AFRICA
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FORESTS AND TREES
MANY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE DEPEND ON FORESTS AND TREES FOR THEIR LIVELIHOOD. Yet, forests can seem harsh and hostile places to those living in or beside them. Sometimes we can feel as if the only way to survive, is to clear the forest, harvest what is there, and use the land to grow food. While this just may help in the short term, we need to think more deeply because forests are effectively the lungs of planet earth - we don’t just need them, we depend on them. We need forests, and we need trees.
Trees are fundamentally fantastic Trees provide humans with shade from the sun, shelter from the rain, warmth from firewood, charcoal and coal, and a feast of food and furnishings - fruit, nuts, chairs, tables, broomsticks, fishing rods and medicine. Trees bind the soil so that other plants can live on the forest floor, they hold water in their branches and they make rain. Masses of different animals live on and inside trees. Woodpeckers snuggle inside their trunks, tree frogs squash under their leaves, bats dangle bottom-up from their branches, spiders spin in their bark. Baobab trees can be 12 metres in diameter. Trees are the oldest things alive. Some trees live for thousands of years.
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COMING UP This chapter shares just some of the things we can do to live well while preserving our forest ecosystems and the life-giving services they provide.
FRUIT MAY BE EATEN BY YOUR GREAT GREAT GREAT GRANDCHILDREN, FROM A TREE PLANTED BY YOU! SAD FACTS Most of Africa’s forests, more than 200 million hectares, are in the Congo Basin, but they are disappearing rapidly. One fifth were lost during the 1980s and another 3.4 million hectares every year between 2000 and 2010. The destruction has slowed down, but more than 600 million cubic metres of wood are cut for timber and fuel every year!
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TREES PROVIDE
Guava Amarula Palm oil
Dyes
Boats
Carvings
Desks Masks
Gum Glues Camphor
Cola Nuts Mango
Essential Oils Meaning Tables Lychees Chairs
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Honey
Strong Drinks Preserves and Pickles Resins Oranges House Frames Medicine Palm Nuts Rattan Plant Fibres
Soft Drinks
A Place to Rest A Place to Think A Place to Meet Mopane Worms Tannins Rubber
Spices
Wildlife
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AFRICA’S AMAZING TREES
Faedherbia albidia: ‘Green gold’ helps crops flourish in barren places so much that farmers in Niger say one tree has the fertiliser value of ten cows. Called Gao tree in the Sahel, Ana tree in South Africa, or Winter thorn because dry season leaves protect crops from harsh sun.
Triphyophyllum peltatum: A curious plant of the West African rainforest. It goes through three stages in its life, each with a different leaf shape. In the second stage, it uses long sticky leaves to catch insects, which it eats!
Baphia nitida: The heart and bark of Camwood makes a red dye, traditionally used by the Igbo people of Nigeria to paint Uli designs on walls and skin.
Welwitschia, or tree tumba is a dwarf tree of the Kaokoveld and Namib deserts in the south west tip of Africa. With leathery leaves, short stem and deep tap roots they collect water from the damp foggy air that rolls in from the Atlantic Ocean each night. They are slow growing, tough and survive fire, thirsty antelope, rhino and zebra. The oldest plants are over 2,000 years old.
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Acacia tortillis: Animals need rough tongues to eat from the thorny branches of the hardy Umbrella Thorn Acacia of the savannah! Its leaves, flowers and seedpods are well-protected! It gives humans medicine, charcoal, food, and flowers to help bees make honey.
Rosa abyssinica: Africa’s only native rose lives in the Highlands of Ethiopia. It is known as Kaga in Amargna, Qaqawwii in Oromiffa, and Dayero in Somali. The fruits are tasty and rich in vitamins, but take care not to eat too much: stomach-ache and tingling teeth result! Prunus africana: This is another mountain lover, it grows in east, southern and central Africa, but only above 800 m altitude! In the rose family, this beautiful tree has a marvellous scent, hard dark wood. Its thick fissured bark is a centuries old medicine now used globally to treat prostate cancer
Brachystegia (Miombo): lives on the Zambezi plateau of Africa. It gives only gentle shade, so a huge diversity of grasses and herbs can live beneath its crown. It spreads by “explosive dehiscence” or seed-pod explosion, by which seeds can be thrown up to 25 metres from the tree!
