From today you can safely call me Mbogo Kimera and I will try to answer you, with a proud smile.
It is a great honor for me to become a turnaround and have been invested in this "honorary tribe" during an official ceremony in the village of the MADCA association for the recovery and preservation of the culture and traditions of the Giriama.
With my affiliation with Amelulu's "clan", a process that began twenty years ago in Tezo, the parts of Kilifi, my process of "giriamation"
In fact, I have always suspected of being a rhythm, belonging to one of the least-regarded African tribes, one of the quietest and most indolent to the West, but also one of those who have not sold their traditions but prefer to live with They do it daily and do not get a card postcard, as is the case for maasai, to which it has become a popularity with which years have to count. The rhythms do not look like warriors, they are rather equatorial peasants, they have carved large zigomi with the scepter and weeds that plow the ground better than plows. They believe in ancestors as I believed in my grandfather, they had a queen, Mepoho, and they were the women to govern the villages, until it was necessary to wage war with enemies that claimed the strength of the muscles and the spears.
When I first arrived in Kenya I was twenty years old and, as the Poet says, I fell in love with everything.
Nature enveloped and involved me, and Nature was not only the baobab, the frangipani, the Indian Ocean, the monkeys and the varani, but also the local population, who knew how to live in symbiosis, still unaware that the "mzungu" They considered Paradise.
After a week in a rush village, sleeping on a non-existent mattress in a mud hut (still today I am convinced that most of the rheumatic pains I have been caused from that week) I realized I was too much to enter In the same way of thinking.
My journey towards Africanization began. The first to realize that I was a spin, was my hair. Hair, you know, being closer to the cerebral matter, are privileged, they first understand things. So they began to grow even wilder and sharper, blacker and more resistant.
Since then, more than 20 years have passed, and there have been so many stories, some books and months and months of studies on the people and tribal lives.
In the meantime, I returned to Italy and declared my African affection to everyone, in 2005 I made my choice and two years ago my daughter was born in Mombasa.
Today, finally, I collect the fruit of a great passion for this land, for these people aware of their own story more than today millions of Italians, proud of their ingenuity, always prepared for the worst and uncertain tomorrow to celebrate even The day before as a remote past, living the present glamorously in tune with our wretched times.
I used too many words and too many arrogance for a spin.
I leave myself from philosophy and elucubrations.
From today I am Mbogo Kimera of the Amelulu clan.
A Giriama.