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Lost Crops of Africa: Fruits, Volume III
the junglesop, produces probably the family’s biggest fruits—as long as a forearm and as thick as a thigh. A third—perhaps the strangest of all—”hangs like a bunch of sausages,” each fruit a separate bright-scarlet link.
Climate Tropical.
4. Ebony
The jet-black, rock-hard heartwood known as ebony is perhaps the smoothest, shiniest, and most beautiful of all the woods; renowned worldwide for expensive carvings, it is regarded as almost a precious material, and can sell by the gram. But Diospyros, the name of these trees’ genus, actually means “fruit of the gods,” and outside the tropics ebony species are most renowned for the persimmon. In their domicile in the wild, African members of the Family Ebenaceae also produce widely enjoyed fruits. And they could be much more widely enjoyed. The fruits have advantages: They are suitably sized for marketing on a large scale, attractive to look at, and appealingly succulent and sweet. They are, however, very soft and delicate. This fragility is at present the biggest—perhaps the only—barrier to ebony fruits becoming a valuable, everyday, Africa-wide food.
Climate Mostly tropical.
5. Gingerbread Plums
Within virtually the whole of sub-Saharan Africa—the vast stretch of territory between Senegal and Madagascar—there exist a number of interrelated wild fruits (Parinari and kindred genera of the Family Chrysobalanaceae) with agreeable strawberry-like flavors. These so-called gingerbread plums can have a texture firm enough to crunch like a crisp apple. Usually red or yellow in color, these plum-sized delicacies lack the sourness typical of wild fruits (and of true plums, for that matter). Millions of aficionados, notably children, love their crunchy sugariness, and consume them in quantity.
Climate Moist tropical and subtropical.
6. Gumvines
Some of the roughly 17 Landolphia species (Family Apocynaceae), occurring mainly in West and Central Africa, bear masses of fruits that make tasty morsels. These “gumvine fruits” or “rubber fruits” look somewhat like apricots, with tough skins that are red, yellow, or orange in color. The plants themselves are common and are obviously at home in the African environment. They are forest lianas and sprawly shrubs nowadays admired for their jasmine-scented flowers as much as for their plentiful fruits or the latex-filled stems that once provided Europe and other parts of the world with much of their rubber.
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