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Baobab: The Tree of Life

Age/Grade Level or Audience

Elementary school children, scouts, 4-H, or religious schools.

Description

Describe to students the importance of the baobab tree to Africans.

Procedure

Read aloud a book about the baobab or monkey-bread tree. Point out the difference between biological facts and legends about the tree. Emphasize these facts:

• The baobab is one of the world's oldest plants.
• It can live as long as a thousand years.
• It can grow sixty feet high, forty feet wide, and ten feet thick.
• It is sometimes called the upside-down tree because, when the leaves fall, its stunted limbs, protruding from a grotesquely thickened trunk, look like roots pointing at the sky.
• The baobab is a succulent plant so soft that a bullet can pass through it.
• Its spongy inner tissue stores water to help it survive drought.
• The tree produces a gourd-like fruit hanging from long twigs.
• The baobab's ability to adapt to changes in the environment accounts for its long life.

Sources

Attenborough, David, Atlas of the Living World, Houghton Mifflin, 1989.
Bash, Barbara, Tree of Life: The World of the African Baobab, Little, Brown, 1989.
Cochrane, Jennifer, Trees of the Tropics, Steck-Vaughn, 1990.
Hunter, Bobbi Dooley, The Legend of the African Bao-Bab Tree, Africa World Press, 1995.

Alternative Applications

Explain why Africans revere the gnarled baobab and its role in the African ecosystem. Mention these facts:

• The baobab is a nesting place for birds, such as the yellow-collared lovebird, mosque swallow, orange-billed parrot, lilac-breasted roller, redheaded buffalo weaver, honey guide bird, pygmy falcon, superb starling, and yellow-billed hornbill.
• Insects make their homes in the bark, limbs, and leaves of the baobab.
• Bats pollinate the baobab's flowers.
• Natives pick the leaves and cook them like spinach.
• Elephants eat the smooth, glossy purplish-gray bark.
• Waxy flowers turn into firm-shelled fruit, which can be cracked and eaten.
• Parts of the tree are used for soap, weaving, drinks, fertilizer, packaging, drinking cups, musical instruments, rope, and candy.
• The spongy wood is light enough to make fishing floats, canoes, and housing material.
• As a medicine, the baobab is used to boost the immune system and to cure sores, malaria, dysentery, fever, earache, and kidney infection.
• The acid in the baobab nut is used to curdle milk or harden rubber.
• A burning solution of baobab pulp rids animals of insect pests.