A truck killed the world’s loneliest tree in 1973

Dakar Rally drivers have used a sculpture as a waypoint since 1993. A frame of welded pipes, tall as a house, bent by the wind. It marks the spot where the planet’s loneliest tree fell one night in 1973, split in two by a Libyan truck driver, reportedly drunk.

L’Arbre du Ténéré, the acacia felled that night, had appeared on Sahara maps since 1939. The nearest neighbour stood 400 kilometres away. Its roots reached 40 metres down to a fossil aquifer that had vanished from the surface millennia ago. French soldiers dug a well nearby in the forties and measured its age: about 300 years.

Before that, it had been the landmark of the salt caravans between Agadez and Bilma. Tuareg guides passed it carrying blocks from the north down to the south, coming back with millet, cloth and news. In the fifties the French geographer Henri Lhote gave it a formal name for the first time, although the Tuareg had always simply called it “l’arbre”. The tree lived there, alone, while the guides changed, and the languages, and the flags of the country.

The governor of Niger had the trunk moved to the National Museum in Niamey. It is still there, in a refrigerated room, with the date engraved on a plaque. When they move it to a new display case they wrap it in a blanket so the bark won’t crack. The Tuareg call the sculpture simply “l’arbre”. The trucker was never identified.