FOREWORD

Networking and the sharing of infor-mation in a community of people has taken place for longer in Africa than anywhere else, for Africa is the cradle of humankind. It is the continent where people first learnt botanical skills and communicated them: information on edible, medicinal or toxic plants, where they occurred and when they could be collected. Survival of these communities depended on sharing the information and skills developed by the most insightful, innovative experimenters and those with healing skills. Those who did not communicate, share, store and recall information on key resources, did not.

New technology and the written word have given us a greater capacity to communicate, store and share information than ever before. E-mail, for example, has given us the means to regularly communicate with western Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and each other for minimal cost between South Africa, Morocco and France. Libraries, including the AETFAT library, grow day-by-day, bursting at the seams with information. Computers give us the means to retrieve this information more efficiently than ever before. Despite these apparent advantages, we have, in many ways, lost some aspects of this community.

Information on potential funding sources or local research projects is sometimes jealously guarded, rather than shared - even within the same institution. A lack of awareness of the extensive literature from francophone Africa, or to a lesser extent, an awareness of anglophone African ethnobotanical literature, is a further example of the rifts between colleagues with a common interest on the same continent. Co-ordinated regional programmes developed between colleagues in geographic regions on common themes are rare, despite the many advantages that can come from comparisons, shared reference materials and common methodologies.

We need to bridge these gaps, and our Network is one way of achieving this. A community of African ethnobotanists will be far stronger than each of us individually. More than ever before, we have the means to develop collegiality, community and a common vision on where the ethnobotanical research field needs to go, and how it can benefit Africa's people and environment.

This register of Network participants and a review of literature from eastern and southern Africa is intended to be a first step in the process. As a long-standing African botanical organization that bridges the divide between francophone and anglophone Africa, AETFAT is a truly appropriate home for this network. We hope that the next step, at the next AETFAT meeting, will be a review of ethnobotanical studies from francophone Africa, so that these may be combined, updated, shared and used.

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