Nitrogen Fixing Tree

Un Eléphant dans mon carburateur | home

I did not know when going to Zambia that I would be planting trees.

If you are interested in this subject, ask your seach engine to look for the address of the United Nations Environment Agency (in Nairobi) or look for “nitrogen fixing tree”.

My father, Will Stalbrand, when young, wanted to spend his life in forestry; had he had money he would have studied to become forester. As he had no money, already to be able to finance his studies up to the College level had been a very hard burden on the family. So he had to immigrate to France to try and find a job.

The sport he loved most was “orientation”, a sport you might not be familiar with. You are given a map and on the maps are indicated points which you have to reach. It is then up to you with the aid of you compass and your map to run in the forest and get round the checking point as fast as you can. He even wrote (in Swedish) a minor murder novel based on this subject:

http://medlem.spray.se/nord

Father was able to find small jobs and get higher and higher up on the social ladder in France, but none of these jobs took him near the forest; He compensated this by walking each Sunday miles and miles in the French forest, but a French forest is a poor substitute for a Swedish forest.

Some genetic memories must have been running in my blood.

When we arrived in Zambia, we first learned what it meant not to have any food and to try and get food. But getting food is not sufficient, you have to cook it.

Cooking food means that you need water and heat. Both water and heat are extremely difficult to find. Water is taken from any river flowing nearby, and when I write river, I mean a kind of open sky sewage waterway, at the most one yard large. When you are lucky, some Agency has bored a well and the children (read the girls) have as main task to go and get water from the well. If you have tried getting a ten litres bucket up from a depth of ten meter, you realize what a task this is for a twenty kg weight girl. Not forgetting that this water has then to be carried home, meaning walking with a ten kg bucket on your head for five miles.

As to the fire needed for cooking, anything that can burn is considered acceptable. As a result, as the shanty town is growing, first all the trees are cut down, then all the bushes, then all the roots. One of the sounds you live with is the sound of axes working on a tree to fell it.

When we arrived in Zambia, we learned that it was an obvious wisdom for any farmer or farming family that firewood was provided by the forest and the forest was provided by Nature and that the farmer's part in this process was to go to the forest and pick some branches. Planting a tree was some kind of idiotic obsession for rich Development Workers. However it was considered as fair in Lusaka to take any dead branch hanging from a tree in a park. How do you know that a branch is dead? Well, you look at it and if you consider that it is within your reach, or you can climb up to it, then it can be considered as dead and you can cut it and bring it home.

The growth of the capital, Lusaka, made things worse. As you cannot grow trees in Lusaka, you have to bring the firewood to Lusaka; As it is much more convenient to truck charcoal, all the forests around Lusaka where felled and converted into charcoal. Lorries after lorry would pass you on the road carrying 90kg sacks of firewood and charcoal.

When on a mission, on our way back to Lusaka, we would always stop by road side sellers and buy two or three sacks of charcoal. Incidentally, if you intend to do that, please remember that the African road sellers are probably all trained by French Strawberry sellers, while you can have excellent looking charcoal at the top of the bag, at the bottom you only find dirt.

The Swedish Aid Agency had suggested in its plan that we would encourage the farmers to plant trees. We did not even try to do it. In Sweden you can see huge bush forests which will be cut down for energy only.

In Zambia, how could you convince a farmer to plant trees?

Even if he planted trees, what was the probability of survival of the trees? Every time there is a bit of free space, the goats will be roaming around, eating everything. We had also be trained to believe that termites only attacked dead wood, the problem being that the Zambian termites had not attended the same course.

The idea was that we would plant the trees in November/December and that the seedlings would grow during the rainy season and survive the dry season, why was of course an impossible dream.

When you look at Zambia in July, it looks like one huge fire; all the maize field stalks are burning over tens of thousands of acres, anything in the way of the fire is also burned. Broken down trucks which had been left on the roadside while the driver was looking for a mechanic, were burned down, maize storage bins were burned down.

So we did not even try to convince the farmers of the need to plant trees; And yet, in some mysterious way this activity became a success.

