The salt whisperers – Study shows rural women not benefiting from indigenous knowledge to extract Baleni salt

Abstract

It’s not just the technical knowledge relating to their specific method of salt extraction that they share amongst themselves, though. They also hand down the rituals which they believe will appease the ancestral spirits as they go about the task of mining salt, and they are careful in their induction of inexperienced women into the salt-harvesting guild. This women-only practice goes back an estimated 1 700 years, and involves a simple but effective process of scraping a crust of salt-laden soil from the dry riverbed during winter months, which is then extracted from the mud by dissolving it in water. The brine is filtered through baskets of mud, and then heated until the water evaporates, leaving behind pure salt crystals. The women of the Mahumani community, who are guardians of this knowledge and the wetland where they have traditionally mined the salt for generations, either exchange their salt for groceries at nearby markets, or sell it for cash to local traders or traditional healers.

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