The digressions of the Baobab Man
Joan Bastide
The Baobab Man
Social and environmental entrepreneur · storyteller · geographer
Twenty years in the field of environment - climate adaptation, conservation, agroecology, land governance - across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
Environment, research, writing, music. Fragments, on the surface.
In truth, the many expressions of a single vision. What may look like dispersion is actually a method: twenty years navigating between worlds has taught me that the best solutions are born at intersections.
From a single trunk spring the branches, and from the branches grow the leaves and the fruit.
The common thread
It's all storytelling
In a world saturated with information, what's missing is not data but meaning. To tell a story is to give it depth, a direction, an emotion that lingers.
The Baobab Man
This name is not one I chose.
It was given to me in Bamako, one evening in 2007, by Malian musicians who came to record demos on my makeshift equipment. They watched this foreigner who wrote reports by day and produced music by night, and they christened me: the Baobab Man.
The baobab belongs to no comfortable category. It looks planted upside down, its branches reaching to the sky like roots. Solitary, yet giving: it stands alone on the plain and still offers everything - shade, the water it keeps in its belly for the dry season, fruit full of energy. And in the Sahel it is under its arms that people gather to deliberate, negotiate, tell stories.
I kept the name because it says something true. Not what I am. But what I aspire to be.
And this site grows like it: from Roots to Seeds, through Branches, Leaves and Fruits.
The baobab does not define itself. It simply exists in the world, and does what it has always done: grow without making a sound.
