Karo-Karounde (Leptactina senegambica)
A radiant aromatic, a gritty backstory
[In short order, Saffron will be presenting her research in the enigmatic perfume plant of West Africa, karo-karounde. The following is to set the scene.]
Sierra Leone in 1997 suffered a third coup in five years, its capital Freetown overtaken by a motley aggregation of pillaging (so-called) rebels, donning army fatigues and bawdy costumes, carrying assault rifles and grenade launchers, mostly kids from the bush who’d been fighting since preadolescence.
They had names like Colonel Bloodshed, Commander Cut-Hands, and Mister Die, scary enough for the residents, but this nightmare was exceeded a couple of years later when the returning drugged teenagers swaggered into the city by night to rampage and spread violent terror even more wanton than before.
They burned entire families alive, sliced off the faces of journalists, tortured doctors for treating the wounded, cut out tongues and raped girls, enacting by plan or improvisation whatever brutal means of killing or creative method of mutilation they could imagine.
They chopped off hands or arms with rusty machetes and axes against concrete slabs, then stacked the appendages in bloody piles or hauled them off in grain bags. Dozens of children were observed walking around with limbs dangling by shreds of unsevered skin.
They were eventually driven away, but beforehand they left their trademark impressions by means of special squads of young marauders who carried out these mass amputations, seeming outwardly not to be organized, yet the operations were too sweeping to be random.
“We are thrilled that Licorice came through her recent ordeal, and fortunate that she joins us here, surely to revelate some worthy revelations,” Saffron makes the introduction.
“Is it true? the perfume witches of Guinea believe that the most exquisitely scented flowers, which they call parfums de mère, grow in places of terrible suffering? sites where atrocities have occurred?”
“Likki, is it real? that the witches used to supply karo-karounde concrète to soldiers? to rub on themselves as protective juju before battle?”
“Is it right? karo-karounde plants are concentrated in the Fouta Djalon mountains of Guinea? precisely where there was a grisly mass killing of chimpanzees?”
“Likki, is it true? that you survived for weeks on just palm butter sauce?”
“Is it actual? they embalm amputated hands and feet and even heads too sometimes? with smoke from combusting copal resin?”
“Tulíp, you may be thinking of nineteenth-century Congo, when sentries sent severed hands of natives back to Belgium in order to demonstrate to King Leopold II that they weren’t wasting ammunition,” Saffron says.
And bonuses were even dished out to the agents dispatching the most amputated hands, which were recorded, for the balance sheets. On account that, much as an attached appendage functions in myriad ways that are impossible to quantify, a severed lifeless hand is suited merely for numeric purpose. In any case, the ten million murdered or mutilated Congolese were considered components of transactions, by terms of the anything-goes business model, measured by the profitability of returns on investment.
“Life tries to stave off the influence of mathematics.”
Tulíp, perhaps you are thinking of the Sierra Leonean rebel policy of compelling villagers to choose between long sleeves (both hands are cut off at the wrist) or short sleeves (cut off at the elbow), to frighten and intimidate them from voting in elections.
“Arithmetic is harnessed to undermine Life.”
Licorice, there’s no point in rehashing, but granting, it was my planning, the expedition into West Africa to seek the materialized expression of unqualifiable vitality, to track the incarnate Urparfüm. It was my idea, which I conceived for its poetic symbolism, not to yield anything material, that was a misunderstanding.
“I had opted to locate populations and possibly make a connection for sourcing aromatic material, since I was already ticketed to visit near Sierra Leone.”
“Life endeavors to defy mathematics,” Saffron continues.
Yes, upon my correspondence with a botanist in that area, I surmised that certain species of Leptactina should be candidates to channel the proto-perfume, that fragrant grail of our interest. But no, I didn’t succumb to cold feet (Licorice, you suggested that I backed out of the trip, but I don’t think so).
“Arithmetic is corrosive of Life.”
