BAOBAB GARDEN

 

 

ONCE UPON A TIME, was a garden full of "neem" trees, between two roads in a neighborhood, its inhabitants called by the beautiful name of Baobab the totem tree of their african homeland. In sunny hot days, kids and youngters use to leave their homes to find freshy shades under the leavy trees. Next to them, lively parties of retired elders played cards, drinking the three senegalese tea cups, seated on mats, joking and laughing. On top of the trees escaped birds, neasted their littles, singing like town birds do.On the garden benches, tired visitors to the city, walkers, lovers or just nature homesick people would sit, to watch strolling cars, passing buses and horse cart driven. Like a wide and large green bed with little blue holes here and there, of these beautiful and healthy trees,showed parcels of sky high above, protecting each one of them against the heat. Then, on an early november morning , after a city short rainy season, groups of unknown men came in and shoped of all the tree leaves. There were some complaints on why this task was performed at this particularly hot period of the year, not to mention the world climate change in relation to the global warming of the Earth!The following day, no one could believe what the garden was looking like: It was as if a tsunami blew all the trees upside down. All of them were lying on the ground on their trunk, uprooted. An apocalyptic view of the day after the Tsunami in the Asian continent or hurricane Katrina, in Florida Usa.Who on earth, ordered this? How can trees be destroyed as if they were not beings but things? Why did these people acted as irresponsible ones? Do they know how long it takes to trees to grow that big? Have they only figured out, the ways in which theirs lives and those of human beings are related? Do they really care? I think its one of their least thought!

I dont need any explanations from you guys who are behind this disaster. What I think is: You should be sued and law should fall upon you. What you have done, isn't in any way the right thing.

Yesterday, Dec, 27, 2007, I saw a young man, standing in the middle of the desert garden, talking loudly to himself as a crazy one, complaining about the destruction of the garden, almost crying, asking unanswered questions to the unseen people who ones said:" Tomorrow, destroy the Baobab garden, so that we can build shops, fast foods and little grass looking like garden places, to get more money"This, unfortunately is not a tale. It's a real thing that has happened here in Sicap Baobabs, on a street called "Allées Seydou Nourou Tall", in the city of Dakar, the capital of Senegal, between november and december of the year 2007.

Photos by Daour Wade, storyteller, scriptwriter & filmmaker
Copyright: Daour Wade-Dec.2007
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