The Shea Nut Tree – the “Golden Goose” for North Uganda’s women.
Try googling “Shea Butter” on the internet – I did, and got 2.65 million ‘hits’ – just 0.1million hits short of “Princess Diana”. Pure Shea Butter (a.k.a. Karité), goes on sale in the US from high end retailers for up to $8 for a tiny 7 gramme pot – my goodness, that’s over $1000 per kilogramme! I had to check the figures, but yes - that’s double the going price of pure silver! Even Ugandan ‘fair trade’ shea butter sells for almost $400 per kg…. Why? Because natural Shea Butter is full of goodies - various vitamins and interesting fatty acids - and its promoters claim a truly impressive array of cosmetic properties. I quote but a few that help to make Shea Butter popular from the cradle: as a “healing salve for babies' umbilical cords” … to the grave - “Shea Butter smooths wrinkles…”

But not just that - it “absorbs rapidly into the skin without leaving a greasy feeling” and contains anti-inflammatory agents making it useful as a “decongestant” and to treat “insect bites; sprains; arthritis; sunburns; and even frostbites” (the latter surely not a traditional African usage!). It can treat “dry, weathered skin and chapped lips” and be used to reduce the symptoms associated with “psoriasis, rosecea, eczema, acne, dermatitis, skin allergies, fungal infections”. “Applied regularly, it even prevents stretch marks”! It also “promotes healing of minor wounds, abrasions, and burns” and “reduces scarring”, and can be used as a “hair and scalp conditioner, maintaining moisture in dry brittle hair, revitalizing and preventing breakage”. In addition, shea butter has “natural sunscreen properties”, though “different batches vary from ineffective to about Sun Protection Factor 6”, so please, wazungu readers, don’t sue me if you peel after trying it out by the pool. With such magical properties it’s no wonder that Shea Butter is used as an ingredient in all sorts of soaps, lotions and creams. With natural remedies booming, the mere mention of Shea Butter on the side of a small tin is enough to ensure that any skin or hair product sells like hot cakes even if it contains only a few percent.

Other non-cosmetic uses range from the more mundane, albeit vital uses such as a local cooking oil, and lamp fuel, to the intriguing, such as conditioning the wood and skins of djembe drums, to the outright bizarre – The Lord’s Resistance Army are renowned for believing that smearing their bodies with shea butter would make them bullet proof… For this reason, ironically, believers might blame Shea Butter for elongating the war that made me choose the tree as the focus of this piece. And so… to North Uganda, where the nilotic variety of the Shea butter tree Vitellaria paradoxa sub-species ‘nilotica’ – (excuse my latin), grows naturally, but very slowly, in open woodlands. It is known locally, inter alia, as the Moo-yao tree (around Lira), and is somewhat different from it’s close West African variety “Vitellaria paradoxa” that dominates the global trade. Of course, Uganda’s Shea butter traders say the nilotica product is better, and they might be right. But enough of the advertising – if you want to find out the cosmetic pros and cons of East versus West African Shea Butter, then start reading a few of those 2.65million citations on the internet yourself!

Below, I give you some other (non-cosmetic) reasons why you might choose to stick to Ugandan Shea butter from now on. Traditionally the nuts are collected and processed by women, both for domestic consumption as an edible oil, and for sale, providing them with a key source of cash revenue to pay for shelter, essential household goods, health care, taxes, and school fees, uniforms and books for their children. During the years of insecurity, when so many in North Uganda were obliged to live in camps, it was unsafe to spend enough time in the fields to cultivate crops and many women instead were tempted to make shorter, but still very risky forays out of the camps to collect the ripe Shea nuts during the fruiting season. Tragically, quite a number of women were killed in the process.

Due to its great importance in local culture, Shea butter trees have for long been protected by customary laws – those who cut one down were liable to be fined a cow, clearly indicating where the tree stood on the spectrum of local importance. This created an added dilemma for those living in the camps - they badly needed firewood: should they break the taboo, and cut Shea trees close to the camps? Or spare the Shea trees, go further for other species and risk their own lives? Inevitably, rules were waived and some begun felling Shea trees – its slow growing, dense wood makes excellent firewood or charcoal, for which there is high demand in the crowded urban centres of North Uganda…. but the charcoal value is not worth nearly as much as its life-long yield of Shea butter… Others have already begun, or are contemplating clearing areas of the Shea-rich woodlands for large-scale commercial agriculture... but again, surely no crop can beat the earning potential of the Shea tree? As usual the gender factor complicates things: traditionally, men burn charcoal, and engage in commercial agriculture…

Unfortunately, even today, an insufficient proportion of the retail value of most Shea butter traded gets back to North Uganda’s women, and the ‘golden goose’ that has for so long helped them through tough times will need much more active protection. So, next time you feel the need to ‘smooth a wrinkle’, have a think about how buying Shea Butter might help North Uganda’s women rebuild their lives… and insist that as much of the retail price goes back to them as possible.
James Acworth. green.solutions.uganda@gmail.com