The anti-parasite tree grows in the Namibian desert. It is an Acacia. Wildlife chew the bark to treat themselves.
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TREES - CLEANING, WATERING, FILTERING THE WORLD
Forest and other terrestrial ecosystems are made up of lots of different creatures: fungi, insects, mammals and plants. Together, they clean our water, our air, make our soil, and absorb our carbon gases. Lowly animals like worms, slugs and bacteria consume our rubbish and dead bodies. Without them we would be up to our ears in dung! Without fungi we would be constantly treading on dead wood and even animal bodies! It has been estimated that such ‘natural services’ are worth around US$33trillion a year to the world economy. To replace them using manmade machines may be impossible. If it were possible, it would cost a huge amount of money; far more than it would cost to look after the nature that provides them for us already.
Healthy water cycle
Healthy soils Clean filtered water 100 | Forests
Water Wonderful Forest! Water gives life, but can also destroy. When rain falls on bare soil, it washes it away, leaving the land infertile. When lots of rain falls on bare soil, it rushes away, flooding villages, towns and cities downstream. Forests act like sponges. They slow down the rain, so it soaks into the ground. Rivers that flow through forests are clearer, smoother, less likely to flood or run dry than those that flow through deforested land. When the sums are done, standing forests pay their way. In New York, U.S.A., a forest was saved from development because the cost of replacing all the services it provided would have been millions of dollars more than the profits from building on the land.
Clean filtered air
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Water + Light = Chemical Energy
FORESTS FEED THE RAIN
The process of transpiration is a vital part of the water cycle. Water is taken in from the soil by the roots of trees, pulled up through the xylem cells of the plant right into the leaves, and then released as water vapour through tiny holes called stomata. Plants need transpiration to bring water to their leaves for photosynthesis, to deliver nutrients for leaf growth, and to keep leaves cool in the hot sun. In large forests, transpiration actually feeds water to the sky, supplying part of the rain, which in turn supplies the roots. Scientists studying the largest rainforest in the world – the Amazon in South America – believe that if it were cut down, rainfall would drop so dramatically that the forest could not grow up again. Trees also protect the land beneath from the heat of the sun, the cool of the night, and the fierceness of the wind. We need trees and forests to keep our local climates stable, to protect us.
Photosynthesis Light
Sugar
Plant a tree by a road Trees make the air sweeter. They actually filter the air, removing polluting gases and particles pumped out by cars, trucks, buses and motor cycles as they travel down roads. We need trees to cleanse the air of lung-damaging pollutants like nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulphur dioxide (SO2), ozone (O3), and carbon monoxide (CO). One tree can absorb 50-100kg of particulate matter in a year. Trees absorb noise. All in all, trees make the side of the road a nicer place to be!
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Water CO²
Transpiration
Trees help prevent Climate Change
Water vapour escapes through the stomata
Trees are so brilliant they can even help solve one of humanity’s most serious problems.
Water is replaced from inner cells
Water is ‘pulled’ up through the xylem
Through photosynthesis, they absorb carbon gases (CO2) from the atmosphere. CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases are causing climate change. All plants absorb and store carbon, but trees and forests are especially important. African rainforest stores billions of tonnes of carbon, protecting us from changes in temperature, rainfall and seasonal patterns that are already upsetting our daily lives. Trees are really on our side in the battle against global warming (see page 140).
