Hot off the Press

Imagine you live on the fringes of one of the world’s harshest deserts where daytime temperatures often exceed 40 degrees and trees and shade are rarer than hens’ teeth. Think about if you had to survive on a blend of foraged plant roots, insects and reptiles, supplemented by the occasional hunted mammal. And then imagine that one day you’re lucky enough to bring down a 200kg adult male gemsbok with your bow and arrow, one big enough to feed your family for months. You’ve got a few days of fabulous feasting ahead but you have a major technical issue you need to address: how can you preserve the rest of the meat in a world where fridges and vacuum-sealed packaging don’t exist? It’s not just a conundrum, it’s potentially a matter of life and death. Enter, stage left, our hero: marula oil.

The OvaTwa of Northern Namibia (a hunter-gatherer sub-group of the Himba) are not the only people in Africa to have discovered the astonishing meat-preserving properties of marula oil, but they certainly live in one of the continent’s most testing environments. If meat preserved by marula oil can survive for months in the extreme conditions of the Namib desert then surely it can stop the skin on my face – only subject to the relatively benign environment of Christon Bank, just north of Harare – from ageing prematurely?

I first came across the almost miraculous anti-ageing properties of marula oil in the mid-Nineties. I was working with a rural community in Nyamatikiti, a small village near Rushinga in the north east of Zimbabwe, where we were trying to figure out ways to help people protect their indigenous woodland. There were a lot of marula trees in the area and it seemed to me that creating an economic value for these trees would provide a compelling incentive for their conservation.

Our initial attempts were focused on the fruit. Marula, as anyone who’s ever tasted one will testify, produce the most startlingly delicious plum-shaped fruit. For centuries these have been the basis for a variety of intoxicating beverages and there are many communities in southern Africa who revere the fruit so highly that they celebrate the annual harvest with parties and, in some cases, full-blown festivals. The Oshituthi Shomagongo Marula Fruit Festival in northern Namibia is of such enormous cultural significance that it is protected and celebrated by UNESCO as part of the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”.

However, the very thing that makes marula fruit so wonderfully delicious also makes them incredibly hard to work with: yeast – those single-celled fungal organisms that are the basis for all bread-rising and beer-brewing. Marula fruit are covered in millions of tiny wild yeast cells that ferment really quickly. This is wonderful if you want to produce an alcoholic beverage but a disaster if your intention, like ours, is to produce a more wholesome non-alcoholic fruit juice. No matter how hard we tried we couldn’t stabilise the product quickly enough to stop it fermenting. Our first batches proved remarkably popular with the village schoolchildren who kept coming back for more. I couldn’t help noticing increased levels of joviality after a single serving and by the time they were on their third glass, the assembled company of Grade 7s were all demonstrably intoxicated. Back to the drawing board.

Then I read an article about the oil from the kernels of the marula nut being used to preserve meat and it got me thinking. By far the most plausible mode of action would be antioxidant. Lipid oxidation is the main non-microbial cause of quality deterioration in meat. Perhaps marula oil somehow inhibited oxidation? “If it did that for meat,” I thought, “might it not also do that for human skin?”
Antioxidants are something of a holy grail in skincare: the push-back against the use of mineral oils (such as paraffin) was driving a growing demand for natural, plant-derived oils. If we could figure out how to produce oil from marula kernels there could be a market for the oil as a skincare ingredient. So we set out on the next stage of our journey: how to extract the oil from the kernel. It turned out to be much, much harder than anticipated.

Humans have extracted oil from plant seeds for millennia. The traditional technique involves boiling the seed, allowing the oil to rise to the surface in the resultant soup and then scooping it out. This is fine for home use but it doesn’t work for industrial production because you can never fully separate the oil from the water. Also, the act of boiling may materially alter the very properties you want to preserve to make it effective in skincare. Hence the focus on cold-pressing.

We sourced an oil press from a supplier in Harare, brought it down to Rushinga, persuaded the nice men at ZESA to rig us up a power supply and switched it on. The resultant mess still gives me shivers when I think about it.

This press was made for sunflower seeds which have just the right amount of hard shell and soft kernel to produce a nice, clean oil. But the outer shell of the marula nut is impossibly hard and there’s no way a sunflower oil press can break it down properly. So we had to laboriously crack the nuts by hand and extract the soft, oily kernel from inside. When introduced into the oil press, this produced a thick, glutinous mess with the consistency of peanut-butter – wholly unsuitable for skincare.

Eventually we found some folks in Namibia who were facing the same conundrum and had come up with a hydraulic cage press to extract the oil. A batch of kernels were placed into a cylindrical mesh in this simple but ingenious device and then slowly squeezed so that the oil came out through the tiny holes in the mesh while leaving the bulk of the kernel inside. It was very slow and very labour-intensive but the quality of this oil was incredible.

The next challenge was to find a market for the oil. Hand-in-hand with our new Namibian friends (and soon joined by others from Botswana and South Africa) we found our way to the headquarters of the Body Shop, situated at the time in Southampton in the UK. With immense pride and absolute conviction that a sale was guaranteed, we showed them our marula oil samples. “This is wonderful,” they told us. “If you can guarantee us a minimum of 30 tonnes a year, we’ll look at it.” We gulped. So far the combined production between four countries didn’t exceed 30kg. We had a long way to go.
But we did it: the Body Shop took on marula oil as one of its Community Trade ingredients. Other brands followed suit and marula oil gradually became recognised as one of the skincare world’s most effective natural antioxidants.

Fast forward three decades and today there are thousands people in rural areas who make a respectable living from the harvesting of marula fruit and the extraction of the kernel from the nut (the best quality oil still comes from kernel extracted by hand). Skincare brands fall over each other to find reliable sources of the oil. Here in Zimbabwe we now have multiple companies producing the oil, one of which was commissioned by the President himself. Marula oil has well and truly made it and there is a high chance that you have used it at one time or another in your own skincare regime.

I think the most remarkable part of this story is how three different ethnic groups – the OvaTwa in Namibia, the Venda in South Africa and the Tonga in Zambia and Zimbabwe – all discovered, independently of each other, that meat would keep for far longer if marula oil was dripped onto it before it was air-dried to make biltong. It’s a real testament to human ingenuity.

These southern African groups still benefit from the traditional knowledge passed down from previous generations because these are the very communities who are producing marula oil for the skincare industry today. So every time you use a skincare product that contains marula oil, not only are you doing your skin a massive favour, you’re also helping these rural communities by providing a market for their products. This, I think we can all agree, really is a genuine win-win for everyone.

Gus Le Breton (aka the African Plant Hunter) is a Zimbabwean ethnobotanist dedicated to the development of novel plant-derived ingredients from indigenous plants in Africa.

HOT OFF THE PRESS