|
Chikanda, An Unsustainable Industry
by Mike Bingham
In
December 2005 two women and their male driver called at Mark
Harvey’s Kapisha Lodge in their old, slightly battered truck, before
setting off for Lusaka’s Soweto market, 800 km away. They were
chikanda traders, who had been touring the area from village to
village buying small quantities of chikanda tubers, harvested in the
peat dambos. Their haul consisted of four 90 kg grainbags each
containing some 80,000 small tubers of kalobola, two or more
species of the orchid genus Disa.
 When
Audrey Richards published her survey of the diet of the Bemba
(A.I. Richards, 1939. Land,
Labour and Diet: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe. London:
Oxford University Press.), chikanda was not highly regarded.
A bag of dried caterpillars would be an appropriate gift from a fit
man or woman desiring an interview with the chief. A bag of chikanda
would be acceptable only from a destitute widow. During the past few
decades that perception has changed, and chikanda has become a
delicacy served at upmarket restaurants in the cities. Originally
restricted to a few tribes in northern Zambia and Malawi, and
Katanga, the taste for chikanda has now spread throughout urban
Zambia, and is no doubt also spreading southward into countries
where it was previously unknown.
The
chikanda ‘cake’ is prepared by pounding to remove the skins, and
cooking with soda or wood ash, and a dash of salt. Peanut flour is
added and the thick liquid poured into pans, and left to set as it
cools. The final product is an opaque brown jelly, sold at roadsides
by the slice.
The
tuberous orchid plant survives the dry season as a tuber with a
single bud, which sprouts in November, at the start of the new rainy
season. Traditionally the tuber harvest begins in April, when the
aerial parts of the plants have dried off.
The
growing appetite for chikanda has had a dramatic impact on orchid
populations, and methods of harvesting the tubers. While in Audrey
Richards’s day people were probably harvesting only a few wetland
species of Disa, sometimes referred to as chikandafye
(the ‘real’ or ‘original’ chikanda), they now also take rarer
woodland species of this genus, as well as species of Satyrium,
Habenaria and Brachycorythis. The species of Eulophia,
such as the common pink-flowered E. cucullata, do not have
tubers, but a different kind of storage organ, known as pseudobulbs,
which is fibrous and inedible.
 Harvesting is now taking place not only in April, but also in
November and December, after the fires, when the young sprouts are
dug up. After several years of growth a plant may have accumulated
enough food reserves to produce a tuber of about 5g, but after
repeated annual harvests the larger tubers are soon depleted and
only small ones remain. The plants being harvested at Kapisha were
dwarfs compared to fully mature plants, and the largest tubers were
no more than 1g. The quality of the tubers declines rapidly as they
feed the growing plant. Harvesting in December can be regarded as a
mopping up operation, after all the best plants have been
eliminated.
Throughout northern Zambia chikanda harvesters, mostly women and
girls, are having to walk ever greater distances, sometimes having
to camp out, to find a few kg of tubers, which they will exchange
for chitenge material or other personal necessities. In recent years
most of the tubers coming to Lusaka are from southern Tanzania, from
as far off as Iringa. That orchids are generally more abundant at
the higher altitudes, in submontane grassland, and that the people
there have not yet discovered the delights of chikanda, makes
southern Tanzania a fertile source of high quality tubers. The New
York based Wildlife Conservation Society, engaged on a project in
southern Tanzania, became aware of the problem, and persuaded the
Tanzanian government to create a national park of the Kitulo Plateau
in order to provide protection for the orchids.
What
can be done to save our orchids? Firstly we must identify the
problem. Recorded from Zambia are 28 species of Disa, 25 of
Satyrium, 81 of Habenaria and 14 of Brachycorythis,
making a total of 148 potentially vulnerable species. Many of these,
however, are unlikely to be harvested as they are too small and
scattered. Some, such as the common Satyrium buchananii, are
regarded as inferior, and are usually not harvested. It is possible
that the total number of chikanda species being harvested in Zambia
amounts to no more than 20-30 species, but these included many of
the larger and more spectacular, and once more common species. The
tubers are difficult to identify, and inexperienced buyers are
easily tricked into accepting inferior types.
I
have often been asked about the prospect of growing chikanda
commercially. My response is that if it was feasible the Greeks,
Turks, Indians or Chinese, who have all been exploiting orchid
tubers for centuries, would long since have worked out how to do it.
It is not difficult to grow these orchids from unsprouted tubers,
and orchid fanciers have been growing orchids from the minute seeds
sown on nutrient agar plates for many decades. The problem is that
to produce a tuber of 5g takes about 5 years, and when the tuber is
harvested the plant is destroyed. Growing the plants which produce
the spectacular blooms on display in florist shops is altogether a
different story. A Cymbidium plant will produce panicles of
flowers every year for many years, and these are valued in tens of
dollars, whereas chikanda tubers are valued in fractions of a cent.
In the countries mentioned, adulterants and substitutes have been
developed, although salep is still used to make a popular
drink, or as an additive to ice cream in Turkey.
The
best prospect of conserving the chikanda orchids is to create
sanctuaries where harvesting is controlled. This is no simple matter
as a Lusaka farmer found when one of his workers harvested his dambo
one weekend. Since the plants are dry when harvested in April, their
disappearance will pass unnoticed unless the area is subject to
frequent and close inspection. Maybe, some time in the future,
communities will organise themselves to control the harvesting to
allow populations to recover. More likely, the orchid populations
will decline until it is no longer worthwhile searching for them,
and those who harvest them will find some more profitable way of
spending their time. There is evidence that this might have happened
in Europe during the early 19th century. Some orchid
species may not survive, but I suspect most will bide their time
until the chikanda craze is replaced by some other transient
fashion.
Photos by
Mike Bingham |
April
2007