IV 



CLOVES 187 



trees, while the drought itself will have killed off many 

 thousands. It will always be to the interest of Zanzibar, if 

 not to over-produce, at least to keep the markets well stocked, 

 in order to keep out opposition and preserve the monopoly. 

 As long as the monopoly is maintained the clove industry will 

 never hopelessly degenerate, in the way, for instance, that sugar 

 planting has. 



Maltreatment of the Trees. The rough handling which the 

 trees receive during picking is a very serious evil, and one 

 difficult to check. The shamba people are as bad as, if not 

 worse than, the outsiders, and seem to have been trained upon 

 careless and destructive principles. To be too strict in the 

 matter is to run the risk of your wa-geni pickers deserting to 

 other shambas, where they will not be molested. It is the buds 

 upon the tops and the lateral extremities of the boughs that 

 are so difficult to reach, and at Machui we were compelled to 

 leave those. At Dunga, where we had sufficient labour to keep 

 half a dozen ladders going, we did not succeed in thoroughly 

 clearing the trees. Three men working one ladder will bring 

 in 6 pishi a day ; it would therefore have been unprofitable to 

 have diverted the labour, where it was scarce as at Machui, 

 from the accessible buds to the ladders, where three men could 

 only pick the equivalent of one. 



Another fruitful source of trouble is the ravages of the maji 

 moto ants, which weave their nests in the branches and are 

 sometimes so bad that pickers cannot climb the trees till they 

 have first smoked them out by lighting a fire underneath. 

 When this takes place the lower branches of the trees are 

 frequently singed, and the trees sometimes fired altogether. 

 The ravages of maji moto ants can be kept under by weeding. 

 Well-weeded shambas are seldom troubled much with ants. 



Experimental Drying of the. Cloves at Dunga. Both Mr. 

 Kobertson and myself have given a good deal of attention 

 to clove drying. We studied the Arab methods, and found 

 that they almost invariably heaped up their green cloves in the 

 godown the first night after they are picked. If the weather 

 is showery, preventing drying, the heaps remain for several 

 days, growing larger with each day's picking. Fermentation 

 is in this way set up, the cloves emerging a rich brown colour. 

 It occurred to us that as this colour approached the rich tan 

 colour so desirable in the dried clove, that a properly controlled 

 system of fermentation might be beneficial. But our experi- 

 ments showed this idea to be erroneous; cloves should be 

 spread out immediately upon being measured in ; heated cloves 

 turn black. We trained our people to separate the burst from 



