Travel
In search of South Africa‘s oldest baobab trees
Join Cape Town-based photojournalist Matt Sterne as he describes in his own words what it's like to get up close to Muri Kungulwa, a colossal baobab tree in South Africa.
It’s towards the end of the second day that I find it. In the Bantu language of Venda, they call it Muri Kungulwa – ‘the tree that roars’ – and it looks as if someone took six massive trees and welded them together. This is the world’s largest living baobab, twice the size of any other in the region. Yet, despite its colossal size, the locals don’t make a big fuss about it. There’s very little signage directing you to its location at the end of a sandy track between two rural villages in this far corner of South Africa.
One of Muri Kungulwa’s branches reaches down to the floor like a divine hand granting access to its elevated world, a slight sheen showing where people must have clambered up it since the Middle Ages. The bark has the look of ancient lava, as if melted and warped from centuries of African sun. The circumference is a whopping 46m, making it (after a cypress in Mexico) the world’s second-stoutest tree. To embrace its entirety requires at least 20 people.
Like great bodies of water, the tree has a calming presence. I spend two hours circling, touching and climbing it, walking further away for a better look and then up close to feel its waxy bark and peer inside its cavernous hollow, where the world’s biggest colony of mottled spinetails resides. Normal colonies of these birds number around 20; here, there are 300. The din of their activity every evening is what gives the tree its name in Venda.
Matt Sterne has made his years of travel into a book called Sterne Journeys
© Alamy
More than the lion, elephant or fish eagle, the baobab represents Africa. Prominent trees even receive funerals
I’m on a quest to visit the most remarkable baobabs in the land. The idea was sparked by news that the oldest trees were under threat. Publications around the world had been running alarming stories about their possible demise, a situation that has stumped scientists.
It all stemmed from a study by a Romanian professor, Adrian Patrut, who used radiocarbon dating to analyse more than 60 of the largest and oldest baobabs in Africa to find out how the trees could grow so big. To his team’s surprise, they found that, since 2005, nine of the 13 oldest and five of the six largest baobabs had either died or partially collapsed. These include well-known trees such as the Sunland Baobab – famous for the pub inside it – a gigantic specimen in Namibia named Grootboom, and Chapman’s Baobab in Botswana. Climate change was identified as the likely culprit, and dendrophiles around the world united in panic. If the world’s biggest baobabs were dying, I wanted to find out why. It felt important.
The worldwide concern was understandable. More than the lion, elephant or fish eagle, the baobab best represents Africa. Much of that is due to its resilience: the baobab thrives where other plants wither and die. These icons of the African savannah reach such ridiculous ages that they’re steeped in mystique, surrounded by superstition and seen as a way to communicate with ancestors. In West Africa, prominent trees even receive special funerals.
The once-mighty Glencoe Baobab in Limpopo Province collapsed in 2017
© Matt Sterne
My first stop was the famous Glencoe Baobab, located on a lucerne farm in Limpopo Province. Carbon-dated to be around 1,844 years of age, it’s the world’s oldest known baobab. At one stage the tree had a circumference of 47m, but it split twice in 2009 and collapsed completely in 2017, yet it still lives on. Viewed from a distance, it looks like a small wood. An information board nearby states: “This magnificent upside-down tree can be described as a grizzled, distorted old goblin – with the girth of a giant, the hide of a rhinoceros, [and] twiggy fingers clutching at empty air.”
I found the King-of-Garatjeke in a very different setting. Towering above the dusty rural village of Maekgwe, this leafy baobab is a gathering point for the local community. As I arrived, a group of young men were playing a game of dice beneath the tree; goats and chickens pecked at its soil while small boys leaned against it. Like so many baobabs across Africa, the King-of-Garatjeke acts as a kind of town hall. The trees also double as prisons, post offices, gun safes, cool rooms and treehouses; one – located on the Caprivi Strip in northeast Namibia – even houses a porcelain flush-toilet.
The King-of-Garatjeke is protected by South Africa’s Champion Trees Project
© Matt Sterne
In the town of Louis Trichardt, I meet up with Dr Sarah Venter, who did her PhD on the ecology of baobabs and owns a company that sustainably harvests the fruit. I ask her about the plight of the oldest trees. “Only four have actually died,” she says. “Some of the others have collapsed, but that’s normal behaviour – they can carry on growing for hundreds of years. The article you read was pretty sensational and was misinterpreted by many news outlets. I wouldn’t be too worried about the older population. What’s more concerning is the lack of a younger generation due to overgrazing of the seedlings by goats and baboons.”
The trees, however, might be able to overcome this. “When conditions are right – maybe after good rainfall or when there are fewer visitors, like after an anthrax outbreak – the trees will communicate with each other that it’s a good time to grow,” Dr Venter says. “That’s known as episodic recruitment; it’s the reason you see many baobabs of a similar size in one area.”
This, for the first time in a while, sounds like good news. There are more trees, all giants of the savannah, still on my list to visit. As I continue on my journey, I wonder how many of the baobabs that have sprouted in this generation will reach the size of their elders. But that’s a question that’ll only be answered way down the line.