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 
