Banana by Dan Koeppel Page A

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.
    â€œUganda 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