Kenema Kola Nut

The kola nut’s name might recall the world’s most globalized beverage, but the two have little in common. The kola nut is the fruit of the kola tree, which belongs to the same family as cacao, Malvaceae. The tree is native to the tropical forests of West Africa, and still grows wild in Sierra Leone and Liberia. There are around 140 species of kola, but the most widely consumed in Africa are the wild Cola acuminata, also known as small or bitter kola, and the cultivated Cola nitida, known as big kola or kola nut. Cola acuminata is brown, while Cola nitida can be of different colors, ranging from yellow to pink to red when fresh and from brown to dark red when dried. The fruits contain caffeine, kolatin, theobromine and tannic acid.
For centuries this fruit has been a vital part of different areas of daily life and given it important symbolic meaning; it is used in religious practices, as a sexual stimulant and in social customs. In Sierra Leone, kola nuts are consumed during rites and ceremonies, to welcome guests, as a symbol of friendship, to seal an agreement or to mark a reconciliation. During Ramadan, soft drink producers make a kind of ginger ale with water, ginger, kola, chili and sometimes sugar. They use white kola, because oddly its juice is darker red in color than other types of kola nuts.
Kola is used in traditional medicine; chewing a piece after meals helps digestion, and the caffeine in the fruits aids concentration. It is also used to reduce hunger pangs. The Mandingo and Temne ethnic groups also use the nuts as a brown dye for fabrics, after they have been ground and soaked in water.
In the southeastern regions of Sierra Leone (Kenema and Kailahun districts), Cola nitida is grown intercropped with coffee and cacao, smaller plants that like the shade cast by the large kola tree. The fruits are picked twice a year, between May and June and between November and January. After the harvest the fruits are cut open to extract the nuts.
One fruit may contain eight to ten nuts, each protected by a yellow skin. To remove this, the nuts are laid out on the ground on a mat, covered with banana or mango leaves, and soaked with water. The skin rots in about a week, making it easy to remove. The nuts are then washed with fresh water before being stored in baskets or sacks lined with fresh mango leaves. The humidity of the leaves is essential to stop the nuts drying out, and thus the nuts can be kept for more than six months and easily transported. Kola nuts from southeastern Sierra Leone are known for their flavor and texture (crisp rather than fibrous), and many traders come to Kenema from as far away as Senegal, Guinea and Mali.