Pronunciation:
Botanical name: Acacia mellifera

Description: “Usually a low shrub, sometimes a tree up to 9m. … A widely distributed acacia found from western Asia, the Middle East, and Egypt south to South Africa and Angola. Widespread in all arid and semi-arid areas of Kenya. … The flowers produce excellent-quality honey (‘mellifera’ = producing honey). Heavily browsed by game and goats in areas where few trees grow. Can make impenetrable thickets. The black Maasai clubs and sticks are made of such wood.”

Uses: Used by Samburu people to clean the lmala container. “Firewood, charcoal, timber, pestles. Clubs, sticks, carvings, edible gum (sparingly), medicine (bark), fodder (pods, twigs, leaves, flowers browsed by camels and goats), bee forage, nitrogen-fixing, soil conservation, live fence, dead fence, veterinary medicine.”

It has red pith which is edible. A little bitter but not very much – at Archer’s / someone from Maralal [?]

Source: Useful Trees and Shrubs for Kenya, Ed. Patrick Maundu and Bo Tengnas; Nairobi, Kenya: World Agroforestry Centre, 2005; https://apps.worldagroforestry.org/downloads/Publications/PDFS/B13601.pdf (accessed July 2024).

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This is the draft manuscript of the Samburu Milk Project, © 2024 William Rubel. 

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Published by William Rubel

I am an author who writes about traditional food and foodways. My book, The Magic of Fire (2002) is about hearth cooking. I have written an introductory history of bread, Bread, a global history (2011) and am currently writing a history of bread for the University of California Press. Other areas of interest include wild mushrooms, and specifically the treatment of Amanita muscaria in the historic record. I also write about Early Modern British Gardens, and for a more general audience, I write for Mother Earth News on bread, gardening, and more. I have an ongoing research project into the smoke-cured fermented milk of the Kenyan Samburu tribe. I am a co-director of the Samburu Lowlands Research Station, Lengusaka. I am the founding editor (1972) of Stone Soup, the magazine of writing and art by young people.

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