If, as the Malian writer and philosopher Amadou Hampatè Ba said, 'In Africa, every old man who dies is a burning library', in the past few days on the banks of the Sabaki River, not far from Malindi, Kenya, millions of books have burned in a single moment.
The fury of the Sabaki's floods, which have been raging for days over Kenya, uprooted an almost thousand-year-old baobab tree, but above all one of the baobabs that is sacred not only to the culture of the Mijikenda ethnic group of the coast, but to the whole of Kenya and its history.
The baobab tree named 'of Mekatilili', in honour of Kenya's national heroine, the first to challenge the British Empire in the early 1900s, had withstood wars, epidemics, droughts and more than nine hundred rainy seasons.

But it could do nothing against climate change, already weakened by pollution and human neglect. Nature has done what man has not directly caused this time, despite being responsible for it. Yet the baobab of Mekatilili, planted today by us and by a few paladins of Mijikenda cultural traditions, is just one of the many thousand-year-old trees that are no longer on this earth. Felled to make way for buildings, or for more space in agricultural fields. Even sold to be transported abroad and displayed, when dead, in the gardens of Eastern European billionaires.
When one sees a symbol of eternity die, whose life once lasted at least fifty times that of a man, one feels even more mortal, as well as guilty. 
To know its history, to have touched it, to have climbed on it and heard from the great poet Kazungu Wa Hawerisa the legends that have sprung up around this great giant that we hoped would be eternal, and to see it at the mercy of the muddy waters, is like seeing the very drift of humanity.

We have seen a lot, as we tried to map the historic specimens of Adansonia Digitata (this is the original name of the baobab) in the vain hope that the Ministry of the Environment would declare them national monuments and no one would be able to touch them anymore. Today is a sad day and we can only remember this beautiful sacred tree of Africa through the video images we have preserved.