The Whole Tree
A broken-down Subaru, a fruit stand by Mabira Forest, and a bunch of bananas that was more than I asked for. On what a banana plant really is, and how the same words can mean different things.
In 2013, I bought a car in Uganda. A Subaru Forester. It was great, when it ran.
It had a problem with overheating. I wasn't a mechanic, so we coped.
One day I was driving from Entebbe to Jinja, and the car overheated somewhere between Mukono Town and Mabira Forest. I pulled over and called my mechanic in Entebbe. He grabbed a matatu, one of the minibus taxis that carry most of Uganda's road traffic, and came to meet us. This wasn't the first time.
The wait
There wasn't much to do while we waited. The car wasn't going anywhere. There was forest just off the road on both sides. We had stopped near a corner, where a few carts sold fruit and vegetables beside the busy two-lane highway.
That road is the main route east from Kampala, toward Jinja, the Nile, and on to Kenya. Trucks, buses, matatus and boda bodas run it all day. Mabira sits right in the middle of it.
Mabira is one of the largest natural forests left in central Uganda, about 300 square kilometers between Lake Victoria and Lake Kyoga. It has been a forest reserve since 1932. Hundreds of tree species grow there, and close to a third of the country's bird species have been recorded in it.
It has also been fought over. In 2007, the government proposed giving about 7,100 hectares of the reserve, close to a quarter of it, to a sugar company for cane. The plan was dropped, then raised again in 2011, and the argument over Mabira has never entirely gone away.
I didn't know most of that, sitting on the side of the road. I knew the forest was beautiful, and I knew I was hungry.
Some bananas
It was early, maybe 7:30. I decided it wouldn't hurt to get something to eat. I asked a friend to get us some bananas from the fruit seller. I asked him how much, and handed him the cash. I don't remember the amount. It wasn't much.
I had pictured a few bananas. Enough for the people standing around a broken-down car.
When my friend came back, he was carrying a whole bunch of small sweet bananas. He saw the surprise on my face and smiled.
I wasn't expecting him to bring back the whole tree.
Not a tree
As it turns out, I wasn't far off.
A banana plant isn't a tree. It's a giant herb. What looks like a trunk is made of leaves, rolled tightly one over another. Each stem flowers once, produces a single bunch, and dies. A new shoot, a sucker, grows up from the base to take its place.
So a bunch isn't a handful taken off a tree. It's everything one plant made in its life. In a sense, he had brought back the whole tree.
In Uganda, that's an ordinary thing to buy. The country is one of the largest banana producers in the world, and Ugandans eat more bananas per person than almost anyone. Most of them are matooke, green cooking bananas that are steamed and mashed. Small sweet bananas like the ones my friend brought back are a different kind, eaten as fruit. Along the roads, both are sold the way they grow, by the bunch.
I had asked for "some bananas" with a picture in my head of how bananas are sold. My friend heard the same words and bought them the way they were sold there. Neither of us was wrong. We just weren't starting from the same place.
A week of bananas
Eventually, the mechanic arrived. He got the car running, and we went on our way. We reached our destination safely.
We ate bananas for a week.
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