Remembering in a Field of Enquiry

This is a story from the field. It is a cairn along the path of my journey of enquiry: a high point marked to make visible a shift in perception, a lengthening of my line of sight. The fieldwork is ethnobotanical, the projects were in Zambia.

Since my return to Scotland a decade ago, I have been writing reflexive narratives based on my experiences, making short pieces that have come together in a small book, Yarn of Remembering. With regards to my approach to research, the experience of being a student of Holistic Science at Schumacher College strengthened my ability to ‘think ecologically’, while membership of the Research-in-Action Community has developed my skills of reflexivity.

Throughout this article, I consider not only the ‘results’ of my fieldwork, but more finely and carefully the inward effects of my actions and perceptions – my rememberings – which I weave into the narrative as I go along. This is my understanding of reflexive practice, which has shaped my experience as a practitioner in the field of ethnobotany.

In this sense, there is much more to the practice of ethnobotany than recording facts from the field and writing up findings. But, that is how I began. Where I began was on the northern side of the River Zambezi.

I conducted most of my fieldwork in Western Province – also known as Barotseland – while my home was some 200 kilometres downstream towards the Victoria Falls, on a small island where my friend Brett had built a rustic camp as a haven for weary travellers – and curious researchers! From there, I would set off several times a year with my field equipment and sufficient supplies to see me through 10 days ‘in the bush’, along with Mr John as herbalist and camp hand, and Boyd as translator and project manager. On occasion, Brett would join me as a wildlife guide and fellow adventurer.

The focus of the early trips was to assess the sustainability of harvesting oil-rich Mongongo nuts on behalf of a small, Lusaka-based, organic products company, Kalahari Biocare. Mongongo grows in a discontinuous belt across southern Africa, where the sandy soil and climate suit these thick-boled, pale-barked trees. They are often cut down to clear land for new fields, but in Barotseland there remain extensive areas of woodland. The trees are still valued for their fruits and seeds as a subsidiary food source, and people collect sackfuls of fallen fruits on their way home from the maize and sorghum fields, carrying them back to the village in ox-carts.

I based my camp in Mongongo woodland near the village of Mwinga, where the headman and his family welcomed me and gave me permission to stay a while. I employed local youths to help me with the survey work, and learned of their worries about finding regular paid employment. I felt deeply at home camping under the canopy of palmate leaves, and was at my happiest at the end of a hot day’s fieldwork, sitting on my faded canvas stool with a tin mug of black tea, the kettle steaming away on the smoky fire which Mr John would rekindle when I returned from the sampling plots.

Headman Mwinga and his wife would visit me occasionally, strolling up from the village with gifts of freshly harvested vegetables, such as green leaves of Bondwe, an amaranth that grows wild at the edges of cultivated fields, or boiled cobs of maize. These additions to my diet of tinned fish and beans were a treat – but I was unsure how to show my gratitude, finding it difficult to know ‘the right thing’ to offer in return.

Each Mongongo fruit contains a hard nut resembling an almond, with a shell that requires a sharp and skilful blow to crack open and release the kernel. The woman who first showed me the technique was sitting on a reed mat on well-swept sand by her house, surrounded by chipped, white-enamelled bowls piled high with nuts. She used the stem of a bicycle pedal as her hammer. I was unable to master the technique.

Traditionally, the kernels are boiled in water to yield a rich, nutritious oil which is skimmed off and used for cooking, whereas Kalahari Biocare workers cold-press the kernels and export the oil to Europe for testing and subsequent manufacture of organic skincare products. Collecting methods were defined and monitored, as requirements of EU organic certification, which followed from my reports.

Harvesting Mongongo provided a valuable source of income for members of the local marketing associations, which were established in villages where people were willing to undergo training and adhere to good practice. So far, so good. The research project was funded by UK and French humanitarian organisations which supported rural livelihoods, especially for women, and the Mongongo woodland was being looked after as a valued resource.

Things became somewhat spikier, however, as Kalahari Biocare began to explore the export potential of devil’s claw, a creeping plant which grows from swollen underground roots proven to have anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties. Known locally as Seto, the botanical name is Harpagophytum, with the species H. zeyheri found in Zambia. The name ‘devil’s claw’ refers to the grapple-like hooks extending out from its woody seed capsules, which are dispersed on animals’ hooves and legs.

The plan was to harvest the roots sustainably, training local monitors as before, and then apply for EU organic certification for the supply of sliced and dried devil’s claw, traceable to a specific harvester or family and village. Sacks of this lightly processed material would then be exported, and manufactured in other countries into regulated medications – pills, capsules, tinctures, creams – for the treatment of arthritis in humans and animals.

This was in contrast with the unregulated business that was creeping into Barotseland from neighbouring Namibia, with traders arriving at nighttime to transport sacks of devil’s claw by river in dugout canoes or by road in large trucks. The Namibians were ‘paying’ the local farmers with only maize meal and sugar in exchange for a commodity whose value would increase at each stage of its journey from Zambia to the deep-sea port of Walvis Bay, and overseas.

