• Around Christmas time, small white or light pink Kukumakranka flowers grow straight out of the ground with no leaves in sight.
• The flowers are pollinated and wither away, leaving no trace.
• In winter after the first rains have softened the soil, long thin spiral leaves and a fruit looking like a very small banana grow out of the ground.

• The ripe club-shaped fruits smell like strawberries. They are very popular with people and animals, who find them by smell. They eat the juicy, fragrant pulp and distribute the seeds in their droppings.
• Kukumakranka fruits are so fragrant that people used to use them to perfume their rooms and linen, like we use pot pourri or air freshener today.
• The Dutch settlers believed that the fruit was good for the stomach. They added Kukumakranka fruits to brandy to make a pleasant tasting medicine called “koekemakrankabrandewyn” .
• Kukumakrankas used to be common on the Cape Flats but are now very hard to find. Ask your grandparents if they used to eat them.

We are not sure how the Kukumakranka got its name. Some people say it was originally a Khoe name, while others say it comes from the Afrikaans phrase “goed vir my maagkrampe”, which describes one of its uses.

Click the buttons to find out more about indigenous food plants:

Indigenous fruits		Indigenous vegetables
	Berries (Tick berry, Frutang, Tortoise berry)		Bulrush (Typha capensis)
	Kukumakranka (Gethyllis afra)		Uintjies (Sedges, Klipuintjies, Wituinties)
	Sour fig (Carpobrotus edulis)		Green vegetables (Dune spinach, wild cabbage, Waterblommetjies)