Carbon gases are released when wood, oil, gas and coal are burned. The heat energy we get from these fuels comes from the release of the carbon they contain. So when forests are burnt and do not regrow, there is a double problem as even more carbon dioxide ends up in the atmosphere. You can read about ways to solve this in the Energy and Climate Change booklet.
Water is taken in through the root hairs
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THE MOPANE
One ecologist claims that two thirds of all living things in the world depend on trees. Another, that nine out of ten living things live in rain forests! Without doubt, trees support a huge diversity of life. Complex foodwebs form on trees. A caterpillar munches on the leaves while a weevil nibbles at the seeds; beetles gnaw on the bark while a monkey eats his fill of fruit and birds eat up the caterpillars. Under the ground, roots give homes for aardvarks, worms and beetle larvae. Carnivores prey on all these creatures and parasitic wasps live inside them. Lichens, orchids and ferns live on the tree’s branches. Leaves and dead wood drop to the ground, are chewed up by insects, rotted down by fungi and soil bacteria, recycling the soil nutrients brought up from deep below ground. It is this rich tapestry of relationships that makes trees so precious. We will look at one tree - the Mopane - and the relationships it nurtures. The Mopane tree is a miracle worker, a life-support system for people, animals, and cultures. Her scientific name is Colophospermum mopane and she is at home in the far northern parts of South Africa, and in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, Zambia, Namibia, Angola and Malawi. Sometimes short and scrubby, and elsewhere creating a ‘Mopane cathedral’ four metres tall, these trees take centre stage in an ecological drama which brings life to the soils of southern Africa. Only Mopane knows how to grow so well in these difficult soils, through association with a specific bacteria that fixes the nitrogen from the air. Only elephants and Mopane worms have stomachs tough enough for fully-formed turpentine-scented leaves of the Mopane. They both help keep Mopane trees small, allowing other plants the light they need, fertilising the soil with their dung. The caterpillars produce even more dung than the elephants! The worms are a tasty harvest of protein for people – as long as they remember to squeeze out the bitter gut-juices. Those that survive chew their way through, leaving the trees bare,
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before crawling off to bury themselves in the ground and wait for their huge moth-wings to grow. But the Mopane recovers, springing new butterfly-shaped leaves, fresh and edible for thirsty kudu and impala at the end of the dry season.
ACTIVITy Label with local names - Choose a tree from your area. Draw a big picture of your tree. Write and draw the plants and animals that live in, on and around it - on the leaves, the stem, branches, the ground and air. Add ways that people use and benefit from your tree. 105
EATEN AWAY
From one side the forest is destroyed by hunters with fire, from another side, the commercial loggers with big machines and lorries come to carry the wood all over the world, and on the third side, farmers swing at the trees with axes (and chainsaws) to make a living from the soil beneath.
Africa loses over 3 million hectares of forest every year By taking photographs from the sky, remote sensing and satellite imagery, scientists have been able to work out how much forest is left in Africa. While large resplendent forests remain in Central Africa, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo, they are under threat. In just forty years, two thirds of Gabon’s ancient forests have been destroyed by man. In Uganda, forests used to cover half of the country, now it‘s one fifth. As roads are built by loggers, humans move in and clear the adjacent forest. Around 10 square kilometres of rain forest disappear for each kilometre of new road. Why are the forests cleared? We chop them for firewood, for farming crops, for plantations, to build houses, factories, or to harvest and sell the timber. As with fish and wildlife populations, trees need to reproduce and grow to adulthood at least as quickly as they are chopped down. If not the forest disappears. It is tempting to clear fell, to chop all the trees down or burn the forest to farm the land beneath. While this can provide for today, it will leave our children struggling. In harsh climates soils are fragile and take hundreds of years to develop. Under the forest, soil is protected from erosion and continuously replenished with organic matter from leaves, dead branches and other organic matter. When trees are removed, quite quickly the soil is lost - and farming cannot continue.
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IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT TREES. This is a pretend newspaper imagining what it would be like.
ACTIVITy Make your own poster or article about the world’s last tree. What message will you include?
