Bananas

(Travellers | Cities | Routes | Trade Goods | Themes)

by Caroline Stone

Some 300+ cultivars arose from two species: M. acuminata and M. balbisiana, while the main basic cultivated crosses are M. paradisiaca (plantain) and M.sapientum (sweet banana). Plantain, or cooking bananas, in spite of certain dietetic deficiencies, are the staple food for half a billion people, while the sweet banana is the world’s most traded fruit. Bananas come in three colours: green, yellow and red.

The wild banana is full of hard seeds and almost inedible. The bananas eaten today are the result of improvements caused by chance mutations, some in the distant past. These mutations rendered the plant sterile and they were then artificially reproduced from cuttings.

This means that bananas have remarkably little genetic variety and have remained more or less static in evolutionary terms since the last Ice Age; hence they are extremely vulnerable to disease. An epidemic wiped out the prime sweet banana, Gros Michel, of Asian origin, in the 1950s, and the fungus, black Sigatoka, is now threatening the entire world stock, with disastrous implications, particularly for Africa. Some progress has been made, however, in genetic modification which gives hope for the future.

The early history of the banana is still little known, largely because it has been difficult for scientists to investigate their native habitat: the jungles of South East Asia, where the greatest diversity exists, and Indonesia, perhaps stretching as far as Australasia and Northern India.

Early literary sources are also unclear, because it is not always obvious which plant is being referred to – Indian Fig or Apple of Paradise may refer to the banana, but without descriptions or illustrations it is uncertain.

A possible mention in a Buddhist Pali text of the 6thc B.C, has been suggested. In the West, bananas are first mentioned by Theophrastus (died 287 B.C.). Alexander the Great is alleged to have come across the banana in India in 327 B.C. and has been credited with bringing it back to Europe.

Pliny the Elder, in the 1st c A.D., relates that the sages of India ate “the plant of the wise”, which led the pre-Linnaean botanist Rumphius to name our basic sweet banana Musa sapientum. The first half of the name – Musa – derives from the Arabic for banana – mawz. The name was also felt to give the fruit an auspicious association with the Emperor Augustus’ personal physician Antonius Musa, one of the most famous doctors of the Roman world.

Yang Fu (ca. 90 AD), author of the Yi wu zhi (I Wu Chih, or Record of Strange Things) mentions banana plantations in China during the second half of the first century AD. These were in the south and the fruit was considered exotic and not commonly eaten in other regions until the 20th century. And there is a long description from roughly this period.

It is again uncertain when the banana reached the Middle East. For climatic reasons it could only be grown successfully in relatively few regions, primarily the coastal areas of Yemen and Oman. There is a mention in the Qur’an of a fruit generally considered to be the banana and numerous later mentions, for example in The Arabian Nights. The scholar and doctor Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi described the banana and its cultivation at great length c. 1200, partly in order to try and answer the question of its botanical origin.

It is not known when the banana and the plantain reached Africa; there are different theories. The plantain in particular is a vital staple in many areas. In Uganda, for example, annual per capita consumption is around 450 kg and the word –matooke – is synonymous with food.

It has been hypothesized that the banana was spread across Africa from East to West from the 7th century A.D. by Arab merchants and slave-traders, who carried with them new plants and technologies as well as Islam. The fact that there are two major centers of diversity, about which little is known, largely because access is difficult, in the highlands of East Africa and in Central-West Africa suggests, however, that the banana may have been there for a longer time, perhaps brought to the coastal areas by Indo-Malay seamen in the first millennium B.C.

There are possible references to bananas in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean by Western travelers and pilgrims in the Medieval period but, as mentioned above, there is a problem with names. Portuguese sailors are believed to have brought the fruit back from Guinea in 1402, calling it by the local name – banema – but the word does not appear in print until the 17th century. Plantain, derives from the Spanish platano, but that in turn seems to be the result of a botanical and linguistic confusion.

The banana was established in the Canary Islands and in 1516 Friar Tomás de Berlanger, a Portuguese Franciscan, took it to Santo Domingo in the Caribbean, and thence it spread through the Central and South America.

Bananas were not eaten in the U.S.A. or Western Europe to any extent until a sweet yellow mutant found in Jamaica in 1836 was propagated and developed. This became the progenitor of the first bananas widely cultivated for export.

The leaves of bananas are put to numerous uses in all the countries where they are cultivated – as thatch, wrapping for food, plates, rope and even woven. In fact, the first reference to the banana in Chinese, c121 refers to the yarn, not to the fruit. A different type of banana, however, Musa textilis – abaca – and variants was and still is, to a limited extent, cultivated in the Philippines and the southern islands of Japan exclusively for its fibers, to make rope, paper and cloth. Bashofu, banana cloth, was produced in Okinawa from the 13thc, at first for local use and later as an export to the north.