Bananas and Plantains in Africa: Re-interpreting the linguistic evidence Roger Blench Research Abstract Phytolith evidence for early domesticated bananas in old date from Uganda may well have chronostratigraphic Cameroun supports a conclusion reached previously from problems. These early African dates are somewhat puz- a combination of botanical and linguistic evidence, name- zling, as these plants clearly originate in the Indo-Pacif- ly that plantains reached West Africa, presumably from ic region. Musa phytoliths (Ball et al. 2006) have been Southeast Asia, at an early period. Botanical evidence reported from 10,000 year old contexts at Kuk Swamp suggests that the plantains (AAB) are the most credible (Denham et al. 2003, Wilson 1985) and from 5200 cal. early domesticates and that their African center of diversi- B.P. at Yuku rock shelter (Horrocks et al. 2008) in the ty is in the zone from southeastern Nigeria to Gabon. The highlands of Papua New Guinea. Many lines of evidence mechanism by which the plantain reached this region is concur on ancient dates for bananas in Oceania. How- much disputed. The paper will argue the following: ever, the routes and mechanisms by which the cultivated • Plantains arrived in West Africa earlier than 3000 B.P. Musaceae reached West-Central Africa are unclear. along with taro and water-yam. Cultivation of these crops made possible the effective exploitation of the There are at least two studies of the vernacular names of dense equatorial rain-forest. bananas and plantains in Africa, Blakney (1963) and Ros- sel (1989, 1991, 1996, 1998), but their conclusions can- • The most prominent reconstructible term for plantain, not easily be aligned with the phytolith dates. This paper #ko[n]do, occurs across the zone where the greatest draws together and reformulates the linguistic and cul- degree of somatic variation is found. tural geographical evidence, and considers the possibil- • The introduction of the plantain can also be linked ity that plantains –and perhaps bananas as well- were with the distribution of typical artefacts made from ba- brought to Africa together with other vegetative crops. nana-stems. Introduction ‘Austronesian’ staple food crops in Africa Until the end of the 1990s, unravelling the history of veg- etative staple crops in Africa had to be pursued by indi- Correspondence rect methods, notably historical linguistics and the study Roger Blench, Kay Williamson Educational Foundation, 8, of plant morphological variation, as no archaeobotani- Guest Road, Cambridge CB1 2AL, UNITED KINGDOM. [email protected] cal material was available. Evidence from phytoliths has been obtained from Cameroun (Mbida et al. 2000, 2001) and Uganda (Lejju et al. 2006) that appears to attest to the antiquity of cultivated Musaceae in Africa. There has been controversy over the Cameroun date (see Mbida et al. 2005, Vansina 2004) but it is very much in line with conclusions drawn since the 1930s by researchers, es- Ethnobotany Research & Applications 7:363-380 (2009) pecially linguists, using other lines of evidence. The very Published: July 30, 2009 www.ethnobotanyjournal.org/vol7/i1547-3465-07-363.pdf 364 Ethnobotany Research & Applications Murdock’s hypothesis: the ‘Tropical Food Kit’ the continent via the Central African rainforest. Simmonds (1962:137; 1976:213) confidently shows a thick black ar- Murdock (1959:222 ff.) was the first author who pointed row sweeping across the center of the continent from east to the historical enigma presented by food crops in Africa to west schematically representing the diffusion of plan- assumed to be of Southeast Asian origin. At the period tains and bananas. However, in a personal communica- when Austronesian navigators were presumably reaching tion to the author in the 1980s, Professor Simmonds ex- the East African coast (before 2000 B.P.), its only inhabit- pressed doubts about the correctness of this model in re- ants would have been Cushitic-speaking pastoralists and lation to the plantains. It is, of course, easier to criticise Khoisan-related groups with a hunting-gathering econo- than to put forward alternative solutions. One scholar who my (Blench 1994, 2007a, in press a). Neither of these so- attempted to come to terms with this problem was A.M. cieties are likely candidates for the transmission of vege- Jones (1971) who proposed that Austronesian seafarers tatively reproducing crops requiring elaborate agricultural rounded the Cape and landed on the West African coast. skills. Murdock’s answer to this was to postulate a ‘Yam His evidence for this was based largely on the tunings Belt’, a corridor with its easternmost tip in southern Soma- and distribution of certain types of xylophone, erroneously lia, passing north of the equatorial forest, reaching as far considered by him to have been introduced from Indone- as the Kru and other coastal tuber-growers in the west of sia. He draws additional support from other musical in- West Africa. His candidates for the adoption and transmis- struments, mancala, sailing