Serve with African Hot Sauce or salt as a snack, an appetizer, or a side dish. Can also be served sprinkled with sugar as a snack or dessert. Serve boiled plantains as a side dish for any African meal. However banana plants are not native to Africa. They arrived in Africa during the first millennium AD, brought by Malay-Polynesian peoples who settled in Madagascar, or perhaps by Arabs or Indians who traded and settled on Africa's East Coast.
Banana cultivation is especially common in Africa's great lakes region, notably Uganda.
The Baganda of Central Africa believe so strongly in the intimate relation between the intercourse of the sexes and the fertility of the ground that among them a barren wife is generally sent away, because she is supposed to prevent her husband s garden from bearing fruit. On the contrary, a couple who have given proof of extraordinary fertility by becoming the parents of twins are believed by the Baganda to be endowed with a corresponding power of increasing the fruitfulness of the plantain-trees, which furnish them with their staple food. Some little time after the birth of the twins a ceremony is performed, the object of which clearly is to transmit the reproductive virtue of the parents to the plantains. Even after the long interval to the present time, and tasting every variety of vegetable, I know none that I enjoy more than boiled ripe plantains. Peel green bananas and slice lengthways or crossways as desired.