The Ugandan diet: A personal account from Kalanga Boy

A vendor selling plantain in Kampala. It is used to prepare matooke

“I can’t go for a long time without eating Matooke,” says Hajjira Namukose, a Ugandan youth. The dominance of banana in the meals of a Ugandan is the first thing that the Southern African will immediately notice if he or she has never been to India or Uganda.

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.

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”.

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.

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.