
Skeeti. Collected June 2016. Habitat: Under trees close to the dry Lengusake River, where it passes behind Lengusaka, Kenya.
Note: My study of the smoke cured and fermented milk of the Samburu will have some application to the milk cuisines of neighboring pastoralist cultures such as the Pokot, the Rendille, and the Turkana. The woods documented here are mostly selected because they are used in the context of the Samburu milk culture, either as a wood burned as part of the process of “preparing” the lmala (“calabash”) for milking, and woods use to make the lmala themselves.
While lmala is usually translated into English as “calabash,” there are only a a few lmala that are made from gourds. Most of the twenty plus milking containers used in the context of Samburu milk production are carved from wood by women.
The botanicals used to sterilize the milk containers between uses as part of the cleaning process impart their own flavor to the finished product, and they also influence how long the milk will stay good before becoming kongu, stinky, rotten, bad.
If you have information to share about these botanicals, then please leave a comment.
Thank you.