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a source of income for unemployed women who brew and sell the beer. TM: Are there any other uses of the marula fruit? PP: Apart from eating the fruit and fermenting it to make marula beer, the pips, called "dikoko" [which are rich in minerals and vitamins], can be broken and eaten like nuts when they are dry. It is very common that young shepherd boys would eat "Mothlokolo," the nut from the marula that was firstly chewed up and spit out by the goats. They are not so easy to crack though and the husks of the pips can be used as fuel for fire. TM: Can you walk us through the process of how you prepare marula beer? PP: It’s very important to make sure that the fruit is ripe and ready. We usually collect the fallen marula fruits around February or March. It is worth noting that ripe fruit is the one that falls to the ground. Unlike other fruit, marula is not picked from the tree but from the ground, or what we call "go rasha" in Sepedi. Next you need to collect enough to have at least three buckets full. You then peel the fruit, using a butter knife or a spoon, and place the peels into a bucket. Using a fork, you would then separate the pulp or flesh into a separate bucket together with the juice. The unfermented juice is called "morula wa baruti," which means “marula of the priests.” This mixture of juice and pulp is then covered and allowed to [wild] ferment for two to three days and then sieved into a jug or bottle. The longer you leave it to ferment, the stronger it becomes. Editor’s Note: In my own research, I learned that marula trees are “dioecious,” which means they have a gender. When I looked up what the differences were between the male and female marula tree, I found that it is the male tree that produces the flowers, and the female tree that produces the fruit. So in other words, marula beer is thanks to the female marula tree. ontapmag.co.za | Winter 2023 | 45