Baobab-mad billionaire at root of attempt to traffic Africa’s ‘tree of life’
No botanical spectacle is more captivating or bizarre than the baobab, a bulbous tree whose root-like branches make it appear as if it has been planted upside down.
Africa’s most distinctive tree can grow as high as 30m and wider than a bus. It lives for thousands of years and many regard it as sacred. Yet this has not saved it from an improbable new threat: baobab trafficking.
Kenya’s newly elected president, William Ruto, last week halted the export of eight uprooted baobabs to the nation of Georgia, whose former leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, an eccentric billionaire, wanted to plant them in his park.
Images on social media of a baobab, with branches and roots severed, strapped to the back of a lorry have horrified horticulturalists, who believe the trees would not have survived a journey to Georgia, which borders Russia and Turkey on the Black Sea.
‘‘It is shocking a thing like this can happen,’’ said John Grimshaw, a director of the Yorkshire Arboretum and specialist in east African flora.
‘‘You can’t just rip it out of the ground and stick it back in after a long sea journey like some ordinary cutting. The survival rate will be nil.’’
Wambui Ippolito, a Kenyan author and landscape designer and a graduate of the New York Botanical Garden’s School of Professional Horticulture, said: ‘‘This was an amateur operation. The trees were not ‘balled and burlapped’ as per custom when professional arborists are doing this type of work. This is more a smash-and-grab operation. There is no way those trees would have survived.’’
The extent of the trafficking is unclear but Kilifi, the coastal region north of Mombasa where the eight trees were dug up for export last month, has been abuzz for weeks with stories of a roaring international trade in baobabs.
The trees line most streets in the regional capital – part of the culture and local economy. Some elderly Kenyans see the ‘‘tree of life’’ as a shrine for communing with spirits. Others make products from the bark and leaves. On a recent visit, a reporter was offered baobab jam, sweets, cloth and rope, and even lampshades fashioned from the large baobab pods. The powdered fruit is considered a ‘‘superfood’’ and the bark is said to have medicinal properties.