Within our garden at Makumira, there were
two massive mango trees that have been standing side by side for I don’t know
how many years. Two people couldn’t reach around the girth of either trunk, but
three people would be too many. The canopy spreads over part of the tree
nursery and over the dirt road that passed by. We built our potting banda
(shed) under the canopy to take advantage of the cool shade. The banda was
essentially four poles with simple roof trusses and coconut-leaf thatching.
Along one side we built a workbench where four people could stand shoulder to
shoulder to fill pots and sow seeds.
Mango flowers are profuse, tiny, in big,
creamy bunches with a mild smell something like lily-of-the-valley, but be
warned, some asthma sufferers really do suffer when the tree is in full bloom! Because
of the flowers, enter the monkey! There was a resident troop of Sykes monkeys
in our area, maybe eight adults accompanied by five or six younger ones. Adults
range between four and six kilogrammes and their tails are long and flaccid. We
have seen David Attenborough visiting gorillas. They seem to just sit there chewing
on fruit, seeds and to a lesser extent foliage. In comparison the Sykes monkeys
are browsers, feeding as they travel. They have their food sources and visit them
almost by routine and regularity. Not that you could set your clock by them.
They are mainly tree dwellers, but if there is an opportunity on the ground
they will take it! They first arrive by jumping into tall silky oak trees that
are covered in bougainvillea vines, not seeming to mind the thorns. They swing
and climb their way to the mango trees, where, if there are flowers, they feast
on them. But because the flowers are profuse, only about ten percent are eaten.
They break dead branches which fell onto the banda, or anyone standing under
the tree! And most of us were peed upon once or twice. They also eat the
succulent growing tips especially between seasons when there are no flowers and
no fruit. Oh yes they are comical to watch.
Once the fruit begins to form, the monkeys
are there to sample them, but the young fruit are not flavoursome so one bite
and they drop them to select and sample another! The bigger the fruit becomes,
the more you have to duck out of the way! Even when the fruit are large, but
still not quite ripe, the monkeys are hugely wasteful, one bite and then the
fruit is dropped. That doesn’t change even when the fruit are juicy and ripe!
Abundance equates to waste! As an aside, there is a huge fig tree on another
part of the garden! Figs act on monkey bowels just the same as humans. And we
were below!
As far as I know, these were the only
mango trees in the village so the half to fully ripe fruit were a mecca for the
kids! They like the taste of salt sprinkled on unripe mangoes, so their season
is long. Especially kids walking to and from school over considerable distances
packed a hunger and the mangoes were a target for them. First came the stones thrown
by kids trying to knock fruit out of the tree! Whether the stone hit a fruit or
not, gravity always causes the stone to return to earth, through the thatched
roof, onto our plants or back onto the track where kids waited at the ready to
catch their prize.
It’s God-given right of passage for kids
to pinch fruit off trees! I was a champion at in my day! But at Makumira, the
likelihood of injury worried me, so I was fairly active in dissuading kids from
biffing stones. All kids are hungry, African kids possibly more so, and to be
fair, the majority listened to me because (wink, wink) I had a strategy. My big
worry was that if one of the kids ended up bleeding, the responsibility would
fall to me to do something about it. We were warned one in four was likely to
be HIV positive, so it was a personal risk to me because I had no rubber gloves
or other protection available to me. The inevitable did happen when a boy was
struck square on the top of his head with a fist-sized rock! Blood poured down
the boy’s head so I rushed inside for a roll of toilet paper. Its ok
unused toilet paper is nearly sterile. I unrolled a hefty wad and told the
boy to hold it firmly over the wound. With more wads, I cleaned him up while being
very careful to avoid touching blood. The direct pressure stopped the bleeding,
so I told him to toss his wad away and gave him another to hold in its place. Off
home he went accompanied by his younger sister, just in case he fell over. He
was fine, but had the bleeding not stopped, I would have had to take him to
hospital, which could have led to all sorts of issues!
As you would expect, some boys were good
climbers. The boundary fence was only a visual barrier, not sturdy and easily pushed
aside, so the boys were able to climb the trees and toss fruit down. But this
was a similar scenario, if one of them fell out of my tree, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about! So I used to
be vigilant to catch the climbers and threaten them with a ride to the police
station! They knew I wouldn’t do that and a couple of them treated it as a regular
game – actually, when I think about it, I did too. They were good kids.
I wasn’t going to deny the kids, so I
brought my strategy into play. Using a very long and awkward pole with a wire hook
on the end, I harvested mangoes twice daily, and filled a couple of buckets. When
kids came down the hill and we made eye contact, I would toss them a mango.
There was no way that I could give every kid one, it was first come, first
served. The little kids I knew would never be able to catch their fruit, so I
would hand one to them through the netting fence, my reward was their ear to
ear grin! I would distribute the fruit before and after school. It was the best
I could do.
Tanzanians do not like snakes and Mbise
told he saw a python climbing one of the mango trees, probably after sleeping bush
babies. He thought it was about five metres long! That’s big. It freaked out
the nursery workers so nursery production was down for about a week until they
forgot about it! But they were just as frightened of the beautiful six inch
chameleons! There were always plenty in the trees when there were flowers
because flies and other insects are the pollinators. People don’t like how one
eye of a chameleon can swing around independent of the other!
Trees are valuable communities, always
worthy of a second look!
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