African Wildlife & Environment Issue 81

FAUNA, FLORA & WILDLIFE

Where did Marulas originate? For the Marula, I am going to start at a beginning, that was deemed to be a long, long time ago in West Africa. This is because some years ago, Tony Cunningham told me (and I hope I have remembered this right) that this may well be where the species evolved. Archaeologists, excavating in a West African cave that was occupied by humans for at least 50,000 years, found small Marula fruits at the bottom of their sequence.Then they noticed that the size of the fruits slowly increased over the millennia - reaching the size we now usually find in the wild. This was interesting as it showed that people were selecting bigger fruits, and as such people may well have influenced Marula fruits slowly getting bigger over time, due to selection. There was also speculation that when people with cattle moved east from West Africa, and then south, maybe 3,000 years ago, that they brought Marulas with them because they are such useful trees. Therefore, our South African Marulas may well have arrived here because people brought them - so strictly speaking they may not be truly indigenous (archaeologists call such species 'manuports', and globally there are many examples that I find fascinating!). In South Africa the first cattle known were in the Western Cape ~2,000 years ago, and then about 500 years later they were in the east of our country, spreading as far south as Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha). A quiz question: why not further west? Like so many things from the distant past, there is also a view that Marulas were part of southern African scene some 12,000 years ago - before cattle. Possibly we will have to wait for thorough genetic studies to solve all the questions; but maybe that research has already been done and I am simply unaware of it? If anyone can add to this, please do so!. Moving to the present When we ran the Southern African Wildlife College (1998-2002), near the Orpen gate to Kruger, on land that formed part of the Timbavati, we were surrounded by Marulas, where they tend to grow in groves on granitic ridges. The College was built on such a ridge because these slightly elevated sites tend to have fewer mosquitoes! I took a group of local elders for a tour of the College and environs, and these old people

A Marula in summer dress (note that under the canopy a common grass may be Panicum maximum )

And bare in winter

reminisced about when they were children and lived in the area (before they were relocated to one of the so-called 'Homelands'). On that day the veld had been recently burned and when we stopped at some of the Marula groves, that had been old kraal sites, we always found pottery sherds and broken grind- stones (what I learned that day is that when people leave a site and break their grind-stones, this signifies that they have left the area not to return. However, if they leave the grind-stones intact, it means that their displacement is only temporary and they intend to return.A very different type of land-ownership!). Another intriguing observation we made back then was that there were very few, if any, young Marulas in the land around the College (basically in the Kruger Park), while over the road in the tribal lands there was a very healthy, multi-aged, Marula community. What made this more interesting is that researchers based at Skukuza had recently published a paper that concluded that Marula seeds would not

21 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 81 (2022)