We knew that the karo-karounde extraction operations in Labé and Mamou had been shut down, and you suggested to learn more about the matter, which sounded worthwhile to me. And we were convinced that the civil war had ended, never expecting that hostilities would flare up again (you weren’t abandoned by me, I don’t think so).
“Mathematics negates Life.”
“Shall we proceed with the scheduled salon?”
Leptactina senegambica aka péti-kiukel or more commonly kauloti which may be spelled koulothi, or maybe karkaroundèn is more possibly called upon than karou-karoudèn or then again, you can say karkaroudé or some will say kuloté so they say, or others say fara-koruté or fara-kukuté, all the same karo-karundé is what we say … it grows mostly in rocky uplands, especially savanna woodlands, but also gallery forests of Guinea and Mali and Sierra Leone.
“There’s a foreboding element of pathos to this story, since intense violence erupted in the area of the fragrance factory, but exactly what transpired there has been a mystery.”
Each year, big bounties of karo-karounde blooms appear, a couple of weeks following initial springtime rains, which used to prompt the concentrated harvest activity, which would take place a month later. The annual flurry over fragrance involved thousands of pickers from dozens of villages in the Labé area, who would start at sunrise and collect flowers until noon, for immediate processing with volatile solvents, mostly hexane or petroleum ether, to yield the waxy reddish-brown concrète, which is relatively resistant to oxidative deterioration and therefore better suited for shipping to Grasse, where the second stage of solvent extraction would be carried out, to finally yield the most concentrated presentation of the plants’ scent principles … the inimitable absolue.
(Saffron now imbues and distributes blotter strips to initiate a flight of reviewing by tonight’s participating salonists.)
“This sample throws out a dusty interpretation of that tuberose-remindful aspect of Play-Doh or bubblegum in a medicine cabinet, which is to say that this oil effuses tropicality in an ylang sort of way though it’s a touch spicier and much woodier and very much earthier and also sugarcoated with a green banana effect as if poured over by alfalfa honey.”
Licorice recalls, “Moving westward from Freetown with this assorted group (everyone traveled in convoys) comprising a number of preadolescent soldiers intoxicated on palm wine (it was never clear to me if they were on the run), one of them shouted allahu akbar and shot off a Kalash (automatic rifle) right by my head, which afterwards caused a constant ringing in my ear.”
“The lifting vapors give an olfactive impression of early-fermenting apricots mixed with rotting stems and foliage spread out on muddy wet floors of a wholesale florist loading dock, among discarded remains of daffodil and champa and ginger lily just shipped out.”
“The child warriors with us didn’t provide much security. In reality they were usually stoned and incited lots of drama and made everyone nervous. We supposed they had been abducted from their families and were probably traumatized, maybe even initiated into military service by being made to murder their parents. It appeared that some vultures above were tracking their movement.”
“Whereas the faceted character elicits a sensory memory of orange flower, it doesn’t reflect neroli, as it connotes jonquil but not poet’s narcissus, jasmine sambac but not grandiflorum. Also it is animalic in the scentful sense of unwashed bedding but not feces, warm and ripe and steroidal but not catty or equine, sweaty and perhaps slightly urinic but not musky.”
“And I developed an abscess on my foot, which attracted giant flies, which doesn’t bear on this account … all the same, I recall that a professed doctor there frightened me by threatening amputation, said the dogs patrolling the garbage heap would be grateful for the contribution of my meaty heel, and that Allah would never stand for his canine children to go hungry.”
“The patchwork of emissive principles is worth parsing to reveal discrete fragments differentiable as nuances of odorousness within the coordinated aromatic wholeness: we can narrowly make out carnation (eugenol and isoeugenol?) and hyacinth (2-phenylnitroethane?) and leather (o-ethoxymethylanilin?) and bitter almond (benzaldehyde?) and sweet vegetables (benzyl cyanide?).”
