98 THE KINGDOM OE UGANDA 



to Negrolaud would be almost too recent to explain its long connection 

 with Negro life as testified by linguistic evidence ; neither is it easy 

 under present climatic conditions to conceive of the plant having been 

 cultivated from Western India through Southern Persia and right across 

 sterile Arabia. Was it by any possibility brought by some navigating 

 people like the Phoenicians or Sabteans across the Indian Ocean, and 

 started as an introduced plant on the east coast of Africa, thence ta 

 spread right across the continent to the Atlantic (Jcean ? * Could 

 it be possible that the immigrants of ]Malay races, speaking languages 

 allied to the Polynesian stock, who at unknown and distant periods drifted 

 across the Indian Ocean from Sumatra and Java to Madagascar, brought 

 with them clumps of banana roots ? The idea seems extremely improbable- 

 The cultivated banana, it must be remembered, produces no seed, and 

 therefore can only be propagated by dividing the roots. Each year 

 the banana, which in the botanical system is not very far off the orchid 

 group, sends up, like an orchid, a fresh stem from a new root, while the 

 old one, after flowering and fruiting, dies. Did the Arabs introduce the 

 cultivated banana from Eastern Asia into East Africa as they did into 

 Egypt? If so, they could only have done this — even if they did it 

 before the Islamic period — as far back as about 2,000 years ago. If 

 this was the means of its introduction into tropical Africa, then in that 

 relatively short period it has spread over all the tropical regions of the 

 continent as a cultivated plant. Of course t am fully aware that several 

 wild species of Musa are indigenous to Africa, as others are to Madagascar. 

 Is it quite impossible that none of these indigenous species of Musa could 

 have originated the cultivated form of the African banana ? The fruit 

 of all these wild species differs from the cultivated fruit very markedly 

 in developing large black seeds which are embedded in a pulp that not 

 even an anthropoid ape could eat with any pleasure. Is it possible that 

 the slightly bitter, dry, tasteless white pith surrounding these large 

 inedible seeds could have been any attraction to primitive man in Africa, 

 so that he protected and fostered one of these species of Musa until it 



* An allied problem is the distribution of the cocoanut palm, the origin of 

 which, judging by its nearest relations in the palm family, Avas in the Pacific Islands. 

 It is quite possible to understand the cocoanut ]ialm having been introduced all 

 along the east coast of Africa, where it is so abundant, by Malay, Phcenician, 

 Indian, Persian, Chinese, Portuguese, Arab navigators, but how did it reach the 

 west coast of Africa? The cold of the Cape peninsula would not permit of the 

 cocoanut travelling round the south end of the continent back to the tropics 

 along the west coast. Yet apparently the Portuguese found it growing on the 

 west coast of Africa when they first travelled in that direction. Possibly, however, 

 it was introduced by them after all from Brazil to the Avest coast, in which case it- 

 has spread up and down the coast with remarkable rapidity. 



