Seeds Men Traditionally Carried On Long Hunts Across West Africa

There is something I find quietly remarkable about the seeds that arrive at the apothecary from West Africa. Mucuna pruriens — the velvet bean — comes in oblong, slightly compressed forms, speckled or almost entirely black, each one carried inside a pod so bristled with irritant hairs that you handle it with respect. And yet hunters across West Africa carried these seeds on their persons for days at a stretch, tucked into a fold of cloth or a small pouch, along with a handful of other seeds that had earned a place in the kit. This article is about those seeds — mucuna, akuamma and voacanga — what they are, where they grow, what they look like, and the tradition of carrying them across the forest and savanna.

The carrying tradition is not as well documented as it deserves to be. A lot of what we know comes from the gaps in colonial-era botanical records, from regional naming patterns, and from the fact that plants like these turn up in place after place across West Africa, going by entirely different names — which is usually a sign that something has been moving along trade and hunting routes for a very long time.

What mucuna pruriens actually is — the velvet bean in its own right

Inside those pods, the seeds are pinkish-brown speckled with black, or almost entirely black — oblong-ellipsoid and compressed, as the World Flora Online botanical record describes them. When you hold one, it has a satisfying density to it. Smooth where the pod’s hairs do not reach, hard, with a slight sheen. You can see immediately why a hunter would choose this over something fragile.

The plant climbs high — easily several metres — and grows vigorously in the wet tropical biome. In West Africa it appears across the forest zone and into the drier savanna edges, which is part of why it ended up in so many different cultural contexts. It is also a nitrogen fixer — meaning it draws nitrogen from the air and deposits it in the soil through its root nodules, the way most legumes do. That made it useful to farmers as a cover crop long before anyone was thinking about its seeds as something to carry on a hunt.

There is a varietal wrinkle worth knowing about. The form commonly referred to in ethnobotanical literature is sometimes listed separately as Mucuna pruriens var. utilis — a cultivated variety with pods that are less irritating than the wild type. This distinction matters when you are reading older sources, because writers sometimes describe one form and label it as the other. Kew’s taxonomy keeps them together under the same species umbrella, which is the sensible call.

The seeds contain a range of compounds, including the amino acid L-DOPA (levodopa — a precursor to the neurotransmitter dopamine), alongside various alkaloids and tannins. This article does not go into what those compounds do — that is a different conversation — but their presence is why the seed has attracted serious botanical and scientific attention, and why it has been part of trade routes well beyond its native range for centuries. You can read about how a closely related tradition shaped another West African plant’s story in the article on the fascinating history of Fadogia agrestis with the Hausa wrestling tradition.

The naming web — what it tells us about how far mucuna travelled

One of the more reliable signs that a plant has been moving through a culture for a long time is that it accumulates names. Not one or two variants, but a whole web of them — names that share no obvious root, that belong to entirely different language families, that only make sense if the plant was already known to each community independently, or arrived so long ago that it was fully naturalised by the time anyone was writing things down.

Mucuna pruriens is a good example. Across Nigeria’s three major language groups alone, the seed is known as agbala or akurugba in Igbo, werepe or yerepe in Yoruba, and karara in Hausa. Five names for one plant, and those are just the ones recorded in the Nigerian literature. Add the names from Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Senegal, and the picture becomes significantly more complicated.

What this naming pattern suggests is movement. A seed carried by a hunter from a Hausa-speaking community into Yoruba territory does not arrive with its name attached. It arrives as an object, and the new community names it from scratch — or absorbs it into an existing category. That process, repeated across generations and language boundaries, is how you end up with five or six unrelated names for the same botanical species. It is, in a way, a map of old routes.

This kind of linguistic archaeology is something I find genuinely fascinating when I am tracing sourcing for the apothecary. The same plant arriving under different names from different suppliers is not just a logistical headache — it is a reminder that West African knowledge of these plants predates any written botanical record by a long margin. The European botanists who eventually catalogued them were, in most cases, catching up with something that local communities had already fully understood.

Akuamma — the forest tree with the tangled Latin name

Picralima nitida, known widely as akuamma, is an understorey tree — meaning it grows beneath the forest canopy rather than forming part of it. It belongs to the Apocynaceae family, the same broad group that includes oleander and frangipani, which gives you a sense of the botanical neighbourhood. The tree can reach between four and thirty-five metres in height, with a dense crown, a cylindrical trunk, and pale yellow wood that is notably hard and fine-grained. The flowers are white, small — about three centimetres across — and the fruits are ovoid, turning yellowish when ripe. The leaves are broad and oblong, running six to twenty centimetres in length.

