Since the 1980s, Yacouba Sawadogo has been planting trees to deal with desertification and climate change. He succeeded in changing the outlook of his territory.
In the small village of Gourga, in Burkina Faso, near the great border of the Sahara, a man has "stopped the desert". Rewarded in 2018 by the Right Livelihood Award (often presented as the Nobel Prize for the alternative), Yacouba Sawadogo has maintained a forest for 40 years that has completely changed the outlook of the territory.
The story begins in the 1980s: hot winds, coming from the nearby desert, cause a major drought and a great famine. Desperate, many families leave Gourga. Stunned by this fleeing life and this dying village, Yacouba decides to take the opposite route: stay put and dedicate his time to planting trees.
Four decades later, its forest has become a veritable oasis. The hedgehog and the doe have returned, the villagers have settled down again. Its forest has also created a microclimate conducive to local agriculture, a real bulwark against climate change. At the scale of his life, Yacouba allowed his village to be reborn.
The story of old Sawadogo is told in the African savannas. It also inspires citizen movements that renew ideas in Burkina Faso. But, to observe it well, the work of this peasant goes far beyond the scale of his country. Because, through the arbitrations he has made, Yacouba formulates avenues for civic engagement and scientific reading keys that could well inspire our contemporary worlds.
Become a farmer-researcher
If his forest has been so successful, it is because Yacouba Sawadogo planted his trees in a unique way. For decades, man has relied on his cultural heritage and observed the functioning of his territory.
In Mooré – the language of the Mossi ethnic group to which he belongs – Sawadogo means “cloud maker”. When rain was expected, the Sawagodos were called upon in the Mossi Empire to "call back the water" with words known only to them. The legend says that no Sawadogo left a village without the rain returning. Coming from this line of peasants, Yacouba had nevertheless chosen another path by moving towards a career as a merchant. The 1980s episode changed his perspective. He too, in his village, would bring back the rain! Is he using the old secrets of his family line? Only he knows...
Yacouba also used different agricultural techniques to think about the stability of his forest. He thus rehabilitated the zaï, a traditional technique abandoned with the modernization of agriculture ; it consists of digging holes 30 cm deep to accommodate the plant during the dry season, while adding organic matter to the bottom. In doing so, the tree develops a root system, admittedly timid but sufficient, so that when the rainy season arrives, its growth is very rapid. In Gourga, this technique has proven itself, making it possible to accelerate the growth of the plantation. Yacouba now teaches it to other West African farmers.
Yacouba also forged valuable alliances. With the stones first, streaking his plot of stone cordons, these small walls allowing to slow down the course of the water and to encourage it to infiltrate in the ground. With the termites, then, which returned naturally to the forest. Like earthworms in temperate climates, termites knead the earth and make the soil fertile. But, in Burkinabe farming systems, termite mounds tend to be ignored or destroyed. Yacouba, he began to cherish them. It paid off: its forest is dotted with these large red chimneys essential to its own survival.
His consultation of Sheikhs, respected figures of Islam in West Africa also guided him. It was one of them who advised him to plant trees rather than cereals.
From these choices made by Yacouba, we can retain his ability to act with the singularities of a territory. Between traditions, sciences and spiritualities, the peasant has renewed his way of inhabiting the Earth by reconciling the different influences that cross his society.
Living the Earth differently
Yacouba's story also upsets some contemporary accounts. While modernity gives movement the keys to a successful life, the old man is a model of fixity. All his life he stayed in the same place. However, he was able to innovate to the point of becoming one of the pioneers of ecology in West Africa.
This injunction to movement also corresponds to models of territorial development, in Europe as in West Africa. Many municipalities seek to attract people with strong social and economic capital to renew their economy, at the risk of forgetting the people already there, who would nevertheless have so much to contribute to the territory. Yacouba's work invites us to change our point of view on fixity. By giving the power to act to the inhabitants and by working on the complementarities with professional trajectories modeled by the movement, “those who remain” can also guide desirable futures.
"The Man Who Stopped the Desert" offers us a final lesson. While many actors formulate the hypothesis that, to save the living, it is necessary to abandon certain territories so that nature can regain its rights there, Yacouba offered another story. It is because he stayed put, while changing his way of farming, that he was able to save his village. If he had left like the others in the 1980s, the desert would surely have taken everything...
Related situations exist in France. The biodiversity of the Cévennes is collapsing because the chestnut groves are no longer maintained, Beauce has lost its diversity because agriculture has become standardized and the villages became depopulated.
Basically, more than defining the places that are suitable for habitat and the places that are not, the old farmer formulates another quest: that of knowing how to live in each territory in order to respect its ecosystem balances, or even to improve the biodiversity.
Damien Deville published in 2022 with Tana editions, "The Man Who Stopped the Desert".
Damien Deville, Geographer, National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
© Photo T. Mercier