Blog: Grow your own clarinet!

Yes – you read that right!

Buffet Crampon is a French manufacturer of woodwind musical instruments, including oboes and bassoons, but they’re best known for their clarinets which are the brand of choice for many professional musicians.

Venture Co has been working with the African Blackwood Conservation Project  since 2002. ABCP collects ebony tree seeds; propagates; and gives saplings to shamba farmers (shamba = smallholding) to plant around their fields and homes thus establishing beyond doubt their boundaries. After all other field markers could be moved! Ebony trees take a lifetime to grow (70 or 80 years) to a useable size, so boundaries become well-established, and there now exists an incentive to protect the young ebony trees. The Makonde carving industry in Kenya and Tanzania, combined with sapling-nibbling goats, have devastated the ebony trees creating the need for some conservation.

Ebony seedlings

Even with all our clever technology and material science degrees, the best woodwind instruments are still made from Dalbergia Melanoxylon or ebony, or Mpingo in Swahili. Ebony’s density, dimensional stability and machinability are difficult to replicate. So there are all sorts of stakeholders in the future of the modest Mpingo.

Last year Buffet Crampon visited the nursery and tree planting sites in Tanzania, and agreed to finance the project. They continue to lead the industry with the manufacture of “Greenline clarinets and oboes” made of recycled blackwood. This material has the same acoustic properties as the harvested wood, remains stable in all playing environments and is not prone to cracking. It is therefore reducing current harvesting demands for ebony. And before too much longer modest supplies of mature ebony will once more become available.

If you visit the project for an hour or so, after a Serengeti safari, who knows, you could plant a clarinet for your grandchild.

Contact us for safari ideas and quotes.

Sebastian Chewa, founder of the Mpingo Project