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WHAT CAN BE DONE?
What can be done? The solutions are not simple. One important factor is co-operation. There is no point one group conserving the forest, while it is destroyed from the other side by another. All the people who rely on the forest, who need the forest to live, must come together and decide. If rights are shared fairly, different groups of forest users may be able to negotiate the uses of their forest for long-term sustainable benefits - fuel wood, long term soil production, long term fruit and building materials, social and cultural benefits. Long term forest equals long term benefit! Forest reserves, National Parks and Protected Areas are ways to care for our forests. Community forests are another approach. A study in Togo found that most of the country's remaining forest is in sacred forest sites. • What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of managing forests? • Which do you think can work best in your country?
THE POLITICAL TREE The colonisers and missionaries who came to Africa hundreds of years ago wrote that they could never get real authority in the lands they wished to dominate. When a big local issue came up, they complained, everyone would gather to discuss it in a council, under a tree. Under the palaver tree, issues are freely debated and important decisions concerning the community are made. People may speak for themselves or they may choose to be represented by a griot (a poet, storyteller and traditional singer) or other spokesperson. The elders try to reach a consensus. In some places, women actively take part in the decision-making. In others, they settle for advising their menfolk outside the assemblies. Nelson Mandela spoke of how he was influenced by these traditional systems of decision-making. In Mali, the palaver system has been worked into official government ways of doing things.
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GOOD WOOD Throughout Africa, brilliant craftsmen and women and artists carve gorgeous ornaments, household utensils, drums, masks, and weapons. When sold, carving makes wood into money, and therefore food, medicine, warmth and all the other things money can buy. Wood carving is a very important industry. In Kenya 60,000 people carve, producing products which bring in an income of US $20 million each year. To increase the value of wood, nothing is better than carving, but to be sure of ongoing success, carvers need to protect the resource upon which they depend. The Good Woods project in Kenya changed a situation in which the forest was being lost. Wild hardwoods like ebony and mahoghany (muhuhu) growing in the coastal forests of East Africa, were starting to suffer from over-exploitation for carving to sell to tourists. However, many tourists who travel to see Africa’s wildlife and animals feel strongly about the environment. They would not wish to buy carvings that might be partly responsible for the destruction of a natural forest. The Good Wood Project, just like the Fairtrade and Sustainability standards provide a choice, because some carvers switched to carving wood from fastgrowing trees that can be grown on farms. The trees provide farmers with useful resources and shelter and protect their soil.
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Neem Seedlings
If you grow trees on farms, instead of harvesting them from the wild, you can be sure of a sustainable supply. Now, carvings made of mango, neem and jacaranda are becoming more popular, and because of an advertising campaign on aeroplanes, more and more tourists coming to Kenya know that it is better to buy carvings from farm-grown trees. By buying carvings with a Forest Stewardship Council certificate, which traces the wood from the farm to carving workshop to the stall where it is sold, they can be sure that their new carving is forest-friendly. They may even pay more for that knowledge! Many other forest products, like charcoal and commercial timber, are now being certified in this way, as buyers take responsibility for the impacts of their purchases. Another important way to look after forests is to reduce the amount of wood needed for cooking by using efficient stoves and alternative cooking methods. These are described in the Energy chapter. ACTION SHEETS - 47: Managing Forest Resources, 48: Forest Product Certification, 51: Neem, 35: Agroforestry
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PLANT YOUR OWN TREE
We have seen how useful trees are and we should all be planting our own. One reason people hesitate to plant trees is because they don’t provide a crop, resource or service straight away. We all naturally tend to be attracted to activities which bring immediate rewards. A tree may take ten, twenty, perhaps fifty years to provide wood, fruit or shelter. But as we are the ones benefiting from seeds sown by our parents, we must plant trees for the next generation.
