They call it 'the forest of the free baobabs'.
Free. 
Not only because unlike so many other historical African trees, they are not threatened by building speculation, climate change and pollution.
Not only because they live in community in a forest just a few steps from the sea.
They are safe (or think they are) because the ruins of the ancient Swahili city are a national monument and their garden is inside a museum, where no one has threatened them for more than fifty years.
They are peculiar, they have dozens of holes in their bark, as if they should suddenly gush out, to shower those who come before them with this freedom. 
But the locals call them 'the free baobabs', they respect them, they gather under them and talk to them for another reason too.
The ancient city was called 'Jumba la Mtwana' and it is not a good name to remember, for those who revere the native ancestors of that place, because it means 'house of slaves'. A memory that evokes abuse, vain resistance, bloody violence and finally, centuries of subjugation.
Around the year 1000, it was not yet called that. It was a quiet fishing village, not far from Mombasa from which it was separated by two large canals and a dense forest, populated by elephants, herbivores and predators.
When the big boats arrived from Yemen, Arab traders took the best men, snatching them from their wives and children, and the young men, to toil on the trade between Mombasa, Zanzibar and the Tanzanian town of Kilwa. They traded particularly in timber, coral and spices.
Each time they came back to kidnap new men and brought back the few unserviceable slaves who had not died of exhaustion or disease.
That magical place, full of the fruits of the earth and beauty, had won over the Yemenites, who decided to have other slaves, taken on the spot, build stone houses for them, and that the women, the elderly and the less energetic adults could be useful as staff. In the same years, on their return from a voyage of discovery to Madagascar, they brought back the seeds of some plants they had never seen on the north-east coast of the African Indian Ocean, including those of the baobab.
Thus was born the 'city of the slaves', which four hundred years after the first conquests was still active and studded with baobabs that, after the first fifty years, had finally blossomed, had borne fruit whose pulp was refreshing, and with the passage of time had become real good giants.
The locals also attributed magical powers to them, heard them whispering at night and tried to glean secrets and teachings from them.
It is well known that baobabs, during the rains, can hold a great deal of water in their cavities and that the locals dig them up inside so that they can hold even more, knowing that the plant will not suffer, because its strength lies in its roots, bark and branches.
Legend has it that one year a great drought came and Arab families began to suffer. The women of Jumba La Mtwana, who knew the power of the baobabs, had a thought.
They gathered one night under the most majestic specimens in the forest and asked them in a traditional ritual to help them. The next day some of them went to their masters and said that they could solve the drought problem, but that if they did, they would have to free the slaves and give them wages and dignity. 
The masters agreed and the villagers started to drill holes in the concave baobabs in order to get water from them. One night, when they were well advanced, one of the baobabs whispered and told them that the masters would take the water but would never release them. 
They used the flowers of the plant, the mushrooms that grew around their roots and the droppings of some amphibians that slept in their hollows, mixed everything with water and took it to the Arabs.
This drink saved Jumba La Mtwana from thirst, but turned out to be a powerful drug for the slavers, which cast a kind of spell on them. So they decided to free the slaves and build more stone houses for them and live together as a community. 
The legend of the sorcerers who had bewitched the Arabs reached the ears of Up to other foreigners who, deploring the softness and laxity of the ex-slavers, decided to sack the Swahili city by the sea and destroy it. But the legends of the magic baobabs frightened them and they decided not to take slaves and not to return to Jumba La Mtwana, preferring other settlements around Kilifi and towards Tanzania. So the locals rebuilt their huts next to the ruins of the stone city, and lived humbly but freely with their baobabs.