The overall composition of this painting suggests that it shows a marriage ceremony or the rapprochement between a husband and wife and their respective parents-in-law, reminiscent of the Iteso sorghum beer ceremonies (above). According to the traditions of this East African tribe, the woman should make the beverage, which is then served at the entrance to her hut or carried to in-laws by near relatives. The close correspondence between such traditional ceremonies and an ancient “Neolithic” depiction, all within the hypothesized sorghum-beer belt extending across the center of Africa, cannot be accidental. To my mind, the painting at Tassili n’Ajjer, about halfway between Hierakonpolis and the upper Volta region, provides compelling evidence that Neolithic traditions of sorghum beer manufacturing were indeed carried one step at a time across the Sahel and Sahara to Burkina Faso, where their influence persists thousands of years later.
PALM WINE AND OTHER LIBATIONS
Converting cereals into alcoholic beverages, assuming one had the expertise to process, saccharify, and ferment the grains, had distinct advantages over making drinks from honey, fruits, and other natural products. Most high-sugar resources were available only at certain times of the year and could not be kept for long. Honey was the exception, as its high sugar content gave it a long shelf life; but it was in limited supply and quickly used up. Africa, however, had no shortage of wild cereals, which could be kept in sealed storage bins for months until needed to make the next batch of beer.
Beer never totally displaced other fermented beverages, which had their own special flavor profiles and potentially higher alcohol content and could be effectively mixed with a cereal beverage. Generally, archaeobotanical research in Africa shows that fermentable fruits figured prominently, as might be expected for a fruit-loving species such as ours (chapter 1). Sweet and luscious Ziziphus fruit is recorded not only at early Neolithic Nabta Playa but also at contemporaneous sites on the upper Nile in Sudan and at late Neolithic Naqada, close to Hierakonpolis along the middle Nile. Hackberry (Celtis spp.), which we have already surmised might have been used to make a fermented beverage at Neolithic Çatal Höyük in Turkey, is attested at the same Sudanese sites and at fourth-millennium B.C. Kadero, north of Khartoum; it shows up in Mauritania, in the western Sahel, between 1500 and 500 B.C. Dried fruits of the fig, soapberry tree, and other plants were recovered from caves in the remote Tadrart Acacus mountains of the Libyan Sahara. Moreover, many of these fermentable fruits were associated with traditional medicinal additives to wine and beer—for example, caper, Rumex, and borage—or could themselves have been used as principal ingredients. The date palm (Phoenix dactylifera), a later source of fruit for making a potent wine, is also in evidence in the Tadrart Acacus around 6000 B.C. and is the basis for beer drinks in modern Darfur.
Of all the potentially fermentable substances in Africa, the enormous variety of palm tree species, adapted to semiarid and rain-forest conditions, stand out. Many produce fruits that are turned into wine, but an even more intriguing alcoholic beverage is made from their sap or resin. The most important species for making palm wine are the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), the ron or palmyra palm (Borassus aethiopum), and the raphia palm (Raphia vinifera), which are concentrated along the humid east and west coasts as well as in the dense jungles of the interior.
Today, adroit “tappers” clamber up the rugged bark to the towering fronds by tying a vine or rope around their waists and hoisting themselves up step by step. Our inherited primate propensity for climbing trees to get fruit (chapter 1) is a distinct asset. At the top of the tree, the tappers skewer male and female flowers, bind them up so that there is a steady flow of sap, and attach a gourd or other container to collect the sap. A healthy tree can produce nine or ten liters a day and about 750 liters over half a year. A more brutal approach is to fell the tree, thus killing it, and collect the sap all at once.
Because the sap has already been inoculated with yeast by insects eager to consume the milky, sweet exudate, the fermentation process is self-starting. Within two hours, palm wine ferments to about a 4 percent alcohol content; give it a day, and the alcohol level goes up to 7 or 8 percent. The end result is an aromatic and slightly carbonated elixir: the paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin described it as a pétillant French Champagne, and another early European explorer likened it to a fine Rhine white wine.
The long pedigree of palm wine in Africa is provocatively intimated by the 18,000-year-old botanical finds at the Upper Palaeolithic site of Wadi Kubbaniya. In addition to wild grains, tubers, chamomile, and water lily (Nymphaea spp.), which might have been made into beverages or used as additives, this important site yielded fruits of the dom palm (Hyphaene thebaïca), which is eminently tappable. This tree thrives in the blistering temperatures of the Horn of Africa, today the nations of Somalia and Djibouti, where the local peoples still skewer the flowers and collect the resin in tightly woven palm-frond baskets to make a mildly alcoholic wine. Because fermentation proceeds so quickly in the hot climate, a tapper can enjoy a taste almost immediately and pass along the bounty to helpers on the ground. When humans chop into its flowers and stems, the tree grows luxuriant foliage along its trunk.
