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- Until the end of the 1990s, unravelling the history of vegetative staple
crops in Africa had to be pursued by indirect methods, notably
historical linguistics and the study of somatic variation, as no
archaeobotanical material was available.
- Evidence from phytoliths is now available from Cameroun (Mbida et al.
2000, 2001)
- There has been controversy over the Cameroun date (see e.g. Vansina
2004; Mbida et al. 2005) but they are very much in line with conclusions
drawn by researchers, especially linguists, since the 1930s using other
lines of evidence.
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- There are at least two studies of the vernacular names of bananas and
plantains in Africa, Blakney (1963) and Rossel (1989, 1991, 1996, 1998),
but their conclusions cannot easily be aligned with the phytolith
evidence.
- This paper attempts to draw together and reformulate the linguistic and
culture geographical evidence, as well as considering the possibility
that plantains –and perhaps bananas as well- were accompanied by other
vegetative crops.
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- Murdock (1959) was the first author who pointed to the historical enigma
presented by SE Asian food crops in Africa.
- At the period when Austronesian navigators were presumably reaching the
East African coast (before 2000 BP), its only inhabitants would have
been Cushite pastoralists, and Khoesan-related groups with a
hunting-gathering economy. Neither of these are likely candidates for
the transmission of vegetatively reproducing crops requiring elaborate
agricultural skills.
- Murdock’s answer to this was to postulate a ‘Yam Belt’, a corridor with
its Easternmost tip in Southern Somalia, passing North of the Equatorial
forest, as far as the Kru and other coastal tuber-growers in the West of
West Africa.
- Murdock’s candidates for the adoption and transmission of these
cultigens were a people he calls ‘Megalithic Cushites’, then said to be
inhabiting the Highlands of Southern Ethiopia.
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- The cultigens are the cultivated Musaceae, taro or ‘old’ cocoyam (Colocasia
esculenta) and the water-yam (Dioscorea alata). These three crops seem
to have been well established in West Africa by the time of the first
European contacts with the coast.
- It was proposed that they diffused across the centre of the continent
via the Central African rain-forest. Simmonds (1962:137; 1976:213)
confidently shows a thick black arrow sweeping across the centre of the
continent from East to West schematically representing the diffusion of
plantains and bananas.
- Nevertheless, exactly how and when elements of the ‘tropical food kit’
were introduced to West Africa remains problematic
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- A study by Blakney (1963) listed and grouped the vernacular terms across
the continent. Blakney found that the two principal word-stems #-ko and
#-to were widespread. Unfortunately, the data that Blakney used failed
to consistently distinguish between plantain and banana, and as he seems
to have been unaware of their very different distributions, he failed to
match any of his widespread roots with either type.
- Blakney concluded from the broad dispersal of the root #-ko must
indicate that it formed part of the core vocabulary of the Niger-Congo
language phylum. This is now an extremely problematic assumption.
- Other authors (e.g. Vansina 1990) argued for an early date for the
banana in the equatorial rainforest on the basis on linguistics,
although without setting out the evidence in detail.
- Rossel (1998) studied the vernacular terminology of plantain and banana
in the entire continent. Her studies accumulate much fresh data, but
reach the rather idiosyncratic conclusion that ‘A westward spread of
musa (from Asia) began only in Islamic times and reached Africa not long
afterwards’ (Rossel 1998: 52).
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- The only wild Musaceae species indigenous to West Africa is Ensete
gillettii, an enset with an inedible fruit found in rocky areas across
West Africa used mainly for magical purposes or as a famine food.
- Names for this plant in West-Central Nigeria incorporate the root #-kom
and it is likely that this term that can be reconstructed back to
proto-Benue-Congo.
- It has also been borrowed into the unrelated but intertwined Chadic
languages. At some point, this name has been transferred either to
plantain or to the cultivated Musaceae in general
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- The vernacular terms that have stimulated the expenditure of the most
scholarly ink are those related to proto-Bantu #ko[n]do.
- These are embedded in languages in NW Bantu, but also appear in Mande
and Atlantic languages in the Guinea-Liberia region.
- It is assumed that the occurrences in Mande, Atlantic. Kwa and Gur
languages are all borrowings from Bantu and that this must have occurred
as a result of late Portuguese transfers of crops along the coast.
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- The table compiles the West African names that appear to be cognate with
English ‘banana’. In the Mande languages, many of these are contracted
and compressed, which speaks of some antiquity.
- It has been suggested that the source of this word is Indian vannan <
purported Sanskrit varana (Blakney 1963:77). However, this is not
confirmed by the relevant dictionaries; the nearest form is Sanskrit vanakadalii
(वनकदल).
- Garcia da Orta (1563) mentions palana on the Malabar Coast, and this
does look like a convincing source for the Mande names.
- The Portuguese may have picked up this name in India and carried the
small diploids to West Africa, along with the Asian name.
- This became fixed in English as ‘banana’ and then was borrowed back into
Camerounian languages in the colonial era. From Cameroun it spread into
the interior, surfacing in Nilo-Saharan languages as an indirect
loanword.
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- The #boro root has a curiously disjunct distribution.
- There are scattered occurrences as far apart as Sierra Leone and Kenya
occurring in very different language families.
- This is another name spread by the Portuguese, as many (though not all)
of its attestations are coastal.
