It is 63 years since declaration of independence of Niger by the French colonial power. This day, August 3, as time has gone by, it has become a ritual to plant a tree in the sand of the Sahel. It will presumably be different today, given the political context the country is experiencing, suspended as it is in the crisis created after the intervention of the military who carried out a coup. The president-elect is under arrest, with his family and other ministers, in the presidential house and will obviously not be able to honor the symbolic gesture of the tree on the aforementioned anniversary. Even ordinary citizens, concerned by the regional context with the threat of an armed intervention for the return to ‘constitutional legality’ and the exponential growth in the price of daily bread, they will not think about the trees to plant around.
Also because the tree of independence is different from all the others. From the Garden of Eden, perhaps located in the mythical Mesopotamia we move on to the trees of the forests and then to those of the savannahs. Without apparent continuity we then move on to thinning out desert treesindeed: to the tree in the desert. In fact, the Ténéré tree, a word that means desert in the Tuareg language, the tamasheq, was the only tree in an area of approximately 400,000,000 square kilometers. It is an acacia which, isolated from the others, survived loneliness for centuries until the fatal collision of the 1973. A lorry driver, during a manoeuvre, ran over and uprooted it. The remains of the tree are currently in the national museum in Niamey. It was the last tree in the desert and a point of reference for caravans, trucks and migrants on their way to Libya or the great South.
The anniversary and other independence day this year make one think about this last desert tree deposited in the museum of the capital, among objects of art, craftsmen and animals of the zoo. It was the only acacia of the Ténéré, a stable orientation for travelers and traders, felled by a passing lorry. There are those who swear they saw some leaves sprouting from the tree at the dawn of this day.
Niamey, August 3, 2023, Independence Day