Yacouba Sawadogo was born in 1946 in Gourga, in northern Burkina Faso. When the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s emptied whole villages, he went back to his. He revived zaï, an old Mossi way of planting in pits, and changed it: he dug before the rains, while the ground was still hard, made the pits wider and deeper and filled them with manure. Termites came and broke up the soil, and seeds in the manure sprouted with the first rain. Neighbours called him a madman. From those pits grew a forest of more than sixty kinds of trees and shrubs, tens of hectares by most counts. In the 2000s it was set on fire several times; he sat in the ashes, then planted again. The town of Ouahigouya grew up to its edge, and in 2021 it was fenced. From 1984 he held market days on his land, where farmers from over a hundred villages came to learn. He died on 3 December 2023.

Told the way Frédéric Back's The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) tells its story: one patient act, repeated until a place changes, and the years passing without a cut.

Who planted something you still see growing?

Sources: The Boston Globe's obituary (2023), the Right Livelihood Foundation, Wikipedia and its sources, and the documentary The Man Who Stopped the Desert (Mark Dodd, 2010).

Film and music: ours, an homage made independently of the makers of The Man Who Planted Trees. Sounds: recordings by 15HPechaM, TheBoulder3400, Legand569, univ_lyon3, bajko, jmbphilmes, dhallcomposer, Vrymaa, felix.blume, JappeHallunken, lukabea, schneidi67, SpliceSound, danielpodlovics, launemax, Joseph Sardin and nvmbky (CC0) on Freesound and BigSoundBank. Piano samples: Apple Logic; orchestra: Apple GarageBand; cello: University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios. Font: Courier Prime (OFL).