It is distinguished on Kenyan market stalls by its green color and chubby shape. Thick, picked before ripening, the matoke banana looks a lot like its cousin, the plantain. But the local variety, the fruit of “East African highland bananas”, has its roots in the tropical highlands of the Great Lakes region.
Matoke, or matooke, is right at home in Uganda, the second largest banana producer in the world after India. Here, it is consumed daily by 75% of the population. It is the staple food for 30 million people between Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, bringing the number of consumers on the continent to 100 million. So much so that in Kampala, the word has become synonymous with food.
Steamed or boiled, sliced or whole, there are a thousand ways to cook this strongly starched and tasteless banana. It is generally cut up, cooked in banana leaves, mashed or served in a stew to become the famous matoke.
“It’s a comfort dish, family, that our grandmothers prepared for us during our childhood, we consumed it at home, says Chanya Mwanyota, a young Kenyan entrepreneur. But with the new urban lifestyles, people decide to taste it on the go, “explains the one who launched in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, Grandma Ruks, a home delivery service of local gastronomy during the Covid pandemic. -19.
“It’s a hit because it’s a local, inexpensive dish that you can serve with just about anything,” she adds. On his menu, the options are legion: topped with fish, beef or chapatis. All for 450 shillings (3 euros). A price that is not within the reach of all budgets in a Kenya subject to inflation, where daily workers prefer to taste it in a hurry, and for a third of the price, in one of the many kibanda , roadside eateries.
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In recent years, the green banana has experienced a comeback among the Kenyan middle class thanks to the injunctions to eat well and eat locally. In Kenya, a study by the Ministry of Health shows that 45% of women aged 20 to 49 are overweight or obese. “We sometimes forget in Africa to cook healthy meals,” says Paulino Awino, a Kenyan chef based in the United States.
“Because our countries have experienced rapid development, the new affluent class in the cities wanted to copy Western habits of fast food and fried food,” she said. Today, the green banana is getting its revenge and is even appearing on the menus of chic restaurants in Nairobi.
In her latest cookbook Africa Eats: Traditional
“People realize that Western food is prestigious, but our indigenous dishes are better, often easier and cheaper to prepare,” insists the Nairobi-born chef, whose family hails from the town of Kisumu, near the Ugandan border, in a region where green banana plantations thrive.
Although it is sold everywhere, the matoke banana is mainly widespread in western Kenya. “As soon as someone comes back from Kisumu, I ask them to bring me some kilos, it’s very special for me,” she confesses from her American culinary exile. If she describes, in her book, the traditional East African recipe for matoke, stewed with beef, her secret touch is to drown the banana in a peanut sauce. A “delight”, which Pauline Awino abused during the Covid-19 pandemic, when she made her own “return to local foods”.