With the date palm we have been long familiar, the cocoa-nut palm likewise, and those too which decorate our ball-rooms, galleries and banqueting halls, we greet as delightsome friends, but what is the oil palm—the Eloesis Guineensis of West Africa? It is said that five thousand years ago its sap was used by the Egyptians for the purpose of embalming the bodies of their great dead. To-day by its aid we travel thousands of miles at express rate; it has been so handled by modern science that it enters largely into our diet; the merchants in Hamburg and Liverpool make fortunes out of it; millions of coloured people live by it, and yet it is barely known to the civilized community. A fortnight’s fairly pleasant steam from Liverpool brings the traveller in sight of the high red clay coast line of Sierra Leone, and there the oil palm first greets the traveller in all its luxuriant grandeur.

From Freetown away down the coast as far as San Paul de Loanda, the traveller is never far from the home of the oil palm—the most valuable tree of West Africa—probably the most prolific source of human sustenance in the world. She greets the traveller everywhere as he steps ashore; she invites him to the cool shade of her avenues leading to some hospitable bungalow; she affords a shelter at intervals along the scorching dusty track—as welcome as an oasis of the desert; she waves at him vigorously from the hill-top like some fluttering banner, or gently nods her graceful plumes in the still valley; she stands as sentinel on the outskirts of the native village, or like some giant memorial column on the plain. All nature strikes the African traveller dumb with admiration, but above all in entrancing loveliness the graceful oil palm reigns supreme.

To the parched and weary she is at once meat and drink and friendly shelter. Her palm cabbage and nut oil are no less palatable than her foaming fresh-drawn wine, and if no other home affords, her branches offer a temporary and not comfortless dwelling. She provides her guest with oil to lubricate his gun, with fibre to plug his boat if it springs a leak; her fronds serve as a weapon to combat the infinite torment of flies, or interlaced as a basket to carry a meal. To her the native goes for a tool or a cooking-utensil, a mat or a loin cloth, a basket or a brush, a fishing net or a rope, a torch or a musical instrument, a roof or a wall. To him she is a necessity, to the traveller a luxury, to the merchant a fortune, to the artist a subject full of charm.

Professor Wyndham Dunstan has stated that the oil palm “does not occur thickly much beyond 200 miles from the coast.” Since those words were written we have learnt that whole forests of the oil palm exist over a thousand miles from the coast. It thrives throughout West Africa wherever the atmosphere is sufficiently humid, but it loves best of all the swampy valleys of Sherboro Island and Nigeria, the cocoa farms of San Thomé, the Gold Coast and the Congo, which are by it provided with the necessary protection from the scorching sun and from the fierce tornadoes which sweep periodically over the land. In the strictest sense the oil palm has never yet been an object of cultivation in West Africa, neither is it in the literal sense self-propagating. The housewife, separating the fibrous pericarp from the nuts, tosses the latter aside or scatters the residue on to the rubbish heap behind the hut, with the inevitable result of an early and vigorous crop of young palms. In the course of time the inhabitants of the village, according to African custom, pick up not only their beds, but also their huts, and walk, perhaps something less than a mile away, where they clear another piece of forest land and build up another village. The old site, thus abandoned to nature, is quickly covered with vigorous growth, but in the race for supremacy the graceful palms lead the way and become the communal property of the former inhabitants.

The screeching grey parrot of West Africa with its horny bill tears the oily fruit from the bunch, after consuming most of the oleaginous fibres of the pericarp, drops the nuts whilst flying, far and wide. These, in turn, add to Africa’s economic wealth, and thus do man and animal join in spreading through ever wider regions the growth of the oil palm.

Within ten years the tree begins to push out its bunches of fruit, beginning with tiny bunches of the size, shape and appearance of an ordinary bunch of black grapes. Some trees bear in eight years, and an earlier date still is claimed for certain varieties, but the fruit at this stage seldom yields any appreciable quantity of oil. From fifteen onwards to a hundred and twenty years, the palm plantations give forth an almost continuous supply of fruit, every tree bearing twice a year. In the rainy season the supply is most abundant, but in the second period, known by many as the “short wet” season there is a fair secondary harvest. All the trees do not, however, bear at the same time, and in many areas of the Equatorial regions where the seasons are not sharply defined or always regular, the supply of nuts is never exhausted.

In appearance a head of fruit resembles a huge bunch of grapes with long protecting thorns protruding between each nut, and a good bunch will contain from 1500 to 2000 nuts. A single fruit in appearance is about the size of a large date, and the pericarp is composed of fibre matted closely together with a yellow solidified oil, which fibrous substance envelops a nut or “stone”; this in turn encloses a kernel of the size and shape of a large hazel kernel, in appearance and composition indistinguishable from the well-known “Brazil nut.” From the fibre a dark reddish oil is obtained, whilst the kernels that are shipped to Europe yield a finer white oil.

The almost universal practice amongst the natives in harvesting the nuts is to climb the tree by walking up the trunk with the aid of a loop of stout creeper. Arriving at the top at a height of sixty or eighty feet, the man deals a few vigorous blows with an axe which severs the bunch or bunches from the tree and they then fall to the ground. As the whole family usually takes part in the production of oil and in the division of labour, the man, having cut down the fruit, descends the tree, picks up his protective spear or gun, and returns home, closely followed by the wife and daughters, who transport the bunches of nuts in the wicker baskets which they have woven in their spare moments.

In every colony a similar process is adopted to separate the fruit from the parent stem. Until it is over ripe, the fruit not only adheres firmly to its stem but the porcupine thorns sometimes two inches long, make separation anything but a pleasant task. The tribes everywhere collect the clusters or bunches into heaps and cover them with plantain or banana leaves, exposing them to the sun for from three to six days, the effect of which is that the nuts, subjected to the hot rays of a tropical sun and cut off from the refreshing sustenance of the mother tree, lose their tenacious grip and readily drop away from their stem.