The seeds inside those fruits are the part that concerns us here. They are compact and hard — the kind of seed that survives being carried in a pouch for days without any particular care. The tree is native to the wetter forest zones of West and Central Africa, and it is one of the plants recorded in detail by J. M. Dalziel in The Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa, the colonial-era survey that Kew describes as probably the most comprehensive published account of economically important West African plants. Dalziel’s 1937 work — later revised and expanded by H. M. Burkill — recorded geographical range, habitat and economic uses alongside both West African and European names, which is why later ethnobotanists still reach for it.

The taxonomic history of akuamma is its own small story. The Kew record for Picralima nitida lists it under at least three earlier Latin names: Tabernaemontana nitida Stapf (1895), Picralima klaineana Pierre (1896), and Picralima macrocarpa A.Chev. (1920). Three different names in twenty-five years — which tells you something about how chaotic the cataloguing process was. European botanists working in different territories, with imperfect communication between them, were repeatedly naming plants that had already been named elsewhere. Meanwhile the local name, akuamma, stayed consistent.

This is a pattern that comes up constantly when I am working with West African botanical sources. The Latin names shift; the local names hold. There is a lesson in that about who actually knew the plant and who was still figuring it out.

Seed	Botanical name	Family	Part carried	Native forest zone
Velvet bean	Mucuna pruriens	Fabaceae	Seed (from S-shaped pod)	Wet tropical — West Africa, South Asia
Akuamma	Picralima nitida	Apocynaceae	Seed (from ovoid fruit)	Wet forest — West and Central Africa
Voacanga	Voacanga africana	Apocynaceae	Seed (dark brown, grooved)	West Africa — forest and forest edge

Voacanga africana — sweet-scented flowers and a global seed trade

Voacanga africana is a tree that sits comfortably in two different worlds. At home in West Africa, it is often grown simply for its flowers — the sweet-scented blooms of voacanga are genuinely striking, and the tree is sometimes planted ornamentally for exactly that reason. Internationally, its seeds are a significant export commodity. The gap between those two identities is interesting.

The tree itself grows to ten metres, occasionally twenty-five, with pale grey-brown bark and large leaves — obovate-oblong, anywhere from seven to forty-one centimeters long—which makes the foliage quite striking in the understorey or forest edge where it typically grows. The seeds are dark brown, dull-surfaced, obliquely ellipsoid, with four to five lateral grooves and a rough, minutely tuberculate — meaning finely bumpy — texture. Each seed also carries an orange aril, a fleshy seed-coat appendage common in the Apocynaceae family. In the hand, they feel like something that was designed to be noticed and kept.

The seeds contain voacangine and a range of other indole alkaloids — indole being a class of nitrogen-containing ring compounds found across many plant families. The presence of these alkaloids is the reason voacanga seed became an export crop. A 2012 market survey published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology found that tons of voacanga seeds, alongside Griffonia simplicifolia and Fadogia agrestis, are exported from Ghana annually — though, interestingly, none of these species were being sold on the domestic Ghanaian market at the time of the survey. The export flows outward; the domestic use is a different story altogether.

That market distinction is something I think about when sourcing. A plant whose seeds leave the country by the tonne, but which is barely sold locally, exists in a particular kind of supply-chain tension. The growers know the plant intimately; the end market, often thousands of miles away, usually knows only the extract. The seed itself — what it looks like, where it grows, what its flowers smell like — gets lost somewhere in between. You can also find the organic voacanga africana root bark powder in the apothecary range, which comes from a different part of the same tree.

The logic of carrying seeds — why these three, and what they had in common

When you look at mucuna, akuamma and voacanga together, a few things stand out. All three produce seeds that are hard, dense and relatively small — the kind of thing you can carry in a small amount of space without worrying about it being damaged. All three come from plants that grow across overlapping ranges in West Africa’s forest and forest-edge zones, which means a hunter working a familiar territory would likely have encountered all of them. And all three have enough cultural weight — enough history of being noticed and used — that they ended up in the written record at all, which is no small thing for a plant from this part of the world.

The carrying tradition itself is practical before it is anything else. Long hunts in West Africa — sometimes lasting several days, covering considerable distances — required a man to carry what he needed. Food, tools, and whatever plant materials were considered worth having on the journey. Seeds are ideal for this: they do not spoil quickly, they are compact, and they can be sourced from the landscape itself rather than prepared in advance. The velvet bean pod, for all its irritating exterior, yields seeds that are remarkably stable once removed and dried.