“Insofar as the kid soldiers in our company were said to be cannibals, we figured that this was just rhetorical smearing by people who were repeating what they were hearing (like calling them bushmen, or savages). Because, of course, they didn’t really eat human flesh? Admittedly, they didn’t appear to be joking about the benefits of devouring the brains of a girl or boy freshly killed, nor did they seem shy to discuss how eating a slice of someone’s heart can be effective to protect against bullets.”
“This sample is another example of an infochemical parcel that beckons to hawkmoth pollinators by its heady diffusivity and arresting mellifluousness as it is nonetheless complicated by phenolic flourishes and fleeting rubberiness plus fading butteriness and tempered allusions to cassis and figs as well as vanilla and chocolate.”
“The cannibals painted their faces with kaolin clay and wore necklaces of ammunition. One kept a small dried gourd containing body parts, a person’s tongue and genitals maybe (I declined a close look), which he maintained were strong grigri. And much as he claimed to be a grigriman, he caused problems for us later when we were stopped by road blockers.”
“The fruity core is enveloped by an herbal exterior with a peaty helping of hay and embellishing shades of mildewed linen and wet fur and scotch whiskey and buchu leaf, yielding to a lasting drydown faithful to the theme of earthy sensuality and story structure of jungle-sweet florality.”
“The checkpoint was manned by more juvenile militiamen, who told us to shut up and stand near a tree they pointed to … then there was frenetic shouting, then more commotion … then they had us wait in a cacao plantation nearby. (It turned out that soldiers received no salaries, so they were expected to take, during the war more than ever, however they could, whatever they needed, whenever they needed it, from whomever they found, wherever they found them, whoever it was that had what they needed or even ever wanted.)”
I just received a communication from an Industry chemist in France who is a primary investigator of karo-karounde. It opens with: I regret to inform you — you can guess the rest: there is no raw or value-added or any botanical material at all being shipped out of Africa.
“So much for the claims of sure-thing naturalness by the various naive dealers and make-believers in perfumery, that the extract extant in the marketplace is genuinely genuine, not partially not largely but wholly and solely authentic,” Saffron says.
In any event, the aromatics trade has turned away from this real-World metabolic perfume. The indifference of purveyors is due to the regulatory censure of a single chemical constituent, benzyl cyanide aka phenyl acetonitrile aka benzyl nitrile. This component happens to disperse among headspace volatiles of numerous flowers, yet only rarely among those of the floral extracts, excepting a few exceptions, namely being emanations from oils of champa and genet, ylang-ylang and jasmine and orange flower.
“Estée Lauder Pleasures Summer Fun is noted for its unabashed incorporation of karo-karounde as an enhancing heart-note.”
The compound in Nature functions as a pheromonal anaphrodisiac, donated by the male cabbage butterfly to his partner just after mating. That’s an adaptive transaction well enough, but the molecule subsequently moonlights in another role: to attract or tip off a wasp who then hitchhikes with the female butterfly in order to parasitize her eggs, which she affixes to foliage of a host cabbage plant.
“Other perfumes of mass commerce for which karo-karounde is listed as an ingredient include Marron Chic from Nez à Nez and Sequoia from Comme des Garcons.”
Myristo nitrile (myristic nitrile, clean nitrile) is another among the many uncommon metabolites that have been identified as constituting factors of the karo-karounde extract. The citrus-themed aroma-chemical was developed decades ago in Grasse, and strangely, only lately has been determined to take up occasionally in certain effluvia of the Natural World.
“And karo-karounde is maintained to odorfully adorn other commercial perfumes such as Shaal Nur from Etro and Timbuktu from L’Artisan Parfumeur. We find their marketing representations to be similarly slippery.”
Licorice adds, “If you regard the admonitions of Guinean perfume witches, if you believe they’re plausible, then you’ll consider the possibility that gnamas are contained within these formulas underwritten by transnational corporations, that they hold avenging spirits of innocent victims harmed, supernatural entities displeased and threatening.”
