Banana (5 page)

A
CCORDING TO AFRICAN LORE,
Kintu—not Adam—was the first human being. He lived alone, on the shores of Lake Victoria, watched over by Gulu, the creator of the universe. Gulu allowed his daughter, Nambi, to marry the lonely herder. But as she set out for her new, mortal life, her angry and protective brother also found his way to earth. It is his malicious presence, as the story goes, that turned the world from a paradise into a place of conflict, pain, and sickness. But there was a remedy. Kintu and Nambi would carry a banana root on their travels, and though the fruit couldn't end all of humanity's suffering, it did well enough.

The Eden of Kintu and Nambi is easy to locate. It was called, both in legend and through much of modern history, Buganda. Today, it is Uganda, the nation that relies more immediately on bananas than anywhere else. The Ugandan fruit—known as the East African Highland banana and also eaten in the circle of nations surrounding Lake Victoria—is more than just something to eat. Songs are written about it, but they are not commercial jingles; they're more like historic documents, chronicling birth, death, and renewal. Bananas are sometimes used as money. A farmer might take out a small loan and pay it back with bananas; the harvested crop might then work its way through a network of middlemen—usually transported from village to village by bicycle—the same way a dollar bill goes from your pocket to the till at your grocery store and on to another shopper as change. There's a special breed of banana that's consumed when twins are born. Another type marks the passing of a relative. Families are guaranteed prosperity if a mother buries her afterbirth under a banana tree. There's a banana that, when eaten, helps return a straying spouse. A breed called the Mpologoma banana represents the lion and is said to improve male potency.

At the center of it all is
matoke
, the word that is used interchangeably, in many parts of this region, for both “food” and “banana.” For Ugandans, nothing says “welcome home” more than this comfort food, served on a banana-leaf saucer. It is the macaroni and cheese of the highlands. The dish is made by mashing green plantains, wrapping them in their leaves, and roasting them over a smoky, open fire. A proper
matoke
will be accompanied by
tonto
, a banana beer, and if it is a special occasion—the arrival of a guest from far away will do—the meal might conclude with toasts made over glasses of
waragi
, a kind of gin distilled from the fruit.

A trip across Africa's middle—from Ghana and Cameroon on the Atlantic, east to Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi in the mountainous regions surrounding Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Kivu—is a trip across what most consider the world's most important bananalands. Uganda grows 11 million tons of the fruit each year. That counts out to more than 500 pounds per person annually—twenty times more than we peel and eat in the United States. In remote villages, where there are few other crops, banana consumption stretches toward the impossible: as much as 970 pounds each year for each person. Ugandan bananas—with names like Monga Love, Mbouroukou, and Ngomba Liko—are grown green and are never exported much farther than regional markets. All are about double the size of our Cavendish and even cooked taste less sweet than starchy, somewhat like a potato. Surveying Ugandan bananas is a nightmare. There can be up to a hundred names for a single variety, making identification more like doing a crossword puzzle than science. In some communities, a banana tree can be found in front of every household, grown for generations, feeding infants and grandparents: a century of nutrition in just a few square feet.

This banana bounty makes Ugandans slightly better off than their neighbors. The country is having some success in fighting the HIV epidemic that plagues much of Africa. Uganda is a democracy. It isn't a paradise—refugees from Rwanda and Burundi are crowded into camps on the country's borders; an estimated 1.5 million orphans live in them. Uganda's cities are impoverished, and basic services are lacking. But one problem the nation has rarely faced is hunger.

“Uganda doesn't endure famine, and to a great extent that is because of bananas,” said Joseph Mukiibi, the former director of the Ugandan National Agricultural Research Organization, at the 2003 opening of a banana-research lab in that country. If famine and war are cyclical counterparts—as a 1991 International Red Cross report determined—then the Highland banana is more than just a nutritious or ritual object. On a scale thousands of times greater than in the Philippines, the African banana is a peacekeeper.

Though other African nations dependent on bananas aren't doing as well as Uganda, the crop is cautiously considered a success story across a continent that desperately needs good news. And while we don't eat African bananas in the United States, and most of us are barely aware they exist, we'd surely come to know the consequences of their loss.

