Bananas and Food Security - Bioversity International

Afrique / Africa : G. Rossel
places, times and agents of introduction of musa to Africa range from Egypt to
Madagascar and from 2000 BC to 700 AD, by Indian and Arab merchants or Indo-Malay
immigrants. Also, the Nile valley, the Ethiopian highlands, the Pare-Usambara-
Kilimanjaro Mountains, Arab trade routes and the Zambesi River have been considered
as possible pathways for the spread of musa to the interior.
Another longstanding enigma has been the exceptionally high diversity of plantain in
Africa, as compared to the continent of origin, which has lead to suggestions about a very
remote date of introduction. The question is, of course, whether the present state of
knowledge of the genetic behaviour of plantain allows us to draw conclusions about its
history or, conversely, whether the latter may help to explain some aspects of the former.
Anyhow, due to a shift in research priorities and to the occurrence of some new and
serious constraints to its cultivation, the location of plantain in Africa has become of
great interest to the agronomic sector as well. This has resulted, among other things, in
the establishment of a number of germplasm collections. However, an efficient collection
of and communication about plantain cultivars was seriously hampered by a huge
number of vernacular names as well as by some confusion concerning both
nomenclature and description of the cultivars, in addition to their phenotypic plasticity.
In view of all these considerations, the present study set out to reconstruct the
history of plantain in Africa by a combined taxonomic and linguistic approach. Being the
first to encompass the total genetic diversity of a crop on a continent-wide scale and on
an interdisciplinary basis, it could not be modelled on previous crop-historical studies.
The exercise, therefore, should be seen as an exploration into both the method and
possibilities of such an approach.
Taxonomic-linguistic approach
The taxonomical and linguistic parts of this study, unrelated and incompatible as they
may seem, are in fact dealing with the same subject, i.e. plantain diversity, its
classification and its nomenclature. Where the taxonomical part of the approach looks at
the subject from a scientific point of view, the linguistic part focuses on the way the
African farmers deal with it. The difference is that taxonomists have to present their
understanding of this diversity in a universal system of classification and nomenclature,
whereas the African farmers express their perception of the subject in languagedependant
folk-taxonomical systems.
Thus, after a brief presentation of the formal way in which the taxonomical data are
handled in this study, some of the (historically significant) folk-taxonomical and
linguistic aspects of the subject are discussed. This is followed by observations on the
expansion of plantain as well as on the historical sources that we have at our disposal.
The final conclusions consist of a short summary of the historical processes of
introduction and spread of the crop in the African continent and of some considerations
on the potential use of ensete as a model in the study of the domestication
history of musa.
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