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Dakar, Senegal —The cityof Dakar sits on a peninsula that jutsout into the Atlantic Ocean as thewesternmost point of continentalAfrica. When Portuguese explorerssurveyed this area of the coast in thefifteenth century, they saw a land-

scape so lush and covered with trees that they called it CaboVerde, the Green Cape.Those trees are long gone now and the landscape is most-

ly dust and sand, asphalt and concrete with no trees tospeak of — except for the ones people have planted in theiryards for shade and a series of dying palm trees that line thecoastal road. People needed places to live in the capital city,so wetlands were drained and forests were cut down, theirwood used for building or for fuel. You can only see the ves-tiges of what this place used to be like during the three-month-long rainy season, when grass sprouts in the high-way medians, in the sand and on the rocky cliffs.The same forces transformed Senegal’s interior. Over

time, the land felt the impact of chopping down those trees,which, along with centuries of intensive farming, livestock

rearing and long periods of drought,led to soil erosion, dust storms and adecline in the overall fertility of theland. Parts of Senegal were especial-ly vulnerable because they are partof the Sahel, the semi-arid zonesouth of the Sahara that traversesAfrica at its widest, like a belt. Those

areas suffered from desertification, a severe form of landdegradation that happens when dry regions lose their vegeta-tion usually because of climatic variations and human activi-ties. Experts have been searching for solutions to this deserti-fication. And some people think they have found one.AcrossAfrica, a reforestation effort is taking shape— one

that aims to build a barrier of trees from West Africa to EastAfrica, or as the promotional literature puts it, from Dakar

BYJORI

LEWIS

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22 THECRISISMAGAZINE.COM

The Great Green Wall of Africa is a bold solution for a difficult pro

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But, first, a few precisions. The Great Green Wall is not awall, as such. It’s not continuous but is made up of discreteparcels inside the 15-km wide zone. The parcels are fencedoff, to protect the trees from livestock and from profiteerssearching for wood for fuel or charcoal production.And although it is a pan-African project, each country

will implement its own plan. Some may choose to rely moreheavily on a method called assisted natural regeneration,

After rain, herds are able to graze on new grass.

to Djibouti. The Great Green Wall of Africa is a transconti-nental tree-planting project whose stated aim is to turn backthe desert by constructing a wall of trees. When completed,the Great Green Wall will stretch across a 15-km wide corri-dor for more than 7,000 kilometers and 11 countries.

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by which farmers nurture tree seedlings thatsprout up from old root systems or fromseedlings left behind in cow patties.And, finally, the Great Green Wall doesn’t

really start in Dakar. It starts in a region ofSenegal called the Ferlo, which has few townsand even fewer roads and where the majorlandmarks are water points for humans andanimals. That’s because this is cow country, apastoral region inhabited by semi-nomadicFulani herdsmen and their wandering animals.“The Ferlo is a hostile environment,” Aliou

Guissé told me. He’s a forestry expert andwhen I met him in his office at Dakar’s CheikhAnta Diop University, he traded tales with meabout the region. “The Ferlo was first inhabitedby rebels, people who were opposed to thepower structure. They withdrew to the Ferlo tohide,” he said, at least that’s what he learned at his grand-father’s knee, a native of the Ferlo. “It’s not easy to livethere,” he said.When I traveled there, I saw for myself. It was just a few

weeks into the rainy season in Dakar, but the rains hadbarely come to this region. Parts of the Ferlo looked like awasteland—no grass left to speak of, small trees eatendown to the nub, large trees with branches hacked off toprovide fodder for the herd, and cow patties everywhere.Most herders can’t stay here for long; they have to move

on in search of greener pastures.This summer, though, those who hadn’t

moved on for the season gathered in theirturbans and jewel-colored robes in a field inthe village of Mbar Toubab. They had cometo work in one of the Great Green Wall’s treenurseries. The workers were under pressureto fill the nursery with the trees that wouldbe planted in the upcoming campaign.Workers only plant trees during the rainyseason, when the trees have their best chanceof survival. But in one half of the nursery, theseedlings had gotten too big, and in theother half, the seeds hadn’t germinated atall.Papa Sarr, the technical director of

Senegal’s Great Green Wall agency, was notpleased and said so to the manager of the

nursery, one Samba Dia, who said it was the soil’s fault.After a quick interrogation, Dia admitted that they recy-cled some soil from last year’s campaign, without addingmanure or anything to enrich it. Sarr told him to fix it andsoon, because the big planting would start in August, onlya few weeks away. Each year the agency fences off newparcels of land to plant more trees. There’s just one chanceand he didn’t want them to miss it. “I want to hear fromyou every two or three days to let me know how it’sgoing,” Papa Sarr told Dia.

Aliou Guissé, the forestryexpert, says that you can’t plantjust any trees here. “There are veryhigh temperatures here and it’s aregion with serious water deficits.So, it’s not possible to imagine irri-gating or watering trees.” So,Guissé said they had to be sure topick species that would be heat tol-erant, hardy and able to withstandperiodic drought. They settled onseveral types of thorny acacias andother dryland trees, most of themendemic to arid regions of Africaand the Middle East.The Great Green Wall of Africa

may seem novel, but it has severalpredecessors. In the 1980s, ThomasSankara, then-president of BurkinaFaso, first sketched out the idea ofa green wall across the Sahel. AfterSankara’s assassination, the idealanguished before being resurrect-ed in 2005 by then-NigerianPresident Olesegun Obasanjo, whobrought it to the African Union. Noone was a bigger booster of theidea than Senegal’s former presi-dent, Abdoulaye Wade, who wasfond of grand gestures.