MOST AFRICAN BANANAS
are rarely sold more than fifty miles from where they're grown; the majority of the fruit is consumed just a few feet from the place it is picked. Ugandan bananas are not bagged or boxed; they are not treated with chemicals, held in atmosphere-controlled ripening rooms, or affixed with cute stickers. But as local as they are, it could also be said that they are among the best-traveled fruit on earth. Bananas reached Africa from the Pacific over a journey of thousands of years. They arrived in four waves, according to current (though sometimes disputed) scientific thinking. The bananas of Uganda and the surrounding countries grow at altitudes of about three thousand feet, and are restricted to a relatively small area: ultraconcentrated biodiversity. The continent's second most important banana is the African plantain. It is a different-looking, different-tasting—but just as important—kind of fruit. If you were to look at a map of Africa, plantain territory would appear like a river flowing westward along the equator, with an island at the center, where Highland bananas grow; one kind exists isolated and surrounded by another.

The theorized reason for this is that the banana settled twice on East African shores. Both times, it came across the Indian Ocean (the best example of one of those long-distance bananas is the Tanzanian
huti
, the fruit that shares a name with the South Pacific varieties). The plantain came first, probably about three thousand years ago, carried from the coasts and into the rain forests by tribes transitioning from hunting and gathering to more permanent settlements. The Highland fruit came a millennium later. Scientists speculate that as the climate changed and Africa got dryer, the two types of bananas eventually became crops distinct to their particular regions. The rain forest plantains spread through the wetter locales across the continent's width, while the later-appearing fruit became a mainstay in the geographically isolated, less-humid areas. Plantains kept moving. The bananas of Uganda and its neighboring countries stayed put.

THE JOURNEY OF THE BANANA
from Asia to Africa began with hundreds of varieties of the fruit. Over thousands of years of agricultural trial and error, that number narrowed to no more than a dozen or two. By the time bananas reached Africa, the fruit's genetic pool was in the single digits. For two millennia, the African plantain and the East African Highland banana were the only varieties of the fruit on the continent. If things had stayed that way, there's a good chance our cereal bowls would have remained forever unadorned. But at some point during the time Europe was experiencing the Dark Ages, a third kind of banana appeared in Africa. While the continent's first two varieties had grown on their own long enough to have gained genetic distinction from fruit found elsewhere, the new bananas were similar to ones found along the Indian Ocean's coastline, from the Middle East to Malaysia.
*
Some of this type might have been brought by sea, while others likely took a land route, carried by traders. Many fruit arrived as a byproduct of the slave trade between Arab nations and North Africa, which lasted from about the seventh century AD until just before World War I. In some places, the banana even became a luxury good. An Iraqi poet named Ali al-Masudi—writing during the tenth century—included the fruit in his recipe for
kataif
, a confection made from almonds, honey, and bananas. (The sweet is still served today, though the formula doesn't commonly include bananas.)

This third type of banana is the one that was ultimately noticed, and actively consumed, by Europeans, who would eventually bring them to the African colonies they were establishing—Guinea and Senegal, on the Atlantic Coast, and the Canary Islands—and ultimately (along with 20 million African slaves) across the Atlantic. The technical term for fruit from that third wave is IOC, or “Indian Ocean Complex” bananas. We have a different name for them, one that the traders from the Middle East brought with them as the fruit moved from continent to continent. Linneaus borrowed an Arabic word,
mauz
, and adapted it as
Musa
, the taxonomic genus for the fruit. But to the average person, another Arabic word is more familiar and has become the better-used term for our favorite fruit. That word translates in English as “finger.” The word is
banan
.

B
Y THE TIME THEY REACHED THEIR FINAL
STOP, our hemisphere, the number of bananas making the round-the-world journey had narrowed. Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the fifteenth century, and depending on which theory you subscribe to, the number of bananas that grew in all of what would become the Americas was none—or one.

The chain of islands that stretches east from the tip of the Malay Peninsula ends 2,300 miles from the coast of South America. The banana of Rapa Nui—we call it Easter Island—is the
maika
. Samoans and Hawaiians use similar words for the fruit. If that banana arrived on our continent, then it would contradict one of the most hardened bits of conventional thinking about the fruit: that it was first brought here by Europeans. It would mean our bananas, rather than coming from one place, arrived—like the winner of a long race in which every other runner has dropped out—in the same kinds of waves that carried the fruit around the rest of the world.