- However, its origin is unknown and there are no early textual references
to this term.
- It could well be associated with the introduction of a particular
cultivated subtype, although there is no clear evidence for this
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- There are some items of material culture related to plantains that seem
to be related to their diversification in the Bight of Biafra area.
- A musical instrument connected with plantains has a distribution
suggesting an origin in this zone. The second is the plantain-stem
xylophone, the distribution of which maps very approximately against plantain diversity. The wooden
bars of the xylophone are laid transversely across fresh Musa stems.
- No analogous instrument is reported from Indonesia, suggesting that the
instrument evolved subsequent to the introduction of the plantain. This
xylophone is today found in areas where the banana is the staple, but
the map suggests very strongly that West Central Africa is its original
nucleus of distribution.
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- The water-yam, Dioscorea alata, another cultigen of SE Asian origin, is
cultivated throughout West Africa and sporadically in East Africa and
Ethiopia, as well as on Madagascar.
- The water-yam has a long dormancy period (Martin 1976), a feature that
makes it an ideal plant to transport on long ocean voyages, as it avoids
the necessity of keeping a plant alive while en route. This must have
been an important factor in its choice as a major staple in Oceania.
- Chevalier (1936:522 ff.) concluded that the water-yam was
long-established in West Africa, although he offers no hypothesis about
the route of its introduction.
- Timitimi (1970) shows that the Kolokuma recognise eighteen cvs. of D.
alata while Raponda-Walker & Sillans (1961:150) list three major
subgroups and numerous other varieties grown in Gabon. If this is
compared with other tubers introduced by the Portuguese, such as the
fertile and easily bred sweet potato,
such a shallow time-depth seems unlikely.
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- Taro seems to be of an importance similar to the water-yam in the Bight
of Bonny area. Knipscheer and Wilson (1980) map the cultivation of
cocoyams in SE Nigeria, and shows that in some areas their importance is
that of a co-staple.
- Lyanga (1980) states that the cocoyam is the second most important
staple in Southern Cameroun. Karikari (1971) describes cocoyam
cultivation in Southern Ghana.
- However, an account quoted by Mauny (1953) shows that taro was well
established in Senegambia by 1500, too early for Portuguese navigators
to have been instrumental in its diffusion.
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- The early introduction of these humid-zone cultigens must have had
important consequences for African prehistory.
- The region of greatest somatic diversity of these crops corresponds well
to the area of the Bantu, Bantoid and Benue-Congo-speaking peoples.
Johnston (1919-1922) originally
proposed the idea that the Bantu homeland was to be located in
present-day Cameroun. The date generally advanced for this is >3000
BP.
- Although the route travelled by SE Asian cultigens remains quite
obscure, it seems credible that their impact on existing agricultural
societies in the Bight of Benin must have been considerable.
- It is likely that a combination of iron technology and three new
high-yielding staples that could be grown successfully in the tropical
rain-forest permitted the second, and most dramatic, phase of Bantu
expansion.
- New finds in Southern Cameroun now provide direct evidence for
agricultural tools in the rainforest (Eggert et al. 2006). Moving South
and East, presumably along the waterways the Bantu seem to have rapidly
colonised the equatorial forest.
- The conjunction of these crops and at least some iron tools to make
easier the clearing of the forest may have been the combination of
factors that permitted the colonisation of half the continent in a
relatively short period of time.
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- a) Ensete gillettii is established as an indigenous magical plant in
West Africa and as such has an old reconstructible root, *kom, in
Benue-Congo languages.
- b) Plantains are introduced by an unknown route to West Central Africa
>3000 BP and the #kom root is transferred to them. It is likely that
taro and water-yam are introduced at the same period.
- c) The plantain becomes a crucial cultigen in the exploitation of the
Central African rainforest and thus one of the engines of the Bantu
expansion.
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- d) Compounding #kom produces a variety of names for plantain, including #kondo
and #kombo which diffuse through the Bantu area
- e) The Portuguese coasting trade diffuses plantains to the West along
the coast, along with the Bantu name, which appears as #konto and #kodu
as far as Senegambia. Another name, #boro, may also be diffused by the
Bantu
- f) The name kondoŋ, borrowed into Fulfulde, is then rediffused back to
agricultural societies in West Africa as an irrigated garden crop
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- g) The few banana cultivars are brought by the Portuguese from India and
Brazil, along with their trade name, palana, a name of Indian
provenance.
- h) This is borrowed into Mandinka as bàrandá and thence diffused into
other Mande languages, where it undergoes phonological transformation
and shortening. Forms like Vai ɓàànà are likely to have been borrowed
into English as ‘banana’.
- i) Banana is then re-introduced into languages of Anglophone Cameroun in
the colonial era, and borrowed into neighbouring languages, eventually
spreading into Chad.
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- Two further observations;
- Despite the great accumulation of data in Rossel (1998) the linguistic
evidence does not support her conclusion of a late spread of plantains
associated with Islam.
- There is, moreover, no purely linguistic evidence for an east-west
spread of the plantain across the continent as proposed by Murdoch,
Simmonds and De Langhe in various forms.
- The introduction of the ‘tropical food kit’, despite its enormous impact
on the peopling of Africa, remains unresolved, and only further
phytolith analysis is likely to shed light on this issue.
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