Joan Bastide

This name is not one I chose.

It was given to me in Bamako, one evening in 2007, by Malian musicians who kept filing into my NGO bedroom to record demos on my makeshift equipment. They watched this foreigner who refused to go home, who set up microphones in rooms too small, who wrote reports by day and produced music by night, and they christened me: the Baobab Man.

I never tried to understand exactly why. Perhaps because the baobab belongs to no comfortable category. It grows where nothing should grow. Its branches look like roots exposed to the sky, as if it had been planted upside down, or as if it were searching for something the other trees had given up trying to find. It stores thousands of litres of water in its belly to nourish the ecosystem around it through the dry season. And in the villages of the Sahel, it is under its arms that people gather to deliberate, negotiate, tell stories.

I kept the name because it said something true.

This site is organised like that tree. The Roots are where I come from: the Cévennes, Geneva, Martinique, the first departure. The Branches are the organisations I have built or keep alive: Melanzé, CREATES, SomOne Music, the University of Bern. The Leaves are the writing, the kind that takes its time: novel, research, chronicles. The Fruits are the tangible achievements, what the tree has given to the world and what continues to circulate long after. And the Seeds are the projects that have not yet sprouted, or that are sprouting right now in the red soil of Senegal.

The baobab does not define itself. It leaves that to the naturalists. It simply exists in the world, and does what it has always done: grow without making a sound.