Palm Oil
Palm oil is produced in great abundance, as a staple commodity among themselves, as well as for exportation since the common light for houses consists of palm oil burnt in native manufactured lamps, some constructed of iron and others of earthenware. The oil of the nut is the most general in use among the natives, both for light and cooking, because it is the richest, being the most unctuous. This use of the nut-oil is certainly an antiquated custom among the people of this region, whilst those contiguous to Liberia have recently learned that the kernels could be put to commercial use, by the discovery or rather practical application by Mr. Herron, of Grand Bassa, Liberia, and subsequent demand by the French traders. The fact that the Yorubas generally produce their charcoal from the hull of the palm nut, is an evidence of the long-continued and abundant use of the latter article for the manufacture of oil. They have regular establishments for the manufacture of the palm oil, with vats and apparatus (simple though they be), places and persons for each process: as bruising the fruit from the nut, boiling, carrying the pulp to a vat, where it is pressed and washed to extract the oil; one to skim it off from the top of the liquid—another to carry off the fiber of the pulp or bruised fruit, which fiber is also appropriated to kindling and other uses. There is no such method of extracting the oil, as the mistaken idea so frequently reported by African traders from Europe and America, that the natives bruise the nut with stones in holes made in the ground, thereby losing a large percentage of the oil. Even among the crudest they know better than this, and many use shallow troughs, made of wood in some parts of Africa, as the Grebo, Golah, and some other peoples on the western coast, adjacent to Liberia.