The Mango Tree - A Common Ground for Meeting, Eating and Business in Africa

An adult mango tree is less like a tree than a tangible earthbound thunderhead, a biome, a refuge. Massive enough, and substantial enough, to repel both sun and rain, it is a way station for travelers on foot or on bicycle, a gathering and meeting place, the natural spot for a bicycle repairman to set up shop (with a box of well-worn tools, a tube of rubber cement, some vegetable oil, a large knife, and strips of tire rubber that he uses as patches and sell for a myriad of other uses). The entrepreneurial mama might tote her glass-fronted box of sweet mandazi pastries and a kettle of tea to the mango tree by the road. The children know where every mango tree in the wilderness is located, and when its fruit will be ripe enough to strike down with well-thrown sticks or rocks. For the mango tree is like a reluctant god that will only yield its largess when beaten and scourged.

I always felt closest to Africa, most comfortable, when relaxing on a low plank bench in the shade of an avuncular mango. For while I was a guest on that continent, all who rest beneath a mango tree are wayfarers and pilgrims on their way to another place. Sometimes, rather than hitch a ride to the nearest town to catch a bus, I would walk down to the main road and wait to catch it as it passed. I would wait, of course, under a mango tree, and never alone. Buyers and sellers, travellers attending weddings or funerals, school children resting during a long walk there or back, villagers headed toward the city or cityfolks to the country: all shared the same benches, logs, rocks, and woven mats. My white skin and strange accent branded me an outsider (mzungus, "glow in the dark", we would joke, for we always felt hyper-visible, like a drum major in an elevator) but I felt like a less of a spectacle beneath the strong, cool branches of a mango tree.

One of the most memorable mango trees for me grows about halfway between the town of Chake Chake and the mud hut village of Vitongojo on the island of Pemba, Zanzibar archipelago, Tanzania. (You can see it as a jade-green splotch on Google Earth.) Its underside is home to a bicycle repairman (one of many I have known who chose such a venue) named Hamisi. Hamisi knew a few phrases in English, and was always proud to greet me in my native tongue. "And how is it with you?" he would always begin, adding an extra -ee to the end of each word: andee howee isee itee withee you? He would close every conversation with "Take it easy," or perhaps "Take her easy," like a boat -- he always mangled this one so badly that I hypothesized for some time that he was saying something in Swahili: "taka riziki" perhaps, with the final -ki elided: that would translate roughly "pursue entertainment" and make about as much sense.

Some of the best mangos I ever ate were consumed in the protection of the branches that produced them. A great circle cut from pole to pole (prime meridian and international date line) would liberate a hairy pit the size of an oyster; the two halves were best served with an octothorp cut and a deft inversion, outer convex surface becoming concave and inner flesh neatly presented like a bouqet of suger cubes or a surreal hedgehog.

The taste of the mango lingers pleasingly long after the fruit has gone. The tree itself has a similar effect on the mind.