In his muslim attire he attended us. The village’s tree planter. The man who had dared to plant ten cashew trees (eight of them dried out or got eaten by the goats), even though the traditional belief is that one will die at the moment the tree planted grows higher than oneself. He was a muslim scholar he said and had read in the Koran about the importance of tree planting. And he had realized that whether or not you plant a tree, you will die and it is better to leave a tree for your children. The other villagers now agree with him and they happily had received tree seedlings from an NGO some years before: the teak grows well, but the mangos were flooded.. and when even simple fencing is too big an investment, it is hard to keep away the animals.
Traditional belief holds that some trees are home to the ancestors. Those trees are not allowed to be cut, nor to be planted. The baobab tree, the sheanut, the dawedawe… Only thing is, people will often not tell development workers who propose a tree-planting project about this, as it is a taboo to share such secrets.. or people are afraid to be called backward. So it can take years to find out.
James tells that years ago they let people from other tribes from the south, come to plant the trees for them as they would not be affected. But then someone tried to plant a tree and did not die, and then others tried…. Also there is less danger in planting ‘white-man’s trees’: trees like the mango that are not originally from this area and the ancestors do not care about.
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