Baobab

I mean, you can just keep going.

On that parallel, you're going to find Baobab.

They're all on that path.

And these sites, when you go to them and you go visit them in person like I have, you begin to realize... how magnificent the architecture is and how incredible the technology must have been to move these things.

And, as Nigeria's internal crisis continuously spills over borders, who ultimately bears the responsibility for this unchecked spread?

That is the critical, hard-hitting questions we are unravelling here under the Baobab.

Ah, George, how is your drink tasting

today? So today is very unsettling.

But before we do that, we are going to look back at last week as we always do.

We discussed Afrobarometer and asked a lot of questions around it, whether Africans should actually trust the data that come out of Afrobarometer.

And as always, our tradition here under the Baobab, our golden comment of the week goes to Honesty Simuliu, who said, the one who pays decides what he needs to pay for and benefits of paying.

Adam Smith said, it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from the regard to their own interest.

It has a rhythm that you only find if you stay long enough to listen.

Dinner was at the Baobab restaurant by Multi Cable Ltd, a nice spot in the city center.

I ordered a three course meal for two, although I was eating alone because the portions are large and the quality is high.

The bill came to about 60,000 shillings, roughly $29.

And the essay concedes that the text can absolutely bear those historical readings.

But fundamentally on a personal level, what the Baobabs represent is the strict necessity of a daily habit of attention.

The daily grind.

The prince is not a traditional hero who grabs a sword and slays a dragon in a blaze of glory.

The source notes that the book ignores the collective duty of the real world to focus on the one rose.

But in real life, Saint-Exupéry left his real-life rose, Consuelo, relatively safe in New York so he could fly back into a war zone in Europe where he ultimately died.

He abandoned his rose to fight the Baobabs.

So what if this entire fable isn't just a gentle lesson on how to love? What if it is a desperate, beautifully disguised confession of guilt to his wife?

Hopefully you did.

Well, Baobab puts the Baobab fruit at the center of all the expressions, and you're sourcing the fruit from Ghana and Zambia, and you're on record as saying it's sort of the foundation flavor of the range.

So why Baobab, out of all the botanicals that were all over the continent, why would you make this one kind of your North Star? What drove that decision?

It could have been so many things, but it had to be this.

Because I think when you are making a gin, the hero is always going to be juniper.

We got a lot more Biobab tree.

See, and then I...

Baobab.

My 25 years at global giants such as Nestle and Challenger brands such as Goo Chocolate Puds, Chobani and Strong Roots, as well as coached over 400 scaling brands, means I have the experience to ask the questions that truly matter and get you the insight that will inspire you to think differently and drive serious growth for your brand.

Tell everybody how you ended up bringing Baobab and then all the other ingredients to the UK.

So I think to answer that, I need to go back into my personal history, really.

Okay.

And, you know, they said no.

And then I found another buyer at Whole Foods who was probably sitting next to the one who said no, who said, okay, that's interesting, but we put it to our store managers.

They had a meeting with the store managers and they said, look, They all agreed that nobody comes in asking for Baobab and say they don't want it.

And we were like, well, of course, nobody comes in asking for Baobab because they don't even know it exists.

The T5 curves away west, but I took a dirt track that pushes east into the bush, toward the granite boulders that litter the hillside like dropped stones.

The air is cool, it's August, winter here, and the temperature sits around 25 degrees at the most, but the sun has that high altitude bite to it, so I kept to the shade of the baobabs when I could.

Baobabs.

I've seen them before, of course, but here on the escarpment there's something else.

They stand alone in the grass like ancient custodians, their trunks swollen with water stored against the long dry months, and the bark is cracked into patterns that look like old leather.

Purer than those was its luster, and carved as they carve not in Europe, and the men thereby are poor and held to be fearless, yet they do not sell that idol.

And I may say here that if any one of my readers should ever come by ship to the winding harbour where the forts of the Portuguese crumble in infinite greenery, where the Baobab stands like a corpse here and there in the palms, if he goes ashore where no one has any business to go, and where no one so far as i know has gone from a liner before though it's little more than a mile or so from the pier and if he finds a golden shrine which is near enough to the shore and a five-inch diamond in it carved in the shape of a god it is better to leave it alone and get back safe to the ship than to sell that diamond idol for any price in the world Ali Kariba Hash went into the golden shrine, and when he raised his head from the seven obeisances that are the due of the idol, behold! It glowed with such a luster as only it wears after answering recent prayer.

No native of those parts mistakes the tone of the idol.

They know its varying shades as a tracker knows blood.