Origins of Some East African Food Plants

Abstract

SPICES AND CONDIMENTS--Contd. making sugar was unknown in Zanzibar as late SUGAR-CANE, Saccharum officinarum L., Mua as 1811. In areas where it can be grown sugar). Research shows that this cultigen* cane is one of the African's crops; he does not has at least four different species in its make-grow it for sugar-making, but for sugar wine, up and that it originated in different parts of and it is also chewed to a certain extent, the world. The species involved are Saccharum especially when travelling. officinarum, applied to the thick tropical canes TURMERIC, Curcuma longa L. Man jano. By and believed to have originated in Polynesia, some this plant is thought to be a native of S. barberi Jesw., thin or reed canes found in India, but the finest qualities are to be found Northern India, S. sinense Roxb., a thin cane in China or Cochin-China. Opinion is divided from Canton and including a group of North as to when this was introduced into East Indian canes, and S. spontaneum L., the wild Africa, one authority saying the eighth cane, races of which extend from North century, another between AD 1000 and 1400 Africa as far south as the western shores of during the Persian colonization of East Africa; Lake Nyasa, although it is by no means com-Ibn Batuta in 1330 records the use of a green mon in East Africa. It also extends through ginger with rice in Mogadishu which is India to the Far East. thought to have been turmeric. In Uganda it Sugar as well as sugar-cane had been seen was introduced as a ration for Indian troops by the soldiers of Alexander the Great on their in the early days of the Protectorate. The invasion of the Punjab in 326 BC, and one cultivation of turmeric in East Africa is by no of Alexander's officers, Nearchus (c. 300 BC), means common. It is used as a colouring agent the Greek author, Eratosthenes (c. 276-194 BC) in curries and as a condiment. and Theophrastus wrote of honey produced from reeds. It was Dioscorides who described BEVERAGE PLANTS it as honey called sakkharon collected from BAMBOO, Oxytenanthera braunii Pilger. This reeds in India and Arabia Felix, with the con-bamboo is indigenous to Southern Tanganyika sistency of salt which could be crunched be-and was recorded from Ubena, where it is tween the teeth. At the beginning of the Christ-cultivated and is tapped for a bamboo wine. It in era, sugar became a trade article in Alex-has also been recorded from Songea in Tangaandria, but the cane only followed it after an nyika, and is planted in parts of Northern interval of more than five hundred years. Nyasaland. Historical records indicate that it was in culti-CACAO, COCAO, Theobroma cacao L. A numvation at Gundesapur in Persia, and after the ber of species are involved in the cacao which conquest of the Sasanians by the Arabs they are in cultivation to-day and they are distritook it, in AD 641, to Egypt; by then the buted between Central and South America Arabs. had very thoroughly adopted the crop, and in the Antilles, where they had long been and in their rapid advance through the Medi-grown before the discovery of America. The terranean they took it to Spain about AD 714, conqueror of Mexico, Cortes (1485-1547), and Sicily in AD 827. In Spain the Moorish sugar his soldiers first met with it on their landing industry did so well that by AD 1150 there in 1519 in Mexico, where it was not only were 75,000 acres under cultivation, highly appreciated by the Indians as a never-About AD 1500 the Portuguese established age but used also as a form of coinage. It was the sugar-cane in Madeira, the Canaries, the not until the end of the sixteenth century that Azores, and down the west coast of Africa …