In Africa, for every 28 trees cut down, only one tree is replanted Every time a tree is cut, more must be planted. Young trees need to be nurtured. They need care and attention, food, water and sometimes, if they die, they need to be replaced. Foresters expect up to two thirds of all trees in a plantation to die. Far fewer will suffer this fate if we give the young trees some tender loving care.
Plant a tree when children, your brother and sister are born and they can eat the fruit when they are grown! The Oubangui of Central Africa believe that when the tree begins to fruit, the time will have come for that person to marry. Gifts for the tree help to nurture the person. When someone dies their spirit goes to reside in their personal “birthright” tree. Plant a tree on your mother’s birthday, plant a tree in memory or to celebrate a special occasion.
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PLANT A TREE
Be sure to choose trees which flourish in your climate. It’s best to plant a tree which evolved in your country – an indigenous tree. That way the animals which evolved alongside it – including insects which may pollinate it – are likely to be around. Another way to let trees flourish is simply to allow land to naturally ‘regenerate’. In many, but not all climates, left to its own devices nature usually finds a way to spring back. Land, which is not too damaged, or polluted, which is fenced and where the vegetation is not cut back or dug by humans, will gradually develop into the ecosystem that was there originally. Leave it alone and it will come home! Plant trees and you will not be alone. Yes, forest is being destroyed, but by planting trees you will be joining a continent – wide movement of inspired people, together, each in their locality making a better future for Africa.
ACTION SHEETS - 35: Agroforestry, 36: Planting Nitrogen Fixing Trees, 38: Growing Fruit and Nut Trees, 49: Tree Planting, 50: Multipurpose Trees, 56: Where to get Tree Seeds, 67: Planting Trees for Fuelwood
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FUN FACTS • Gabon has ambitiously protected forest that covers 13% of its national territory. • Tunisia, which in ancient times was forested, had lost almost all of its woodland during its 2,000 years of civilisation. The first president of independent Tunisia, Habib Bourgiba, engaged the entire population in a massive, collective reforestation project. While many of the the trees planted were not native they have still had a wonderful effect on rainfall and agriculture. • Kenyan, Wangari Muta Maathai was the first African woman to win the famous Nobel Peace Prize, when she was globally recognised for her Green Belt Movement and 30 million trees planted ‘to counter deforestation threatening the lives of subsistence farmers'. • In 2007 the African Union launched The Great Green Wall in the Sahel that has seen trees planted from Senegal to Djibouti. Senegal planted 12 million drought resistant Faidherbia albida trees. Niger calls these ‘magical Gao’ trees and planted 200 million! It improves soil and crop production even in drought years. The pods are fodder, wood is fuel and bark is medicinal. One tree = 10 cows for fertilising soil. The leaves fall when crops need light and grow when crops need shade!
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PROTECT YOUR TREES
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DON'T FORGET Protect young trees from grazing animals - goats, sheep, cattle and wild animals will all enjoy to eat the leaves and buds. Protect your trees so they don’t get trampled and pushed over by careless people or herds of cattle.
WATER YOUR TREES IF YOU CAN; WEED THEM, AND BE SURE NO-ONE ACCIDENTALLY DESTROYS THEM WITH FIRE, CUTLASS OR STRIMMER! Don't just plant seedlings, nurture and grow them into trees! It's better to plant 10 seedlings, and have 7 succeed, than to plant 200 and none survive.
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ACTIVITIES
ACTIVITY 1 The Sustainability Game This is a game and discussion in which everyone learns about the idea of sustainable use of forest resources. For this game, your group will use pebbles to represent trees. Preparation Before you begin the sustainability game, start by telling the class the name of the game. Next, give them a simple definition of sustainability. For instance, you could tell them that sustainability means using our trees and forests and other resources without using them up. To help the group to better understand, try giving them examples of sustainable use of forests and unsustainable use of forests. Ask them to consider the difference between cutting a few trees in a forest every year and cutting all the trees in the forest at once. If you can, provide them with a local example of a way that trees and forests are used sustainably.