Farther west in the Sahel, tropical palms proliferate. Beginning by at least 2000 B.C. and continuing into the first millennium B.C., a mixed foraging and horticultural society, centered on the oil palm, had spread out across the region that is now Burkina Faso, Ghana, Cameroon, Gabon, and the Congo Basin. Numerous sites, even in the poorly explored interior jungles, are littered with ground stone axes and hoes, which could have been used to tend and thin out competing trees or, less likely, to chop down palm trees for their resin. A sharp rise in oil-palm remains during the second half of the second millennium B.C. strongly suggests that tapping techniques had been refined. Because the tree propagates itself by dropping its fruit or through dissemination by humans and other animals, it does not need to be domesticated; only careful management is required. Intriguingly, the oil-palm remains are very often associated with fruits of the incense tree (Canarium schweinfurthii). Today the aromatic, resinous bark of this tree is employed in the treatment of numerous illnesses and infections, from eczema to gastrointestinal complaints, coughs, and gonorrhea. One way that it is administered is by preparing a decoction in palm wine.
African jungles, like those of South America, teem with potential medicinal plants, which innovative humans had probably already begun to explore for their healing properties when they were first encountered; the centrality and persistence in religious traditions of some of these plants imply as much. For instance, peoples throughout the region where the oil palm was exploited practice the Bwiti religion, whose main beliefs revolve around the iboga shrub (Tabernanthe iboga). According to one founding legend, a pygmy fell out of a tree while collecting fruit. A creator god picked him up, cut off his fingers and toes, and planted them; they grew up as the iboga.
The roots of the iboga are rich in indoxyl compounds with powerful hallucinogenic properties. Among the Bonga of the lower Sangha River, a tributary of the Congo, palm wine laced with these hallucinogens lubricates all-night ceremonies overseen by a shaman and accompanied by drum and harp music and exuberant dancing. The initiates say that iboga, the “generic ancestor,” transports them into the kingdom of the ancestors, who lead them along dazzlingly colored roads and rivers to the gods.
Throughout Africa, drinking palm wine is a practice with intimate ties to the ancestors. Social drinking only proceeds after flicking some of the beverage onto the ground to honor the deceased, much as Mother Earth first needs to be moistened with chicha in the Andes. The funerary ceremonies of the Giryama people in coastal Kenya, whose livelihood once depended exclusively on their palm-tree holdings, illustrate how an alcoholic beverage mediates between this world and the next and effectively integrates the social, spiritual, and natural orders. When a respected plantation head dies, the first funeral lasts seven days and nights for a man, and six days and nights for a woman. Hundre
ds of wailing mourners gather around the grave. After the mourning period comes feasting and dancing. By plying themselves with palm wine, the celebrants assuage the grief of the dead ancestor, whose spirit looks on with pleasure and recalls how he or she enjoyed the same beverage in life. After another one to four months, the festivities are repeated for three days and nights at a second funeral, at which the new plantation head is named. The enormous cost of these funerals must be justified by the way they serve to bind the community together, but shrewd plantation owners plan ahead by expanding their palm estates through astute negotiations for additional wives.
Contrary to the view that sees our “ancestors” in sub-Saharan Africa as totally benighted and resistant to new technologies and ideas, peoples there made pottery as early as the supposedly more advanced Near Easterners. They herded animals and cultivated a huge range of plants from at least around 6000 B.C. and likely much earlier. They also developed their own fermented beverages, like palm wine, or were ready to try new ones with some help from the outside, as is likely the case with making sorghum beer. Although most African fermented beverages were improvised from locally occurring plants, sometimes a cultivar that could provide special delights was introduced from a distant locale. The domesticated grape from the Levant was transplanted up the Nile and out to the desert oases over the course of Egyptian dynastic history. Vineyards were planted in Nubia and Ethiopia by around 2000 B.C. so that the peoples there could make their own wine. Recently, grapes and wine have seen a resurgence throughout the continent, so that virtually every country, just like every state in the United States, now produces wine. The modern colonial period opened up Africa to American crops, including cassava or manioc, which can be made into beer in the same way that the native yam can be transformed into an alcoholic beverage.
One imported foodstuff from Southeast Asia highlights the need for much more intensive archaeological research in Africa. Scientists have long believed that the banana (Musa spp.), which was domesticated in New Guinea in the fifth millennium B.C., reached Africa only in the mid-first millennium A.D. Then, in 2000, came the astounding announcement that a banana phytolith, a characteristic microscopic silica accretion that forms in its leaves, had been found embedded in a first-millennium B.C. sherd of what was undoubtedly locally made pottery at Nkang, Cameroon. This site belongs to the far-flung West African societies that had begun exploiting the oil palm and other plant resources. This archaeological bombshell was followed by another in 2006: the bottom layer of a sediment core from a swamp at Bunyoro, Uganda, radiocarbon-dated to the mid-fourth millennium B.C., contained fourteen Musa-type phytoliths. At one fell swoop, the date for the earliest banana in Africa was moved back three thousand years.
Because the phytoliths were recovered only in a single layer, and thousands of years separate them from specimens of the past five hundred years, one wonders whether the phytoliths are intrusive. It’s wise not to make too much out of a unique find, such as the domesticated wheat and barley from Wadi Kubbaniya and Nabta Playa (above) or the domesticated fig at Gilgal I in the Jordan Valley (chapter 3). We might be assured that a cluster of phytoliths were found and that all the radiocarbon dates are consistent, but how can we be confident that a single banana-leaf fragment did not somehow contaminate the sample, perhaps by groundwater percolation or an animal’s moving it there from an upper level of the core? The radiocarbon dates of the core could be genuine but the banana evidence intrusive.