But the germ in Sankara’s mindmight have been inspired by theGreen Dam in Algeria, a project

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Papa Sarr, right, and colleague Mor Sy at the tree nursery at Widou Thiengoly. Below, Fulani families rely on boreholes for water.

that had begun in 1974 with the stated aim toprotect Northern Algeria from the Sahara. Ormaybe he heard of the Three-North ShelterbeltForest Program in China, aka the Great GreenWall of China, which began in 1978 and was,likewise, designed to hold back the Gobi Desert.

Those projects had their criticsthen and still have critics now.Richard Escadafal, the chair of theFrench Scientific Committee onDesertification, told me that the very

language of creating a wall of trees is simplisticat best and misleading and detrimental at worst.“It’s a political slogan,” he said. “The Sahara isnot a sickness that going to infect the Sahel. It’s not a cancer.”he insisted. So, Escadafal said, the problem is not how to stopdeserts from expanding. But it is learning how to managearid environments better, so that they don’t degrade.

At any rate, both the Algeria program and China’s pro-gramwere initially failures. Guissé said that bad tree selec-tion was the culprit in both cases—monoculture in the caseof Algeria and water-hogging trees in the Chinese exam-

ple, trees that, over time, startedto degrade the land around them.Escadafal said the trees were a

big part of it, but the nail in the cof-fin was the top-down approach.In Algeria, the government plant-ed the trees and left. “Lots of thelocal people tried to respect theproject, but others mistreated thetrees or did worse worse; they cutthem down,” said Escadafal. Heis afraid that this top-downapproach is happening with thenew Great Green Wall project aswell. “We have had the impres-sion that the authorities in chargeof this project were acting as ifthere weren’t any people livingin these areas,” he said. “Butthere are people there, andmaybe they won’t be so happywith this invasion.”Indeed, that has been the case in Senegal. Amadou Issa

Sow, a herder I met outside of Mbar Toubab, told me thatpeople were not happy to see the government fence off por-tions of the area, parcels that are often more than 3-km long.“People said that this project was going to decrease theamount of pastureland too much,” he said. One forestry

agent told me that they have had problems with people cut-ting the fences, sometimes just to cross the area and some-times stealing whole parts of the fence to sell.

These are just the kinds of issuethat preoccupy Emmanuel Seck,program coordinator for theSenegalese organization ENDA-Energy. “This project, which wasconsidered a utopia, is now becom-ing a reality,” said Seck. “And weare working to ensure that the pro-ject is more participative, so it’s notjust government workers who areinvolved, but that everyone has arole.” He said that from ENDA’sperch, they are not yet entirely sat-isfied on that score.Papa Sarr, though, says that it’s

something they are doing—byemploying local people in the treenurseries, for example, and in thecreation of community gardens,like the one that they establishednear the Widou Thiengoly bore-hole, the main base for the GreatGreen Wall.On a hot morning, I met an

older woman named Hola DembaDoula Ka who was cleaning up herplot of the garden and gettingready to plant beans and watermel-on for the rainy season. During thedry season, a women’s groupgrows vegetables and fruit treeshere, using water from the bore-hole and a drip irrigation system

Samba Ba, manager of the Mbar Toubab nursery.

furnished by Senegal’s Great Green Wallagency. People out here mostly just havelivestock, so they have to go to the market tobuy everything else. “But the market is justonce a week and it’s expensive,” Ka said.“Sometimes I had to sell a goat to buy otherfood or wait for food aid to arrive.” Withthis garden, her approach has changed. Lastyear, she grew enough beans to last hermore than four months.

Back in Mbar Toubab, the oldherder Amadou Issa Sow toldme that the skeptics havebecome fewer over time. He’sthe president of the local man-

agement committee and an important manin another way: He has the keys to the gatesof a fenced-off portion of the Great Green Wall. During theparts of the yearwhen peoplemost need fodder for their ani-mals, he opens the gates to let people harvest the grassinside, which sometimes grows chest high. This helps certainherders avoid having to migrate elsewhere for pasture.I talked to Sow under the shade of a tree in the parcel

and noted a couple of donkey carts in the distance and anolder woman carrying a tower of grass on her head. Sowtells people to leave their matches and machetes by thegate, so they aren’t tempted to cut a tree or light a cigarette

that could start a fire “This year, there are lots ofpeople who have come and said that they want aparcel like this near their village,” he told me.“It’s not just the trees, but it’s also the pasturethat’s important.”Or as Papa Sarr put it, “The goal is not just the

trees,” he said. “This is also to permit them tolive better lives.”

Near Widou Thiengoly, I visitedanother parcel with Papa Sarr.He told me that this was the firstparcel, the one they planted in2008. There were some things

he’d do differently. For one, the acacia senegal istoo dominant. They planted so many becausethe people wanted to harvest gum arabic fromthe tree’s sap as another source of revenue. He

said they should have had more of a mix of tree species forbetter biodiversity. But five years have gone by and thetrees are strong. Sarr said that soon they would take downthe fence, restore the lands management to the people andmove on — on to next patch of arid land on the long trailacross Africa.

Jori Lewis is an award-winning freelance writer and a radiojournalist. She reports on the environment, global healthand social justice.

THE GREATGREEN

WALL OFAFRICA

MAY SEEMNOVEL,BUT IT

HASSEVERAL

PREDECES-SORS