Tanzanian Ritual Perimetrics and African Landscapes: The Case of Dracaena*

Abstract

Whenever I encountered the dracaena plant when hiking through the forests of North Pare, Tanzania, my companions found it significant. “Ah, here we see an old homestead, ” they would say, or “this must be an old grave. ” This shrub, which has green sword-shaped leaves growing from central stalks, is ubiquitous in the social landscape of North Pare. It forms living fences between adjacent fields, it marks the borders of sacred groves and graves, and it symbolizes the “coolness ” and peace that result from having the ancestors’ blessings in Pare. I had long considered the social functions of dracaena in Pare to be examples of the arbitrary production of cultural meaning in a society’s physical environment. I was wrong. I had put my North Pare work aside in 2004 to review the literature on African sacred groves for a book I was editing.1 I was looking for general themes, and so was quite surprised—astonished, really—when I found references to dracaena in West African sacred groves. It is a common genus throughout the tropics, so its presence in West Africa was no surprise, but the striking continuity of social significance in both East Africa and West cried out for explanation. This article is a preliminary attempt to make sense of the

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