There is a well-established export chain connecting these medicinal plants of Kalahari Sands vegetation with Europe and the USA, but many areas in Namibia have become exhausted over decades of unsustainable harvesting. Zambia had not been part of the supply chain until there was pressure from exporting companies to look for fresh territory.

Year by year, the mother root of Seto produces strings of secondary roots which radiate out through the sandy soil, expanding the plant’s reach and building up stores of food during the wet summer to support future growth and for sustenance in the dry winter months. Each of these secondary roots grows longer and bulkier over the years, if left to develop without disturbance.

As pressure comes to dig up more Seto for export, even the skinny and short secondary roots are now being harvested and – disastrously – the mother roots are being extracted. Subsistence farmers in the communities I visited for my fieldwork knew that, to sustain their sources of Seto, the mother plant should be left to grow and produce more side roots which, season by season, would provide traditional healers with their source of medicines.

In my first venture into the villages and fields where Seto could be found, I went with questions which, at that stage in my understanding, seemed clear and simple. My aim was to establish at the outset whether or not those areas had the potential for sustainable harvesting and if there were people who would allow me to record traditional practices. Such questions as:

What ailments does Seto treat?

Have you ever taken it?

Does it work?

Who prepares the medicine for you?

Where does it grow?

Can you take me there?

I was always accompanied by Boyd, with whom I had worked on previous fieldtrips and who was fluent in English as well as SiLozi and several other Zambian languages. Sometimes I caught Boyd’s gesture or facial expression which told me that he was uncomfortable translating my questions, and later we would chat about this around the campfire, often ending up in laughter about my blunt approach and lack of cultural understanding.

The most puzzling thing for me, in those early days, was how many different answers I received about the uses of devil’s claw. Now, having learned about ‘redundancies’ in the potential for one plant to heal – that is, an abundance of forms of action, not all of which are expressed at one time in one particular set of circumstances – I understand how devil’s claw can offer multiple manifestations of pain relief.

My report concluded that Kalahari Biocare’s small-scale operation would be sustainable and enriching for the local associations – with the proviso that community leaders commit to undergo training in harvesting methods and put in place monitoring procedures.

This was agreed, so I designed and ran a week-long residential workshop for representatives from all the participating communities, and produced a monitoring guidebook which was translated into SiLozi.

By this time, devil’s claw was becoming a ‘hot potato’ politically, due to the on-going illegal trade with Namibia. The Forestry Department of Zambia had a licensing system for managing the extraction of ‘non-timber forest products’, and was adding devil’s claw to an existing list, but it was unclear how this would benefit local harvesters and protect the plants.

I perceived an arc of pain connecting the lands where devil’s claw is harvested and the countries which import it. Pain is caused through loss of traditional sources of medicines, damage to fields, and exploitation of local labour. In contrast, pain is relieved in people and animals by the use of pharmaceuticals that contain devil’s claw raw material.

Over many weeks of studying the plants, I absorbed into myself a sense of their way of life – their forms, movements of growth, gestures within their surroundings. I used the practice of Goethean science. This way of enquiry brings receptive and active attention to the plants, observing their appearance and behaviour while setting aside pre-conceived theories. I was finding that this approach brought an experience of plant-environment-me as one whole phenomenon.

One day, I waited for a moment when I could be alone (with no other human beings) among a patch of devil’s claw plants and asked them for their response to the matter of over-harvesting. Were they at risk? Would they disappear completely from this land?

The answer that arose was that the plants would retreat, would withdraw to the edges of the land where they could survive and conserve their resources. They would become unseen, invisible, undetectable for a while. They would let the people forget them. This would be a way of continuing, alive in memories, for a different future.

I sketched this picture in the field, as I contemplated the potential for harm – as well as good – that the search for plant medicines world-wide can have on people’s wellbeing and livelihoods. Would I continue to buy herbal medicine in Scotland if the ingredients were harvested from other people’s lands, now that I had witnessed the possible consequences of their commodification?

At that high point in my fieldwork, I faced a choice. Seek funding and a sponsoring organisation to employ me to stay longer and dig deeper into the devil’s claw story in Zambia; or accept that my part was done, acknowledging my achievements in successfully completing research for Kalahari Biocare, and return to Scotland.

I chose the latter path.

A decade on, and I find myself at the same place, brought here through the experience of remembering. Standing by the cairn, looking back to find ragged traces of the road I took, ideas and perceptions I gathered along the way.

I am feeling the pain of stopping. No more field trips to Mwinga. No more Mongongo and Seto. I express my feelings of joy and connection, and of pain and separation, in poems. One of which I include here, with a second poem further on.