The methods adopted to force the oil from the fibrous pericarp differ considerably in the several political divisions of West Africa. Roughly, however, they fall into two divisions: (a) by fermentation; (b) by boiling; and in certain parts of the Kroo Coast by a combination of both methods.

The fermenting process is carried out by placing a large quantity of separated, but hard, nuts into a hole about four feet deep, this having been first lined with plantain leaves. In the regions nearer the coast towns, these pits are either paved or cemented inside and in some cases they are both paved and cemented. The nuts are covered up and then left for some weeks, even months, to ferment thoroughly. They are then either pounded in the pit with wooden pestles, or they may be taken out and treated in prepared wooden mortars.

The process of boiling is more expeditious. The nuts are boiled or steamed until the firmly coagulated fibre shows signs of yielding; then they are placed in an old canoe or large mortar and pounded with wooden pestles. In both processes, whether by fermentation or by boiling, the oily fibre separates itself from the hard inner “stone.” The fibre, which is by this time a tangled mass of yellow and brown, is then taken and squeezed, sometimes with the aid of water, through a woven press and a stream of golden liquid results. Sometimes loads of the oily fibre are thrown pell-mell into a large canoe half filled with water in which the children delight to paddle, causing the oil to rise to the surface, when the elders skim it from the top and carry it in earthenware pots for boiling and straining before sending it on its way to the market and the European consumer.

The oil, however, is but one exportable product of the palm tree; the value of the inner kernel may be gathered from the fact that over four million pounds’ worth of palm kernels are sent to Europe every year. This kernel is encased in an extremely hard shell, which varies so much in size that until quite recently there was no satisfactory “stone” cracking machinery in Africa. There are now several machines on the market, but the old grey-haired lady of the West African kraal, with her primitive upper and nether grind stones, still makes by far the most reliable “cracker.”

At Victoria, in German Cameroons, we saw an elaborate set of machinery for dealing in turn with the oily fibrous pericarp of the nut, and later, extracting the kernel from the inner stone. The latter process was that of a general crushing, then throwing the entire mass into a brine bath and so separating the shells from the kernels, which were then taken out and dried in the sun. This process, while being infinitely more expeditious, has the obvious drawback that a large proportion of the kernels are so bruised and broken that it entails a considerable wastage of oil.

The Palm in Tonnage and in Figures Sterling.

Exports in round figures for the year 1911—

TOTAL OUTPUT.

The proportionate output from the palm trees from the different colonies of West Africa is therefore—

Production in figures sterling per square mile under the several colonizing Powers—

Whilst the palm provides one of the principal exports of West Africa for consumption in Europe, its domestic uses are inseparable from native life. The fruit is used by the natives in many sections of primitive culinary art. Pounded with manioca leaves, Indian corn and red peppers, a savoury pottage is manufactured which is a universal delight. One of the choicest vegetables in the African continent is the pearly white head of the palm, which, in small trees of two years’ growth, weighs about 1 pound, but in trees of many years’ growth, may turn the scale at 56 pounds. The substance of this vegetable differs in appearance and taste but little from the Brazil nut, but when cooked provides a succulent dish not unlike, though superior to, sea kale. The natives cook this in palm oil, but Europeans usually prefer it boiled and served with a white sauce, or baked in a custard. To obtain this vegetable is almost invariably to destroy the tree, consequently it seldom figures on the every-day menu.

Meat, fish and fowl are all of them stewed in palm oil, and, as African meat is deficient in fat, the palm oil makes an excellent and appetizing substitute. I once smelled a very savoury native “hot pot” which, upon examination, revealed a wonderful mixture. The liquid was golden with palm oil, and floating about, adding to the compendium of flavours, I detected bats and beetles, a flat fish “cheek by jowl” with a monkey’s head, caterpillars fitting themselves in with sections of field rats and parrots—altogether a stew delightful to the nostrils, at least of the African boys and girls who squatted around the huge clay cooking pot. The white man, though he usually has no keen appetite for native stews or pottage, lunches and dines off “palm oil chop” with as great a relish as does his Indian confrère upon “curries.” The “chop” may be fish, flesh or fowl, but it all goes by the name “palm oil chop,” which has a happy and almost essential knack in West Africa of hiding a multitude of “foreign bodies.”

No African meal can be regarded as complete without the addition of palm oil, and, as a beverage, palm wine is extensively though moderately consumed. This sparkling beverage closely resembles in appearance the “stone ginger” of civilization. The tribes on the Upper Kasai are probably the greatest consumers of palm wine in Africa. In those parts of the tropics where quantities of sugar cane are cultivated, palm wine competes with a sister product from the cane; the sweet and somewhat insipid taste of the latter being more palatable to some tribes than the sharp flavour of the palm wine. The Eloeis wine is the sap of the palm tree itself, extracted by various means, generally by cutting off the male flower-spike and fixing a calabash to the wound to catch the juice which is removed every morning. Another method is to remove the palm cabbage or head; yet another, to cut down the tree and “dig” a hole in the heart of the trunk, from which the liquid is then scooped into a calabash or earthenware pot. Europeans generally prefer the wine when fresh from the tree, owing to the fact that after a few hours it begins to ferment and loses its sweetness.

The oil palms of West Africa are taking an increasing share in supplying the temporal wants of both the white and the coloured man. It is safe to say that there is no tree in the universe capable of providing to so great and varied an extent, the daily wants of the human organism.