There is also something to be said for the symbolic dimension. Seeds, in many West African cultural traditions, carry meaning beyond their physical properties. They represent potential, continuity, the capacity for something to persist and eventually grow. Carrying a seed on a hunt is not just practical — it is a statement about what you are bringing with you and what you intend to bring back. The role of kola nut in West African ceremony is perhaps the most widely known example of this kind of seed symbolism, but it is far from the only one. Mucuna, akuamma and voacanga each carry their own version of it, less documented but no less real.

The Griffonia simplicifolia seed — another West African legume — sits just outside this particular carrying tradition, but belongs to the same general category of seeds that have circulated across the region’s trade and cultural networks for centuries. The forest floor, in this sense, was never just a place to walk through. It was a pharmacy, a map, and a market, all at once.

Frequently asked questions

What is mucuna pruriens good for traditionally in West Africa?

Traditionally, mucuna pruriens seeds were carried on long hunts and journeys across West Africa, valued for their durability and cultural significance. The plant itself — a vigorous climbing vine — was also used as a cover crop by farmers, since it fixes nitrogen in the soil like other legumes. Its various regional names, from karara in Hausa to werepe in Yoruba, suggest it was known and used across a wide range of communities and contexts long before any written botanical record.

What does mucuna pruriens do for men?

This article focuses on the botany, history and cultural significance of mucuna pruriens rather than its effects on the body — which is a separate and complex subject. What we can say is that the seed has been specifically associated with men’s traditions in West Africa, particularly the practices around hunting and long-distance travel. Its presence in those contexts, across multiple language groups and geographic regions, is well documented in ethnobotanical and botanical literature.

What are the side effects of mucuna pruriens?

That is a question for a qualified health professional rather than a botanical apothecary article. What we can note is that the seed pods are famously irritating to handle — the dense bristly hairs on the outside of the pod cause intense skin irritation, which is one reason the seeds are typically handled carefully and processed before use. The seed itself, once removed from the pod, is the smooth hard object most people encounter in dried or powdered form.

Does mucuna pruriens increase testosterone?

This article does not cover the seed’s effects on hormones or any other aspect of human physiology — that falls outside what a botanical history piece can responsibly address. What the research literature does establish clearly is that mucuna seeds contain L-DOPA (levodopa), a documented plant compound, alongside various alkaloids and tannins. The significance of those compounds in the body is a subject for clinical literature and your own healthcare provider.

How long has mucuna pruriens been used in West Africa?

Long enough to have accumulated five or more regional names across Nigeria alone — which is usually a sign of deep, pre-colonial familiarity with a plant. The colonial-era botanical record, including J. M. Dalziel’s foundational 1937 survey of West Tropical African plants, documented mucuna alongside akuamma and voacanga as established parts of the regional plant knowledge. The linguistic evidence — unrelated names in Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa — suggests the plant’s cultural history predates any written account by a significant margin.

There is a reason these seeds ended up in a hunter’s pouch rather than left on the forest floor. They are remarkable plants — each with its own botany, its own naming history, its own place in the long human relationship with West Africa’s forests. Mucuna pruriens, with its bristled pods and smooth dark seeds, is the most widely known of the three, but none of them deserves to be reduced to a single use or a single story. If you want to work with the seed itself, our organic black mucuna pruriens is sourced whole and dried, exactly as it should be.

Shop organic black mucuna pruriens seeds

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Sources

1. Kew Science, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Plants of the World Online — Mucuna pruriens (L.) DC. Ongoing botanical database.
2. World Flora Online Consortium, 2025. World Flora Online — Mucuna pruriens (L.) DC. World Flora Online.
3. Kew Science, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Plants of the World Online — Picralima nitida (Stapf) T.Durand & H.Durand. Ongoing botanical database.
4. World Flora Online Consortium, 2025. World Flora Online — Voacanga africana Stapf. World Flora Online.
5. Dalziel, J. M., 1937 (revised Burkill, H. M., from 1969). The Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa. Crown Agents for the Colonies / Kew Publishing.
6. van Andel, T. et al., 2012. Ghana’s herbal market — a quantitative survey of trade in medicinal plants. Journal of Ethnopharmacology.

Written by Joanna, founder of Jostylin Naturals — a West African botanical apothecary sourcing directly from growers across the region. Joanna has worked with West African plants for over fifteen years and writes from Ghana.