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| A vendor selling plantain in Kampala. It is used to prepare matooke |
By the way, by producing 9.5 million
metric tonnes per year, Uganda is the world’s second largest banana producer
after India. That is at least understandable for a country whose history has
experienced so much Asiatic influence because even the memorial of Mahatma
Ghandi is at the Source of the Nile River in Jinja, a city in Uganda.
Coming from a country whose main diet is
thick maize porridge called sadza or isitshwala or hadza in three Zimbabwean
local languages, it never took me long to realize that I was being introduced
to the East African Great Lakes region, particularly Uganda The Pearl of
Africa.
Not that I was not expecting any
surprises especially having been born, bred and lived in Southern Africa for
all my life till I landed in the Baganda country, no. Only that I never
expected such a sharp dietary contrast from my host country.
Back home I used to eat bananas but to
see them being prepared the same way my Kalanga mother back home in the small
Zimbabwean border town of Plumtree would prepare thick maize flour porridge
called hadza was the newest development in thirty years and as a youth plus a
journalist, it made me very curious and encouraged me to do extra research on
bananas and the Baganda. For your interest, Kalanga is one of the tribes that
dominate Plumtree in Zimbabwe.
“Matoke is one of the staple foods of
Baganda,” said Moses Kulubya, a youth from Mbali. Yes indeed, this is confirmed
by statistics that show that banana is staple food to some 10 million Ugandans.
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| A small plot of banana in one compound in Bukoto, Kampala |
According to the 2015 national census
data, Uganda has a population of 35 million people and therefore a third of
that population eats banana at least four times a week. This suffices the
conclusion that it is one of the staple foods here because further evidence
show that 66% of the country’s urban population depends on bananas and an average
Ugandan eats as much as 1kg of banana per day.
These statistics heightened my
suspicions that banana should be having a high nutritional value and indeed,
amongst my discoveries was a detailed quote by an NDTV health reporter,
Plavaneeta Borah who after interviewing a renowned medical doctor wrote that:
“It is loaded with essential vitamins
and minerals such as potassium, calcium manganese, magnesium, iron, folate,
niacin, riboflavin and B6”.
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| Banana is among the critical fruits sold in Jinja Central Market shown here |
My attention to this nutritional
information was especially caught by the information under the quote which
stated that 100 grams of banana contains carbohydrate of 23 grams, fat
0,3grams, and protein 1,1grams among other nutrients.
Banana has a high content fibre which
keeps one full for a larger part of the day and contains only 90 calories which
is a low salt content that prevents high blood pressure. Its high content of
potassium regulates heartbeat, blood pressure and keeps the brain alert.
Records by the University of Leeds in
the United Kingdom show that banana lowers cardiovascular diseases (CDD) and
coronary heart diseases (CHD).
More research on nutritional information
revealed that the Ayurveda, its sour taste stimulates digestion and generally,
banana settles an upset stomach. Most importantly, the high iron content in
banana helps fight anaemia which is the decrease in the number of red blood
cells which fight diseases.
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| A farmer tenders his banana plot in Kampala, Uganda |
I therefore discovered that by eating a
lot of banana, Ugandans eat a power house of nutrients and so stand a chance of
being healthier than their Southern African counterparts who like eating food
with high fat and salt content.
According to records on the World Health
Organisation (WHO) website, high blood pressure claims 9.4million people
worldwide every year. In another study, WHO stated that Africa has the largest
number of high blood pressure cases with 46% of adults across the continent being
highly affected.
Uganda was however not amongst the five
African countries namely Sao Tome and Principe, Nigeria, Ghana, Seychelles and
Cape Verde with the highest prevalence of blood pressure.
Like the Indians, the Baganda people
have various menus of banana and matooke, which triggered this article, is just
one of those various ways of serving it.
My research made me discover that the
most widely grown cultivars are types belonging to the East African Highland
Banana (EAHB) subgroup.
There are dissert bananas namely the
Sukali, Ndizi and Bogoya. Cultivars like Kayinja and Kisubi are used for making
beer.
Plantain cultivars are the ones for
making matooke, a thick paste made of raw plantain which has been peeled and
then cooked such that it remains looking like the Southern African sadza which
they call “posho” in local language. Other types of bananas are roasted and in
local language the roasted banana is called “Gonja”.
Going through historical evidence, I discovered
that banana has always been the major crop in Uganda having been domesticated
more than two thousand years ago before the Christian era.
According to local agricultural
statistics, seventy-five (75%) percent of all farmers in the country grow
banana and of the country’s total farmland area which is 13 952 million
hectares, 1 785 million is used for growing banana and that is about 13% of the
total area reserved for producing the crop.
Online records show that even the
greatest British leader of the Second World War, Winston Churchill in his 1900s
book titled “My African Journey” that he wrote on his trip to East Africa he
described Kampala the capital city of Uganda as “invisible” and concealed by
the “leaves of immunerable banana plantations”.
By the way, my research later on
revealed that of the four administrative regions of Uganda drawn since 2010, the
Western region emerged the country’s leading banana producer since 2009 while
the Northern region was the least.
Since 2010, Uganda is divided into four
administrative regions namely the Northern, Eastern, Central and Western that
are further divided into 111 districts.
The 2008/2009 census ascertained that in
the first season of 2009, which was possibly one of their best seasons, 68% of
banana was produced in the Western Region, 23% in the Central, 8% in the
Eastern and 1% the Northern region.
Infact, by the time of the 2008/2009
census 79% of the districts that were there by then all produced banana because
63 out of those 80 districts produced banana with all leading districts being
from the Western Region, with Isingiro reaping 597 000 tonnes of the crop from
45 000 hectares followed closely by Mbarara which harvested 540 000 tonnes of
the crop from 32 000 hectares.
I see that you still wanted to read on
but alas, I have run out of words. All I am saying in this article is: Eat
banana. Like the Ugandans you will stay very healthy and even more attractive.
