NNINZIWRITER’S CORNER

  Christmas Card 2024 May the Fulfillment of Your Goals in the New Year  Be as Abundant as Ffenne in Nninzi Village in 2024!

Nninzi village is doing well. In April 2024, some farmers were busy tending to young bean and maize crops. Others had started harvesting the early-ripening coffee beans from the traditional type trees. The big harvest of the so-called cloned coffee types will begin in June.  It has been raining since December 2023. Farmers are happy with the rain and sunshine. So, what else is new?  Today’s morsel has a provocative title. What good thing in Nninzi could be too much? After all, this is rural Uganda, 150 kilometers from Kampala, which we think has all the good things in life!  First, a little science for the ordinary person ( saayansi n’omuntu wa bulijjo )! Green plants need light to make food for themselves and us. The scientific name for this process is photosynthesis. Plants utilize light during the day to do so. Under normal circumstances, in the presence of light, plants direct their growth towards the light. However, plants also grow at night, but their growth te...

Life in Nninzi village would only be life at all with the plant known as highland bananas. Everywhere one looks, banana groves flourish. Bananas are tall, unbranched herbs! They do not have a stem, as the apparent stem consists of overlapping leaf bases with a central fragile core or stalk. Some have short stalks up to five feet. The most significant number have medium-height stalks of ten feet. Then there are the giants with stalks reaching up to fifteen feet. In Nninzi, we use every part of the banana plant directly, except maybe the roots. But I suspect there is someone who knows some medicinal value of banana roots.   However, we want to look at the most beautiful part of a growing banana plant - the inflorescence - the final part of the core or stalk. The dictionary gives three related definitions: the part of a plant that consists of the flower-bearing stalks, the arrangement of the flowers on the stalk, and the process of flowering blossoming. When an inflorescence emer...

One of the oldest houses in Nninzi village, Komukungu House, is no more! Today, there is a field of exuberant maize plants where the house used to stand. Modernization and the clamor for land have caught up with it. The house was named after its owner, Komukungu , the matriarch of a family that settled on the land in the 1920s. It is said to have been constructed by 1923. Clearly, it must have been a grand structure in its day. Above is the front of the house with a prominent porch. There are suggestions that the porch was a later addition in the 1950s or 60s when porches came into fashion with the introduction of corrugated iron sheets as roofing. Below is the back of the structure with several sturdy poles supporting the veranda rafters. Village residents suggest that three additional bedrooms were probably added at the back at the same time the porch was devised.  Clearly, Komukungu House must have been magnificent! As is evident, the walls were of mud and reeds but the house...