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Leaves. Banana.
by Stephanie Eyocko (she/her)
Stephanie Eyocko (she/her) is a conservationist, foodie, and urban gardener. She’s passionate about locally-grown food and locally-sourced stories and writes about it in Mixed Mag where she is the food Editor.
This piece is part of a series by the Global Vision Initiative titled “Every Dish, A Struggle”. To read more , please head to our Medium account or to our website here.
Banana Leaf
When I called my mother to tell her I’d be writing about the “feuilles de banana,” she chuckled. “Ca ce n’est pas de la nourriture, c’est la tradition,” she said. “That’s not food, it’s tradition.”
Thinking back, she’s right.
As a child, we did not have playgrounds, instead we climbed the tallest banana plant. “La Roseee, où es-tuuu,” my elder brother said as he searched for me. “La Rose, where are youuu?” The past hour, we had been engaging in an intense game of hide-and-seek, and as small as I was, he’d been unable to find me in a field of Musa plants. Our front yard in Bisseke prefecture, Edea, Cameroon was and still is full of Musa plants.
Though the plantain and banana are valuable foodstuff, it is the stems and leaves of the plant that tie much of Cameroonian cuisine together — literally.
“It is about taste, La Rose,” she reminded me, “Le gout de xa aaach” — the taste…beyond words. And she’s right, it is about taste and tradition.
My grandmother would come home with buckets and buckets of manioc, cassava — a versatile tuber in preparation of Ntoumba, a Cameroonian delicacy. We would spend hours removing the skin, washing it with water gathered from the not-so-nearby-well, and soaking it in clean water. The act of peeling and soaking manioc root easily took a day. With the sub-tropical climate of Edea, fermentation would take approximately three days. These actions are necessary, because as important as this tuber is, it contains traces of cyanide and proper care is essential. As we waited for the manioc to ferment, we gathered our Musa leaves, making sure to harvest the leaves with green color and strong midrib (the line dividing the leaf in two). On the third day, my grandpa and male cousins would gather the wood and prepare the fire using kerosene. And the women would…
