The Baobab

When you first see a baobab — really see it, not just photograph it — the first thought is usually that it looks impossible. A tree this wide should not be standing. Its trunk is wider than a house. Its branches reach upward like roots in search of soil, bare and fingers-spread against an empty sky. It looks like something that was planted by a careless god, or perhaps by a child who did not understand which end went in the ground.

In Tanzania, you will see them everywhere on the northern circuit. At the entrance to Lake Manyara, there is a famous grove — they appear in almost every photograph of that park, silhouetted against the Rift Valley escarpment. In the Serengeti, they appear individually, standing alone in the middle of nothing, the only vertical geometry in a landscape of horizontal plains. They have been there, in some cases, since before the Norman Conquest of England. They will be there after whatever we build is gone.

The Oldest Living Things in Africa

Botanists estimate that the oldest baobabs in Tanzania are between 1,200 and 2,000 years old. A baobab grows slowly — adding less than a centimetre of trunk radius per year — and the oldest specimens have trunk diameters of 12 to 15 metres. The mathematics of that growth rate tells you something: a tree that large has been there since the height of the Roman Empire.

They are, in biological terms, extraordinary. The baobab is nine parts water — its trunk can store up to 100,000 litres — and it sheds its leaves entirely during the dry season, surviving on stored moisture. During the rains, it grows with extraordinary speed for a tree of its age. It is pollinated by fruit bats, not bees. Its seed pods — large, hard, dangling objects the size of a coconut — are called "monkey bread" and attract a remarkable range of wildlife.

What the Baobab Has Seen

Stand beneath a baobab that is 1,400 years old and let your imagination work. The people who have gathered in its shade include generations of Hadza hunter-gatherers who have lived in the Serengeti ecosystem for 50,000 years. They include Datoga pastoralists who arrived in the region around 500 AD. They include Arab slave traders and German colonists and British game rangers. They include the first tourists — pale, wealthy Europeans in pith helmets who arrived when the Serengeti became a national park in 1951.

In the 1980s, the Serengeti was being cleared for agriculture. The oldest baobabs stood on land that was almost farmed. In the 1990s, there was talk of drilling for oil in the national park. In the 2000s, there was commercial hunting, and before that, the rinderpest epidemic that killed 90 percent of the Serengeti's cattle — and nearly the wildebeest too. All of this passed in the working life of a single tree.

The baobab does not care. It is indifferent to history in the way that very old organisms are. What changes around it — the human dramas, the political upheavals, the fortunes of wildlife populations — is a context it does not register. And yet, somehow, standing beneath one, you feel the weight of that indifference as something peaceful. It has been here since before your great-great-grandparents were born. It will be here after your great-great-grandchildren are gone.

The Upside-Down Tree

Across sub-Saharan Africa, there is a widespread folk explanation for the baobab's peculiar appearance. The story goes that when the gods were planting trees, the baobab was lazy — it refused to root properly and kept moving. An angry god pulled it from the ground and planted it upside down, with its roots in the air, as punishment. And that is why, to this day, the baobab looks like it has been shoved into the earth headfirst.

It is a story that reveals something true about the tree's appearance, if not its origin. The baobab does look, from a distance, like something that has been roughly handled. Its crown — the cluster of branches at the top — is sparse and un-tree-like. It has the silhouette of an upturned broom. And when it is leafless, which it is for much of the year, the impression of roots above and crown below is strong.

The Hadza people of northern Tanzania have their own stories about the baobab — more practical ones, focused on what the tree provides. The bark is used for rope and cloth. The leaves are eaten as a vegetable. The fruit pods, when ripe, contain a powdery pulp that mixed with milk makes a refreshing drink. The tree is, in this cultural context, not sacred in the way of a temple — it is useful. It sustains life. And it has been sustaining life around it for as long as anyone can remember.

Inside the Giants

Several of the oldest baobabs in the Serengeti and Tarangire have developed large hollow chambers at their base — not from disease, but from elephant damage. Elephants strip baobab bark for moisture and nutrients, and over decades of this, a cavity forms at the base of the tree that can be large enough to stand inside. These hollow baobabs are some of the most extraordinary things you can experience on a Tanzania safari.

The acoustics inside a living baobab are like nothing you have heard. The walls — 40 to 60 centimetres thick — muffle every sound from outside. Your voice comes back to you strangely. The smell is ancient: bark and dry fruit and the accumulated smell of a thousand dry seasons. It is one of the few places in the bush where silence is not just the absence of noise — it is a presence.

Where to Find Them

The most photographed baobabs in Tanzania are at the Simba Kopjes in the central Serengeti — the rocky outcrops that rise from the plains and are surrounded by some of the most ancient baobabs in the region. Lions use these kopjes as den sites; the combination of ancient trees, dramatic rocks, and big cats makes for remarkable photography.

The stand at the Lake Manyara entrance is famous precisely because it is so accessible — you can photograph it from the road without even entering the park. But for the most extraordinary experience, ask your guide to take you to the largest baobab in Tarangire. It is not on any official map. It requires a short drive off the main circuits. It is, by our guides' estimation, the oldest living thing most visitors to Tanzania will ever stand beneath.