Kammu women suppress grass weeds with sesame Often weeds can be a real nuisance. Damrong Tayanin and Kristina Lindell write about a way to get rid of grass. Damrong Tayanin learned about it from his mother. Presently, he is working on a book on plants and animal in his home area. He writes on plants as such, where they grow and together with what other plants, how they look and smell, how they are used as food or medicine, and if they are used in rites and rituals. Grass, especially Imperata species is an increasing problem all over Southeast Asia. It therefore seems appropriate to make known the special method used to suppress grass in the Namtha area of northern Laos. In the traditional Kammu villages it was the women who learnt about the different kinds of soil in the area used for swidden agriculture. The men went hunting and fishing and also left the area to go on trading tours, but the women stayed in the village most of the time and worked more often on the fields than the men did. It was therefore the women who found out about which plants and seeds should be used in different parts of the area. It was also the women who tended the garden plots for vegetables. It may therefore be somewhat unexpected that I, a man (Kàm Ràw, the author) am able to transmit the specific knowledge of Kammu women concerning plants and soil in the area. This depends on the conditions within the family described below, and the knowledge of my mother, Mrs. Kwaay Cíam. Mrs. Kwaay Cíam was born in Seen Tong village in the Yùan region of northern Laos. Only very little is known about her childhood except that she fell seriously ill when she was about 5 years old. Her parents then killed a water buffalo and made a sacrifice to their ancestors in order to let the ancestors help her recover from illness. The girl recovered and to accentuate that her health depended on the sacrificed buffalo, she received the name Kwaay which is the Lao word for water buffalo. There was not a single school in the villages in the area when Kwaay Cíam was a girl, and she never even saw a school from the outside in all her life. She could neither read nor write and she never held a pen in her hand. The only language she learnt was her mother tongue, Kammu. However, she had visited other Kammu villages and also Lao Lum villages, when she went on a trading tour to buy salt in the Bo Ten region. As a young girl she also went on a tour to southern China and there visited some Tai villages. When she was some 17 or 16 years old, she married Raw Laang, my father. He came from Rmcùal village, which is situated some 8 kilometers from Seen Tong on the opposite side of Smpiar river. Af ter her marriage she moved into her husband’s house. Over the years she had seven children, six sons and one daughter. I am the youngest child and my Kammu name is Kàm Ràw. When I was about five years of age, my father died. After her husband's premature death, my mother had a most difficult life, since her seven children were still rather young. Because my father was dead, I followed my mother much more than boys usually do. Not only I but also my father’s sister’s daughter, Tiang Pang, went with her wherever she went. As was said above, it is the women who are the experts concerning the soil and the plants It is therefore they who decide which sort of rice is suitable to sow on a certain field. They caref ully observe the soil and then choose the right variety of rice to sow in that particular place. Elderly women teach young girls about the soil and the rice and instruct them how and where to plant different kinds of vegetables. Since I and my cousin went with my mother all the time, I learnt how and where the various plants would grow well, to recognise different kinds of soil and also to choose the most suitable weather for sowing and planting. We often went with mother to work in the garden plots where she had peppers and vegetables. While she was weeding she looked carefully at the plants. When we worked in the fields, she showed us how to cut the grass, bushes and wild banana plants which sometimes grow up in great numbers in the fields. If there are too many banana plants the leaves overshadow the rice so that it does not get enough air and rain. The banana trunks then have to be cut below the shoot apex which is under the surface of the soil, otherwise new shoots will sprout very quickly. The tallest kind of grass (often incorrectly called elephant grass) which may be four metres high is hard to get rid of. It has to be dug out and turned upside down so that the rain can wash away all the earth from the roots. There is another kind of grass which may sprout in any open place or glade in the jungle, especially in somewhat dry places. Its leaves are some 70 to 120 centimetres long, and people use it as thatch for their houses, common houses and barns. In November-December the women go to cut thatching grass either for their own use or to sell in town. Thus the grass is often used for good purposes, and where it is wanted it is burnt when the leaves have been collected and then it is left to grow up again. On the other hand, this kind of grass is extremely bad for agriculture. In places where there is a lot of it, the root system makes the soil both acid and hard and thus unsuitable for growing not only rice but also most kinds of vegetables. However, the thatching grass may be suppressed, poisoned perhaps, by sowing sesame seeds in the area where it grows. To prevent that a field is overgrown with thatching grass one can therefore sow sesame seeds in the places where the grass is likely to sprout. When the sesame matures in a few weeks time, the soil becomes very loose and soft and the grass which requires hard soil will die completely. No botanist has as yet looked at the varieties of grass in our area of Laos, and we therefore do not know whether the thatching grass is Imperata cylindrica. However, the grass seems to fit the description of the Imperata very well. Perhaps it would be a good idea to experiment with sesame in order to see if perhaps it is able to rid the fields of Imperata grass and maybe several other kinds of grass as well? Major works on plants, animals and Kammu swidden agriculture are now in preparation under the Kammu project at Lund University and will be published during the next two or three years. For more information contact: Kristina Lindell and Damrong Tayanin, Paronvagen 15, 224 56 Lund, Sweden. ILEIA Newsletter Vol. 12 No. 1 p. 30 << country/story review