How to make a Banana Mat

Tobacco leaves dry under the eaves of the roof.  I am sitting on a low stool, watching Mary, the banana mat lady work. As her hands move a litany of instruction in Chiwandia pours from her mouth. She wants to make sure I know how to make a banana mat. It was a blessing to have Jonathan there to translate, otherwise, I think she just might have continued to repeat herself over and over until even and English speaker understood her words.

First Mary explains the two types of mats, one comes from dried banana leaves and the other is made during the cold season from specific woven grasses. The grass mats are fancier and therefore more expensive, but only by fifty kwacha. This price increase comes from the dye they use to color the natural string made from local plants. Large coils of twisted string, the color of straw are divided into chunks for dipping. The string is died green or a reddish pink. The colors are added to about one liter of water. This is warmed over a fire then the string is dipped for several minutes.

Sitting in Mary’s cozy courtyard, surrounded by trees and scrub brush we sweat in the afternoon sun. But are lucky, there is no rain. It is rainy season and almost like clockwork, torrential rain comes in the afternoons.

Mary starts a mat by stripping what is left of the fronds off the stalk of the banana leaf. The leaves are so dry they crackle as she quickly sheds them. The stalks are Just as dry but fibrous on the inside, lending them a certain amount of flexibility. This is increased as the Mary slices it into smaller strips, the slightly rusty, curved knife moving swiftly through the stalk. For a while there is only the shhk shhk of the knife cutting strips. 

The three varieties of peri-peri pepper bushes blaze red in the sun, a sharp contrast to all the green around us. Next Mary rolls out a previously made mat that they work upon to keep the new mats clean from the swept dirt of their courtyard.  Mary pulls out lengths of string, and then begins to twist them tighter by rubbing it with one hand against her calf while the other holds the rest of the string out. This is then repeated after switching ends of the string. She explains as she does this that they measure how big too make the mats by height.  If a short person is weaving they make it as long as their toes to their skyward outstretched hands. A tall person merely marks it as tall as they are. This should give you some insight as to the height variations of Malawians.

Mary’s husband is de-cobbing maize into a large metal pot while she works. Mary herself is a short, round woman. She has a hearty laugh and a slight accent, a combination of a lisp or talking from the back of her throat. She has distinctive scars or birthmarks across her cheeks bone and forehead some presenting bumps others just patch of pink skin on her otherwise brown face. Her hair has grown out since the last time I saw her, woven into tight braids ending in small tufts of hair, almost like pigtails on the back of her head.

It is not until she stands to get more fronds strips before us and enthusiastically gestures before her at her children, literally jiggling her large un-brassiered breasts that I even realize her blue blouse has two huge rips in the left side causing her chest to be occasionally fully exposed. Even after noticing I am unfazed. You know you have lived in Africa a long time when the sight of a woman's breast or a skinned goat dangling by its slit throat in a market doesn't seem strange anymore.

As Mary works her elderly mother comes and sits with us. Her skin is wrinkled and eyes cataract. Her teeth are going so she has the characteristic toothless grandparent mouth. At one point I take her picture and offer her the camera. She turns it this way and that, squinting and moving it closer to her face.  Mary softly tells her it is a picture of her. She smiles and utters a faint, barely audible ‘oh’ and does the Malawian woman tongue warble to show her extreme happiness. However she is so old that her tongue goes from side to side without making any sound. Everyone joins in heartfelt laughter at Grandmother’s obvious excitement.

Mary begins weaving. She wraps the string around her toes on the stalk to hold it down. Then she selects another stalk and places it on one end of the string. She crosses the strings and pulls tight. It is not knotted but holds firm. She then picks the next stalk and proceeds to weave the mat. After the string line is done it is up to the weaver to decide how far in she want to place the next line of string to go up the mat.  The mat Mary was working on had 5, 5 vertical rows of string to hold the horizontal woven banana stalks in place.

Before I go she sends me off with 2 seedling piri piri peppers and several small spiky topped eggplants. It was her way of compensating for not feeding me during our instructional time. Though I demurred, she insisted, and that night I had fried eggplant spiced with piri piri that made my week.