As a Zambian, when you say that you are eating, you mean that you are eating maize. Maize is ground to flour, the finer and whiter it is the better it is. You add five fistfuls of flour to one bucket and you cook while stirring for 5 to ten minutes. Anything you can get besides it, like cabbage, tomato, groundnuts is considered as relish to be eaten with the mealy meal. If you are rich you may even have your own little bag of salt, which is too valuable a product to be shared with your companions. Basically the mealy meal has the taste of some fresh concrete, the digestibility of fresh concrete the major advantage of this meal being that you did not feel any hunger for five to six hours.

We tried to convince the farmers to grow groundnuts. The farmers were no fools; they soon discovered that one hectare of groundnuts will yield 800kg of grain while one hectare of maize will yield 2000kg. All our talking about the nutritional value of the proteins in groundnuts was considered as rich peoples sick jokes. The groundnuts should also have enriched the soils in nitrogen and given a much better crop next year, but how can you see that next years crop is better than this years crop? Anyway who is interested in next years crop when your problem is how not to die now.

We also tried soybeans with poor results. Soybeans have a strong taste and they are difficult to shell. Adding soybean flour to maize flour was not acceptable.

We had better results with the Indian/American way of growing beans in the middle of the maize fields. From the point of view of the farmers, the beans were not stealing any soil away from the maize, so it was OK. The same was true for pumpkins. Beans have another huge advantage; you can eat bean leaves at a time when there is really nothing else to eat. If you are familiar with beans you will also know that nearly all bean leaves are slightly poisonous. We also discovered the marvellous “winged beans” which we received from South Africa, everything in winged beans is edible.

But we were on the right track, if we wanted any innovation to be accepted, it had to been seen by the farmers as additional food, not as food stealing away from the maize crop.

At my government House at the research Station of Mount Makulu, I started planting eucalyptus trees all around the house. Eucalyptus trees are really ideal, they need no care at all.

Then I discovered that there were nurseries around the town were I could buy very cheaply fruit trees; Nobody would be fool enough to plant mango trees, they grow by themselves. The fruit trees were obviously confused by the inversion of the climate compared to Europe but they managed to produce some fruits. It was not a major success as no grown up would eat fruits, fruits are eaten by children who get sick, get diarrhoea and die of dehydration.

We were lucky, those were the years when all the journals had articles about nitrogen fixing trees and bushes.

I needed the help of a colleague who put my nose on a leuceana hedge to see my first nitrogen fixing bush. It does not look very impressive. If you are familiar with acacia trees, or mimosa bushes, they you know what a nitrogen fixing bush looks like.

We started by harvesting the seeds from the leuceana hedges growing all over the research station and learned how to germinate the seeds.

It appears that Nature had planned that the bushed would be eaten by ruminants, that the seeds would travel through the digestive system and then germinate in the muck. We wanted a faster track, so the seeds were dipped into boiling water for less than a minute, then the seeds would germinate within a week. As we had thousands of seeds, planting was no problem, you simply dug a kind of shallow channel in the soil, dropped the seeds and covered; Bushes would grow by the hundreds within 2 months. After two years you had an edge which was two meter high, whenever you needed a pole for anything you just went out to the edge and cut down a leucena. It did not matter as there were hundreds of them.

I did what any settler does, I looked around my house and saw that the hill behind my house, going down to the river, was bare; So I started planting it with bushes. However one should always remember that any good intention carries in itself the seed of discontent. Women digging out acacia trees to get at the roots which were used for the fermentation of the local beer would see me storming on them and threatening them with the most fearful possibilities (which ones would they be) if they killed the acacias just for the purpose of getting three acacia roots. Any goat straying on the hill would be convinced with stone sharp arguments to try its luck somewhere else.

Little by little we improved. I got seeds from Peru, my colleagues got seeds from Hawaii, we diversified into all kind of nitrogen fixing plants, we even planted the parking place around the Ministry with bushes.

Little by little it became evident that this was going to be a success; there was no investment, there was no hard work, there was no maintenance care and the results were magnificent.

The nitrogen fixing bushes would provide fodder for the cattle, the poles always came handy, and when they were cut down they were useful to make charcoal. Most of us also discovered the pleasure of letting some bushes grow to tree size and give shade to the house.