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Play the sustainability game For this activity you will need a large number of small pebbles and paper and pencils for keeping score. Teacher’s Tip: Pebbles are readily available and easy to collect, but if you can, try using something small and good to eat for the game, like nuts, seeds or sweets. Because edible things have greater value to your group of young people, they will find it more difficult to share. In this way, the game will more closely reflect real life, in that people find it difficult to share valuable resources like trees. Divide your group into “communities” or teams of at least four people each and place an equal number of pebbles, or “trees,” in communal piles, one for each community or team. In each communal pile there must be at least twice the number of pebbles as there are people in the community, though there can be more. The fewer pebbles you place in each pile, the easier it is to play the game and to count the results. Assign one person in each community to record the number of pebbles taken by each community member in each round. Explain the rules of the game as follows: • Each community member may take from his/her communal pile as many pebbles or “trees” in each round as he/she wishes. However, because people depend on trees and forests, each player needs to take at least one pebble per round to survive. • The game is played in rounds. Each round represents a year. The members of each community must reverse the order in which they take pebbles after each round. Reversing the order will ensure that whoever took pebbles first in the first year must take pebbles last in the next year and thus doesn’t have a permanent advantage. • During each round everyone in the community must take at least one pebble or “tree”. When there aren’t enough pebbles in the community for everyone to take at least one pebble, that group has finished the game. • After each round, you the teacher will count how many pebbles or “trees” each community has remaining in the pile, and add an equivalent number of pebbles or “trees” to the pile. The “trees” grow back after each round of play. They grow back by a factor of two. That means that if a community has taken all but one pebble or “tree” in the first round, then only two pebbles or “trees” will be available in the pile for the second round. If the team has 10 pebbles or “trees” left, than there will be 20 pebbles or “trees” available for the next year or round. Take a walk around during the game to make sure everyone remembers the rules.
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• Play three rounds, pausing after each round to find which communities are still playing and which ones are done. At the end of three rounds, those communities that have enough pebbles in the communal pile for each of its members to draw on have reached “pebble sustainability” and have survived. Suggest to the communities that if they work together in the community and agree to help one another, they might be able to make sure that their community survives. By working together and planning, some communities will be able to gain more pebbles and find a level of sustainable use. • Then have the communities play the game a second time, only this time ask them to think of ways to work together to make sure that there are pebbles or “trees” for the future. • When the second game is over, lead a discussion with your group of young people and ask them the questions provided below to reinforce the idea of how sustainability works. In which communities did everyone survive? • Which community had the most pebbles in the pile at the end of the game? • Which communities are confident they will always have enough pebbles for everyone as long as the pile is renewed? How did these communities arrive at that point? What strategies were used? • Did a leader emerge in any of the communities that reached pebble sustainability? • If there was a leader, why did the community listen to that person? Could these communities have reached “pebble sustainability” without a plan? • Compare pebble ownership around the room. Of all the people in the room, who has the most pebbles? How did he or she accomplish this? After you play the sustainability game It is important that your group of young people understand that sustainability isn’t just a game, that it is about how people use their trees and forest and other resources. Ask your group to make a list of items that their community uses from trees and forests. Then ask your group to think of HOW things from forests and trees are used by their community. Ask: • Is there anything on the list that is used in a way that is unsustainable? • Is there anything on the list that is used in a way that is sustainable? • Is there anything on the list that is used sustainably by some people but unsustainably by others? • Is there anything that can be done to ensure that the things on the list are used sustainably?
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POEM Grandma had a favourite saying She said it till she was old and grey She said it till She breathed her last “That land is never at peace”, She often stressed, “Where a few have so much And the rest have so little “There is enough corn For all the chickens of the world If only they peck with equal beaks And the fast tame their haste For the benefit of those left behind” By Niyi Osundare
Discuss this poem. Perhaps after playing the sustainability game!
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