Banana by Dan Koeppel Page B

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