techniques, and brass-cast- sion of these cultigens were a people he called ‘Megalithic ing. These arguments are discussed at length in Blench Cushites’, who he postulated had inhabited the highlands (1982), but Jones’ questionable methodology means that of southern Ethiopia, and represented today by people they must ‘by and large’ be discarded. such as the Konso. A daring hypothesis at the time, it was significant in focusing attention on the role of cultigens in The ‘Age-Area’ hypothesis and its population dynamics; however, it has been discarded in relevance to botanical evidence the light of subsequent work (David 1976:258). The main difficulty is that there is no evidence that highland Cush- A fundamental argument for the antiquity of Southeast ites were settled anywhere near the coast, either then or Asian cultigens is the ‘age-area’ hypothesis: the relative now. Sam speakers (Somali, Rendille and Boni) were al- time-depth of a given cultural trait in a specific geographic ready present on the Somali coast before this period and area is reflected by the diversity of vocabulary applied to their economy was either pastoral or hunting-gathering it and by its morphological variation. Related to this is the (Heine 1982). degree of cultural ‘embedding’, that is, the significance of a trait or artefact in ceremonial life or oral lore. In the case Another difficulty is that Murdock’s categorisation of the of plants, this may be measured by the everyday uses to ‘Indonesian’ cultigens was not sufficiently precise. There which parts of the plant are put, and by the elaboration of are two major species of yam in Africa that have been the ritual and belief surrounding the cultivation or collec- transmitted from Southeast Asia. One is the Asian yam tion of the plant. (Dioscorea esculenta (L.) Burkill), cultivated in the coastal zone in East Africa. The other is the water-yam (Dioscorea Two reservations may be entered with respect to intraspe- alata L.), found discontinuously throughout the continent, cific variation of a cultigen. When a crop is introduced, but particularly in West and Central Africa. Murdock simi- a number of different cultivars may come simultaneously. larly uses the term ‘bananas’ to refer indiscriminately to The mango, for example, was brought to West Africa by bananas and plantains. In defence of Murdock, it must be the German colonial authorities in the first decade of the said that the descriptive literature available to him was in- 20th century and different varieties were introduced simul- adequate, and he was not able to use Simmonds’ (1962) taneously. The variations between these cultivars were classification of edible bananas. Throughout this paper immediately recognized by the local populations who be- ‘plantain’ is the term applied to the particular AAB sub- gan to encourage and protect mango trees, and the Yo- group defined by Simmonds (1962). This is essentially a ruba today identify some six or seven types. In this case, West African usage, since the anglophone name ‘plantain’ only historical evidence indicates the recent introduction in East Africa is applied to any starchy banana. of the mango, because as soon as oral history ceases to record it as a ‘new’ crop, it will rapidly be assimilated into Nevertheless, exactly how and when elements of the the repertoire of ‘traditional’ cultigens, just as maize, a 16th ‘tropical food kit’ (as Murdock calls it), were introduced di- century introduction, has been. rectly to the west coast of Africa remains problematic. The cultigens under discussion in this paper are the plantain, If cultivated introductions reproduce sexually, they can be taro or ‘old’ cocoyam (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) generally assumed to produce greater genetic diversity and the water-yam (D. alata). These three crops seem to within a given period of time than cultivated plants that have been well established in West Africa by the time of are sterile and can only be vegetatively propagated. Even the first European contacts with the coast (Blench 1996). the edible Musaceae, herbs notionally propagated veg- It was proposed that they diffused across the center of etatively, can rapidly produce considerable genetic diver- www.ethnobotanyjournal.org/vol7/i1547-3465-07-363.pdf Blench - Bananas and Plantains in Africa: Re-interpreting the linguistic 365 evidence sity if a few fertile specimens are present among the in- the Guinea yam (Dioscorea rotundata Poir.) and the oil- troduced plants. However, in Africa the basic process for palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.). The hypothetical recon- deriving new clones of the cultivated Musaceae is somat- structions derived from the synchronic terms applied to ic mutation (Simmonds 1966:57). The exception is wild these plants suggest that they have transformed phono- Musa acuminata Colla AA on Pemba island off the East logically according to the historical divisions within lan- African coast, suggesting that the navigators occasional- guage-families.