Walking That Way


walking that way,

living in a way that clears the path

clears the path of weeds

letting some remain at the edges

where they bound and bind

and nourish, wildly and freely

one gift for another

and what can I offer?

what can I put in the bowl

which they gave me and I emptied,

and now I’ve cleaned it and

am waiting eagerly, anxiously

to hand it back

to weave another strand of the rope

but I don’t know how to do it

so I ask Mr John,

should I put something in the bowl

when I return it?

and he says it’s up to you.

when the headman and his wife come back

to my camp, I hand over the bowl

which I have filled with the only things

I have to give,

and they quietly take back the bowl

and sit with it while we talk and drink tea

under the Mongongo trees

whose fruits I am measuring and counting.

I catch some words of SiLozi that tell me

that they accept my gift

and they understand that I don’t understand

their culture and I can’t know their ways of

what’s right and wrong.

I see that a few fine strands have been passed across the gap

and the rope begins to weave itself.

Reflecting now across the years, I remember with love my experiences of driving for hundreds of kilometres through sandy woodlands to visit traditional villages, groups of people gathering around me with whom I had no shared language to set out survey plots and gather samples and measurements.

I was nourished and fulfilled by every aspect of the fieldwork. Planning, assembling, packing. Leaving the island quietly at dawn, crossing the river in a makoro, the paddler guiding the long, wooden canoe through damp, vegetal air. Climbing into the driver’s seat of the 4x4, pulling on my rugged, hemp hat and waving bye through the open window. A long day’s drive due west and, finally, turning off the tarmac and heading up a lumpy, sandy road as the sun set over the floodplain. Setting up camp with Mr John at last-light and heating up a home-cooked stew on the tangy wood fire. The first, tentative day of walking the land, working out where to begin. And allowing each of the precious days to go along as they would, surrendering to the wonder of it all.

I feel changed. Changed by remembering, which I experience simultaneously as a high point where I can look out, and a way in: sight lengthening to gaze through translucent layers of memories imbued with the vividness of the present moment.

I also feel changed by how much I have forgotten. But, how can we know that we have forgotten memories? They remain invisible, out of reach, and yet they seem to shape our lives. Perhaps they are sensed, not as things in themselves, but by how life forms around them.

My way of life in Zambia – seasonal, earthed, rooted, purposeful – still nourishes me today, and I am inhabited by a question as I write this piece:

How can I find the same sense of being with, in my homeland of Scotland?


Asking Questions

asking questions is harvesting from the wild

I’m harvesting from the wild in myself

but here now in Scotland

there are no Mongongo trees

no headman Mwinga

no-one handing bowls

across the gap

it’s more than a gap,

the ribbon-road has disappeared

and I’m wandering through the land looking for it,

that’s what I’m doing

and when I find traces of it,

of the ribbon-road,

What will I do?

I want to do my bit of

ribbon-road-repair

of finding the hidden tracks,

the overgrown line that could be

revealed

to others

so that they can

walk along it if they wish

or just know it’s there

put it on the map

my work is to put that road

back on the map,

there is map-making work to be done,

re-drawing the maps,

finding the old names

and using them to re-name

to re-name the places and the ways,

the ways

I’m going to look for the tiniest traces

tracks signs

of the knowledge, of the relationships,

of who-told-who

and when and where

and like an archaeologist

and a collector of pebbles

I will collect stories

and songs

and words

and what will I do with the bits I collect,

with the pebbles?

can they pave the road,

mark the way across the terrain

to join up the traces?

the pebbles can be cairns along the way,

yes, cairns along the way.

Through my practice of remembering scenes and conversations, and recording them in reflexive narratives, I am experiencing a strengthening of my connections with the people and plants among whom I lived in Zambia, despite the ever-stretching time apart. Now, here in the Scottish Highlands, I am looking for ways to follow my fascination with lost stories, forgotten practices, fraying knowledge – the torn ribbons of ways of living and how to speak of them.

With this in mind, I have initiated a new project. At a practical level, it is a Seed Sovereignty pilot scheme called Seed Circle Lochaber, which I am designing in collaboration with the Lochaber Environmental Group. The aim is to support local food-growers to use open-pollinated plants as sources of their seeds, lessening the grip that the transnational petrochemical companies have on the supply of seeds to small farmers and home-growers.

Many of the participants in the Seed Circle are people with small gardens or allotments, whose motivation to participate in the pilot scheme is the provision of fresh, nutritious vegetables and the fun of growing plants from seed saved and shared among a community of like-minded folks.

My motivation to run this project, however, is fed by my fieldwork experiences. I have witnessed the damage that can result from the commodification of edible and medicinal plants. Now I wish to make a small difference in my local area by bringing greater awareness of the sources of seeds and the ways in which they are widely controlled and manipulated for commercial gain – conditions which contrast with the lively experience of growing food using seeds harvested from plants cultivated in accordance with sustainable and locally-adapted practices.

Alongside the pilot scheme, I am crafting my next enquiry, exploring the relationships between people and seeds. I am curious about the language we use when talking and writing about them, and what this reveals about our perceptions of seeds and the way we treat them.