviour has been documented in several habituated Bwindi groups and is consistent with pharmacological analyses of the plant’s active compounds.
Conservation and controlled access to medicinal plants
The gazetting of Bwindi as a national park created immediate tension with communities that had used forest resources including medicinal plants for generations. Uganda Wildlife Authority’s response evolved over time from strict prohibition of all forest resource use toward a nuanced system that acknowledges some traditional plant collection rights while preventing commercial exploitation. Specific community groups, particularly Batwa community members, have negotiated limited access rights for cultural and medicinal plant collection within buffer zones adjacent to the park core.
The conservation of medicinal plant knowledge is now recognised as a biodiversity concern in its own right. When traditional knowledge about plant uses disappears with the passing of elder knowledge holders, the information is lost even if the plant species itself survives. Ethnobotanical documentation projects — recording plant names, preparation methods, applications, and dosage knowledge in community members’ own languages — are part of the conservation work happening in and around Bwindi. Some lodge operators partner with community ethnobotany projects and include botanical walks with knowledgeable local guides as part of their guest activity programmes.
The forest pharmacy: what visitors can learn
A gorilla trek that includes attention to medicinal plants produces a richer understanding of why the forest matters to the communities that live alongside it. The gorillas are one reason to protect Bwindi; the plants that generations of people have depended on for health care are another. These reasons are not separate — they reinforce each other. A forest protected for its gorillas also protects its fig trees, its Prunus africana, its Vernonia, its Ocotea, and the entire botanical pharmacy that serves both wildlife and people.
Asking your ranger guide to point out medicinal plants during the approach trek costs nothing and enriches the day considerably. Guides who have grown up in Bakiga or Batwa communities typically know dozens of species by local name and use, even if their formal botanical knowledge of Latin names and pharmacological mechanisms is limited. The local knowledge is the valuable thing — the framework within which the forest is understood as a living system that provides, not merely a landscape that contains.
