How deep is the African plum tree rooted in Yaoundé natural and cultural heritage?

Abstract

In a 1980 paper on urban trees in African cities, the geographer Philippe Haeringer pointed that a man-tree identification could be seen in the relationship between sub-Saharan African city dwellers and fruit trees, as the latter appeared with the urbanites and outlived them to the point of bearing witness to their passage. Since fruit trees survive city dwellers, what are the possibilities of these trees becoming a local heritage? To reflect on the position of fruit trees in the lives of city dwellers, we seek to explore how their owners perceive and use them today, in relation to their sense of inheritance from the past and the way this sense of inheritance is articulated to the future. Using the example of a fruit tree indigenous to Central African cities, the African plum (Dacryodes edulis, Burseraceae), in Cameroon, we propose to analyze how the uses, perceptions, and cultural practices related to this food tree present in urban home gardens help understand how it is part of the city dwellers’ history and culture, and thus possibly of their heritage and identity. Building on interviews conducted with 173 African plum tree owners from three different neighborhoods in Yaoundé, we will discuss more specifically how tree planting is embedded in family and rural-urban networks, and how food and non-food uses and symbolic knowledge are distributed between individuals from different neighborhoods, genders and ethnic identities.