I want to believe most of us are very familiar with bamboo. We can excuse our brothers and sisters who were not born in rural Nigeria like us and so never got to know so much about the woods, about the forest and all that go with them. I remember quite well at the Federal School of Arts and Science, Ondo in Ondo State, when yours sincerely became the cynosure of eyes of his student colleagues from Lagos as he cleared the grass and tilled the soil with dexterity at the school farm.
They had never handled the hoe and cutlass in their life. I remember quite well too that at the school farm in Oyemekun Grammar School Akure, some of our colleagues from Lagos confessed that they thought yam grew on trees like oranges and other fruits do. So, if we have readers of this piece who does not know that rugged, multi-usable beauty of a wood called bamboo, they are quite excused.
We cannot all be ‘butter’ or ‘pepper less’ like we call them in our UNILAG days. Bamboo is one wood timber that can be put to different uses. An Asia popular saying describes it distinctly.
It says: A man is born in a bamboo cradle and goes away in a bamboo coffin. Everything in between is possible with bamboo! We have bamboo edible shoots, bamboo medicine, bamboo fabric, bamboo biomass or biofuel, bamboo architecture. We also have bamboo fibre for the garment and automotive industries, flooring boards, and veneers as thin as 0.
2 mm. Bamboo is increasingly becoming popular among Western architects and engi.
