It seems like a sad story that grandparents tell their grandchildren to make them fall asleep. But it is completely real. The lonely life and the ironic death of the Tree of Ténéré.
The Tree of Ténéré was considered, for centuries, the loneliest tree in the world. Located in the middle of the Sahara desert, in Niger, there was no other for 400 kilometers around.
No one can explain why it was not eaten by camels in the caravans, or used as firewood. Maybe because it was the only tree for hundreds of kilometers around, the Tuareg decided to respect it.
The Tree of Ténéré, an acacia, became sacred to the caravanners. They gathered around him before crossing the desert from Agadez to Bilma, and as the decades passed became a legend. Used as a desert lighthouse It is the only tree in the world to appear on maps with a scale of 1: 4,000,000.
How did this acacia survive in one of the driest deserts in the world? It is known that it originated in a time when there were still trees in the Sahara, when the climate was less dry.
Survived because its roots reached a water table, an underground water well located more than 30 meters deep.
The Tree of Teneré served as a point of reference for the Tuareg for centuries, unaccompanied, surviving the harshness of the desert and the caravans and their animals.
It could have been a happy story. But, in a cruel irony of fate, the centennial acacia was killed in 1973 by a drunk driver. His truck crashed into the only tree in a 400-kilometer radius.
As he confessed to the police, he was driving the truck at high speed because he was in the desert, and he did not expect to encounter any obstacles.
The Tree of Teneré broke into several pieces due to the impact, and died. In its place, a simple wire statue was erected and is still preserved today. The remains of the tree were transferred to the Niger National Museum, in Niamey, and placed in a monument that represents the resistance of the Nigerian people to adversity:
We consider ourselves the most intelligent species, but we are also the most clumsy and careless when it comes to living with the rest of the living beings on the planet. We skew centuries-old lives, even unintentionally.
The sad story of the Tree of Ténéré it contains metaphor accounts of life, and of the human condition. Also a few lessons that we should learn.