Above: Elephants at the waterhole at Voi Wildlife Lodge looking into Tsavo East National Park. Image courtesy.
Published: Saturday magazine in Nation newspaper 4 May 2024
The air is still and sun-baked. I take refuge under the shade of the banda staring into space that is the grandeur of Tsavo East National Park. It’s been 20 years since l sat in the same spot, with the solitary baobab for company at Voi Wildlife Lodge on the edge of the great park.
It’s opportune time to read the new edition of ‘The African Baobab’ by Rupert Watson, lawyer by profession and naturalist by choice. Every page l turn of the full-colour book on baobabs increases my awe of the tree.
Watson writes, ‘For starters, baobabs are living monuments, the oldest natural things in Africa, outlasting every plant and animal on the continent… They survive in the driest, rockiest areas of the continent – yet for all the hostility of much of their habitat, African baobabs live longer and grow larger than most other trees in the world. That is the great paradox of their existence.’
I didn’t know that, and suddenly realize that The African Baobab is one of two books fully dedicated to this living monument, some well over 2,000 years and still standing sentinel on the savannahs.
Continue reading “Tales from Tsavo East”
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