Whatever the date of its arrival, the banana had made serious inroads into Africa before the beginning of the Christian era, possibly brought to the east coast by proto-Malaysians who traversed the Indian Ocean in outrigger canoes. The ripe fruit, with 20 percent or more fermentable sugars, had enormous potential for making an alcoholic beverage, and where the plant took root, especially around the lakes in the Great Rift Valley, the resulting drink acquired all the significance and accoutrements of a native beverage.
The Rift Valley peoples had other fermentable materials available to them—millet, sorghum, honey, and palm sap—but during the past two millennia, banana wine came to the fore in both east and west Africa. Starches in bananas naturally break down into sugars as the fruit ripens, leaving a sweet pulp inside the darkening skin. That makes it challenging to peel and eat an overripe banana but facilitates the production of a fermented alcoholic beverage.
Among the Haya people of Tanzania, it is a man’s job (contrary to the more common practice of women being responsible for beverage making) to extract this sugary liquid from the fruit and keep the village well supplied with banana wine. Ripe bananas, peeled or unpeeled, are piled into a wooden vat or hollowed-out log, mixed with fine dried grass, and then stomped by foot, just like grapes. In the past, women of each household probably made the wine by a less labor-intensive method, squeezing out the juice of the bananas by hand. Once collected, the mush is kneaded and pressed through the grass, to which the peels adhere, until a thick creamy mass has formed. After filtering through a grass sieve, the fruit pulp is topped up with water; additional cereal malt might be added; and the trough or vat is covered with banana leaves to keep the liquid warm. Fermentation commences quickly, especially if the same vat or log is used repeatedly, and continues for at least a day, yielding a beverage with about 5 percent alcohol. Longer fermentation yields more potent beverages but makes the wine more prone to spoilage.
The Haya have very specific rules governing the consumption of banana wine. A man sips his through a reed drinking tube from a gourd with a long, narrow neck. Women can drink either from a banana-leaf cup or a short-necked gourd but must not use a straw. Before anyone of either sex imbibes, a gourd of banana wine is offered to the ancestors at the household altar. The king, who traditionally received sixteen or more liters of wine from large-scale consignments, propitiated the ancestors with banana wine in grander style: he donned his ceremonial cow and leopard skins and, in the company of priests and to the sound of drumming, presented gourds of wine at their graves and shrines. The new moon was a critical time for these ceremonies, as it was believed that the ancestors roamed the land then and could cause disaster unless they were placated with the banana wine that they had enjoyed while alive.
Placating the dead was clearly a widespread preoccupation in Africa. The prayer of the Tiriki of northwestern Kenya, as they sprinkle a cereal beer onto the ancestral shrine and drink it with straws from a jar set among the stones of the monument, captures the spirit of the diverse, exciting world of fermented beverages on the continent where our species began:
Our forefathers, drink up the beer!
May we dwell in peace!
Everyone is gathering; be pleased, oh ancestral spirits.
And may we be well; may we remain well.
(Sangree 1962: 11)
NINE
ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES
Whence and Whither?
TO UNDERSTAND THE MODERN FASCINATION with alcoholic beverages of all kinds, as well as the reasons why they are also targets of condemnation, we need to step back and take a longer view. Alcohol occurs in nature, from the depths of space to the primordial “soup” that may have generated the first life on Earth. Of all known naturally addictive substances, only alcohol is consumed by all fruit-eating animals. It forms part of an intricate web of interrelationships between yeasts, plants, and animals as diverse as the fruit fly, elephant, and human, for their mutual benefit and propagation. According to the drunken monkey hypothesis, most primates are physiologically “driven to drink,” and humans, with bodies and metabolisms adapted to the consumption of alcohol, are no exception. Like water, a fermented beverage refreshes and fills us up, but it does much more. Apart from the peoples in the Arctic and those at the southern tip of South America in Tierra del Fuego—dwelling in climates too harsh to support any sugar-rich plants—almost every known culture has produced its own alcoholic beverage. Signs of indigenous fermented drinks are also so far noticeably absent from Australia, perhaps owing to limited excavation
there. The use of the hallucinogen pituri by Aborigines may be a later substitution for alcohol, as tobacco might have been for native North Americans.
Beyond the physiological imperative, the universality of fermented beverages in human societies cries out for even farther-reaching explanations. Certainly, the natural occurrence of fermentation, one of the key processes that humans harnessed during their Neolithic revolutions, provides part of the answer. As Benjamin Franklin said in a letter to André Morellet in the late 1780s, “Wine [or any fermented beverage, for that matter] is continual proof that God loves us and that he likes to see us happy.” Fermentation contributes nutrients, flavors, and aromas to food and drink—whether a lambic beer, Champagne, cheese, or tofu. It removes potentially harmful alkaloids, helps to preserve them because alcohol kills spoilage microorganisms, and decreases food-preparation time and hence fuel needs by breaking down complex constituents.
Uncorking the Past Page 33
