How They Harvest Peanuts and Make Peanut Butter

Peanuts are planted at the beginning of the rainy season, from mid-June to early July.  The fields are cultivated with the short-handled all-purpose tool called a daba, from its name in the Dioula language predominant in the western part of Burkina Faso.  It can be a hoe, a shovel or an axe, and it is most often employed in the bent-over (oh, my aching back!) position that is used for most jobs, from weeding to washing dishes, to be referred to hereafter in this blog as “the Position.”

A Burkinabe 'security system' (their words, not
mine) watches over the peanut field.  The innards
of a calabash are purported to ward off thieves. 

In early to mid-October the peanuts are ready to be harvested.  Women assume the Position to pull the peanut plants out of the ground, shake off the sandy red soil, and pile armloads of plants in the fields.  The kids then come out with bushel-sized or larger aluminum or plastic tubs, and fill them with the bundled plants to carry home on their heads. Often the filled tub is taller than the child.

This field is nearby, just behind our courtyard.

In our case, we harvested the peanuts of both families in our courtyard, along with those of two other families in the area.  Everyone (except the men and older boys, of course) gathered under the trees outside our courtyard to pull the peanuts off the plants.  Kids traded off carrying tubs of plants to dump at our feet and joining in the peanut-plucking. 

While tearing peanuts from the roots, you can eat as many as you want.  They aren’t all that tasty at this stage, though, and difficult to shell, but the kids consume quite a few.  I put in a good three hours under the trees, listening to the women gossip (I’m assuming that’s what they were doing), and laugh, and holler at the kids, and laugh some more.  They also rocked and breast fed the babies while plucking peanuts. The plucked plants went back in the tubs and onto kids’ heads to be dumped back out in the fields as fodder for the roving cattle and goats.  The peanuts themselves went home with their owners for the next step in the process:  drying.

It takes about a week of lying in a single layer in the hot sun for the peanuts to be dry enough to store.  The girls come out early in the morning to spread the peanuts on tarps or simply on the ground.  This has to be done after sweeping the courtyard with a handle-less broom, starting a fire, and hauling and heating water for the families’ bucket baths, and before washing, eating and leaving for school (which starts at 7 a.m. for high school and 7:30 a.m. for the younger kids).  In the evening, and any time there’s a threat of rain, all of the peanuts have to be swept up and piled into tubs and sacks and taken indoors.

During the harvest, people are very generous with their bounty.  Several of the kids I’ve been helping in small ways brought me sacks of peanuts, claiming they were “for you from my mom.”  On my way to school one morning, a family returning from the field with a donkey cart piled high with peanut plants shouted, "Nipela! Please take some peanuts!  We have plenty!"  If you see an acquaintance or are introduced to someone on the street, chances are he’ll pull several handfuls of peanuts out of his pockets and force them on you.  Walking, talking and eating raw peanuts.  It’s what you do.  The ground is littered with peanut shells wherever you look.  At least this is biodegradable litter.

Sometimes you’ll see a big mound of peanut shells, which indicates that someone is going to roast them and sell them in little 25 f bags at the market, or make peanut butter.  The shelling process calls for another communal, or at least family, gathering.  Each little shell is cracked and emptied by hand.  These are not your big ol’ ballpark peanuts; they are the size of Lesieur tiny peas, extra fine, and only rarely will you find three in one shell.

                   

Pretty in pink party dresses, perfect
for processing peanuts.

The next step is roasting.  You sit by a wood or charcoal fire, continually stirring the peanuts in a marmite, until the desired degree of roasting is attained, and then you turn them out onto a tarp to cool, and loosen the blackened papery skins.  Tossing the nuts and skins repeatedly in a shallow basket will separate the skins from the nuts.  At this point, I figured they would pound the nutmeats into a paste in a big mortar, but when I asked, lo and behold, the answer was, “No, we take them to the mill to be ground.”  Transport to and from the mill is, of course, on one of the girls’ heads, but there is at least this one mechanized step in the process. No oil or sugar is added.  This is the real thing.

There are several peanut butter vendors at the market.  They spoon their brown goo into small plastic bags.  It’s normally sold by the spoonful, but I have them fill my Bonne Maman jelly jar, and it costs 300 F, or about $.60.  The flavor varies from vendor to vendor, as some roast the nuts longer than others.  I’ve found a vendor whose peanut butter I like, in the shade of a colossal tree, so I’ll stick with her.  And I get a kick out of her traditional chair -- lashed together with blue string!