Of the banana proper, there are several varieties, each distinguished by a special name, just as the European gardener distinguishes his several varieties of potatoes. Some are 3 inches in length, with deep green coats, and seem fat with matter. Others, 6 inches in length, and of a lighter green colour, are considered the best; others are short, plumpy fruit, great favourites also. There is another species, known by a dark point, rather bitter to the taste and unfit for food, but specially reserved for the manufacture of wine, for which it alone is adapted.

2. The fruit of this latter species furnishes the natives with the maramba, a honey-sweet, cider-flavoured wine, and, when mixed with a little millet, sweet beer also. When fermented and perfect, the latter is a potent liquid, and a quart suffices to disturb the equilibrium of many men; but there are old topers, like Prince Kaduma, who would toss off a gallon and be apparently only slightly elated after it. A small draught of maramba taken at dawn I found beneficial to the system.

3. The banana-fronds serve as thatch for houses, fences for enclosures, and as bedding. They are also used to protect milk, water, and flour vessels from dust and impurities, are employed as table-cloths, on which food is spread, and, like newspapers or brown paper, are used as wrappers for gifts of eatables, such as ripe bananas, butter, meat, eggs, fish, &c., while they serve daily and universally as pudding-cloths in the Kiganda households. The cool, thick shade afforded by a banana plantation is well known.

4. The stems are sometimes used for fences and defensive enclosures; they are also frequently employed as rollers, to move heavy logs, or for the transportation of canoes overland from point to point, when the strategies of war demand it. The pith or heart of the stalk is scraped and made into sponges of a dough-cake pattern, and may be seen in almost all Kiganda lavatories. Frequently the indolent prefer to knead a fresh sponge-cake and make their ablutions with this to going to the river, lake, pond, or well, or troubling themselves to fetch a vessel of water.

The fibres of the stalk are used as cord, and are adapted for almost every purpose for which cord is useful. The poorest peasants make rough but serviceable shields also from the stalk, while the fishermen of the lake make large sun-hats from it. Many other uses might be mentioned, but the above are sufficient to prove that, besides its cool agreeable shade, the banana-plant will supply a peasant of Uganda with bread, potatoes, dessert, wine, beer, medicine, house and fence, bed, cloth, cooking-pot, table-cloth, parcel-wrapper, thread, cord, rope, sponge, bath, shield, sun-hat, even a canoe—in fact almost everything but meat and iron. With the banana-plant, he is happy, fat, and thriving; without it, he is a famished, discontented, woe-begone wretch, hourly expecting death.