There's no physical or fossil proof that the banana grew on the Pacific shores of either South or Central America before the years following the first voyage of Christopher Columbus. Without such evidence the case becomes circumstantial. But it is still strong. The argument, first posited by historian Robert Langdon, begins with what we know: Almost everywhere Polynesian sailors went, they brought bananas. So it is a reasonable assumption that if they came to this hemisphere, they brought the fruit along with them. Next would be to show that people from the Pacific arrived on American shores. In the 1970s, archaeologists found a cache of artifacts near Ecuador's Bahía de Caráquez, which is today a popular beach resort a hundred miles north of Puerto Bolívar, the country's busiest banana-shipping center. The objects, estimated to be more than one thousand years old, included pottery, figurines, and personal-care items. Not only were these unlike anything else found in South America, they were nearly identical to articles used in Asia at the same time.

Also interesting to note: If native tribes in that part of South America did grow bananas, there's no trace of it in current language. But those tribes do grow, even today, another crop that Polynesians are known to have carried. In the eastern Pacific, the word for sweet potatoes is
kumara
. Ecuador's Quechua Indians call the root crop
cumar
.

The word used today for the region's cooking bananas,
plátano
or plantain (the term has been adopted worldwide), is almost universally assumed to have originated in the Western hemisphere. Yet, while
plátano
is a Spanish word, it originally had nothing to do with fruit. It was used to describe the sycamore tree. Langdon argues that the Spanish may have encountered a similar-sounding native word for bananas already growing in parts of South America. At least one pre-Columbian term that may indicate so has already been deciphered: Scientists reconstructing a Mayan dialect in the 1940s concluded that a
plátano
sound-alike was, in fact, present during the pre-European period of that culture.

The case in favor of the banana's early presence in North America was further bolstered in 2007. Early in that year, archaeologists working in Chile found fifty prehistoric chicken bones during a dig near the Arauco Peninsula. The site is as close to Easter Island as any point in the Americas and a feasible jump for the exceptionally skilled marine adventurers who settled the Pacific. When DNA was compared to genetic material from prehistoric chicken remains collected in Tonga and Samoa, scientists got a direct match. The time line for travel from Rapa Nui to South America fits perfectly with the patterns of settlement that brought people to the farthest reaches of the South Pacific: Easter Island was settled sometime between eight hundred and one thousand years ago. The Arauco bones date just a little bit later; they're between six hundred and seven hundred years old. But there's little trace of migrating
people
—no human bones, no artifacts other than the Ecuadorian ones that appear to be from Asia—in South America. If Polynesians or Asians came all the way here, where did they go? It turns out that throughout history Pacific wanderers have rarely settled where people already lived. Native tribes have inhabited coastal South America for thousands of years. But the early navigators could have made briefer stays—stays that were never meant to be permanent (the Vikings did the same thing, around the same time, in North America). Whether they planned to take up residence or not, the renewable food resources we're pretty sure they brought, sweet potatoes and egg-laying chickens, would almost certainly have been accompanied by the most reliable long-distance traveler of all.

THEN AGAIN, IF THAT BANANA
didn't
arrive in the Americas, if Polynesians were
not
roasting chickens along the western edge of South America, then the progression of bananas from many in Asia to a good number in the Pacific to a few in Africa only continued to the Americas with the advent of the modern world.

Either way, in 2016 the banana associated with European husbandry will celebrate its five hundredth birthday in our hemisphere. If the from-the-Pacific theory is discounted, those bananas, the ancestors of our plantains, were brought to the Americas by just a single person. Once they arrived, the fruit moved with a velocity that would become a hallmark of the expansion of the New World. It took just decades for the starchy staple to extend across a continent.

“One hears on all sides that this special kind [of fruit] was brought from the Island of the Gran Canaria in the year 1516 by the Reverend Father Friar Tomás de Berlanga of the Order of Predicadores, to this city of Santo Domingo, whence they spread to the other settlements of this Island and to all the islands peopled by Christians. And they have been carried to the mainland, and in every port they flourished,” wrote Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, royal historian to the Spanish court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, in his 1526
Sumario de la natural historia de las Indias
(Santo Domingo is today the Dominican Republic). The fruit didn't become an African-like staple in Latin America, but it came fairly close and remains so today: A serving of cooked green banana is an essential part of any meal in most of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

Nurtured by farmers, and carried by sailors, merchants, conquerors, and pioneers, the banana took seven thousand years to complete its circle around the globe. By the time the United States was founded, nearly the whole world was eating the fruit. Except us.