So, apparently, I fulfilled my fathers wishes, I planted trees. I often think about the trees I have planted in Africa, that whatever happens, nothing can prevent the seeds from spreading. At the same time I am aware that introducing a foreign species to Zambia, will affect something in the eco system in a negative way. Did I act as a fool?

I regret that at that time I was not familiar with vetiver. You may know vetiver, it looks like some tall grass, you may have used shampoos flavoured with vetiver. For us, vetiver had a very special quality, its root system is huge, colossal, endless. When you plant vetiver on a slope attacked by erosion, vetiver will consolidate the whole hill and stop the erosion. The grass is eaten by the cattle, without any damage to the hill, it is really all profit.

This activity with nitrogen fixing tree had an unexpected consequence. My wife, Annie, started a fabrication of authentic African Art Craft which were sold by the only Lusaka boutique too foreign tourists. What else could they buy in Zambia?

If you wanted to see true original Zambian art you had to travel one thousand kilometres to Mbala to the Moto-Moto museum. It had been created by a French priest who used to travel around the country with a motorcycle, thereby his name “moto-moto”.

It started with the leuceana seeds and the bean seeds; we had so many of them that the house was full of seeds, some stored, some germinating, some rolling on the floor.

When the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) provided us with leuceana seeds from Peru, we also got a leaflet explaining what was done with the seeds in Peru; if they could make necklaces with beans and seeds in Peru, why should we not be able to do the same in Zambia.

In the beginning, Annie did some necklaces for fun, just to find some good patterns; then she started giving them away to the wives of our house staff; then, seeing that they were fond of these necklaces, Annie thought that they could learn to do themselves the job. She started with Ackim's wife, then other wives joined.

It does not take many days to produce a necklace, the most difficult thing is to find different seeds, different sizes, different colours, the most precious ones being the lucky beans, nice red ones making the necklaces more attractive. Then Annie had only to try and find an outlet for them and started looking around in Lusaka. Some local curio shops got interested but the curio shop at the Ridgeway's hotel with the very nice and beautiful African looking young lady as shop manager was very helpful. Being a woman she was very keen to help poor village women and accepted to try selling them to tourists proposing them as “local traditional craftsmanship”. Quite soon they were buying ten necklaces every two weeks.

It may sound as a business of dubious honesty but it is better than letting the curio shop sell carvings made in Hong-Kong. Anyway the shortage of local stuff was so huge that you could not even find postcards in Zambia.

Our hope was that we could teach the wives to produce the necklaces, go to the shop, sell them and get the money, preferably out of the reach of their husband's thirsty hands. That proved to be a rather optimistic hope, the wives were quite willing to produce the necklaces as a group job, but walking into the shop to sell them was too frightening for them.

As Annie had found that there was a market for “original African genuine craftsmanship” she started producing dolls and African animals with rags. Young unmarried girls of about15 with one or more children started sewing elephants, hippos, wild looking cats with the help of the mission sewing machines and were very happy with the unexpected money flowing in. Annie had learned how to make dolls when the United Nations Women's Group wanted items to sell for the Christmas Bazaar they were running to get funds for their charity.

Given time, I think Annie and I would have cornered all the national market for authentic African art objects.

Pod Mahogany or Lucky Bean Tree

By Adrian and Jimmy Storrs

Drawings by Pythias Mbewe

Curator of Copperbelt Museum

Ndola.

There are several trees in Zambia that have lucky beans so it is best to call this tree Pod Mahogany or mupapa. The beans are really the seeds and because they are hard and black with orange and red tips they make lovely bracelets and necklaces. Many visitors buy the beans and take them back home. However, the beans are not always easy to find as many animals and birds like to eat them.

The wood is hard and strong, light and red or golden brown in color, and it lasts for a long time. It makes nice furniture, and many of the chairs and tables in our homes are made from this tree. Also, because it is strong, it is often used to build bridges and houses, and for canoes.

The leaves of the tree can be cooked and eaten as vegetable. Wild animals and cattle certainly enjoy eating the leaves.

If you live in Ndola or nearby you will know the famous "Slave Tree".At first glance you will see only two fig trees, but if you look closely you can see that there is a third tree around which the figs are wrapped. This third one is a Pod Mahogany which is being very slowly strangled by the figs. This "Slave Tree" is a National Monument as it is part of Zambia's history.