In Malindi there will only ever be one Captain.
The Captain of Lungo Sorso.
After a very brief and disruptive illness, Beppe Passaglia, a long-time Italian resident in Kenya and one of the pioneers of Italian Malindi, passed away, fortunately without too much pain, in Italy at the age of 72.
The pain and the great emptiness, as never in this case, is of those who remain.
Of the "old" Malindi, the one who has learned to love his style, intelligence, acute sincerity, discretion, the ready wit, the fruit of a Tuscan character that he never repudiated, the ability to live and be with everyone, the balance of someone who learned early in life to walk through the storms of the high seas.
Beppe the Captain arrived in Malindi at the end of the 1970s after having travelled the world as a sailor on merchant and cruise ships and having made a career out of it until he obtained the rank by which he was known by everyone on the Kenyan coast.
He was taken ashore in the port of Mombasa, which introduced him for the first time to the beauty and sense of freedom of Kenya.
When some friends from Livorno discovered Malindi and he decided to put his feet back on the ground after so many years, he didn't hesitate for a moment and decided to start a new life.
He tried with an ice-cream parlour in the centre of Malindi, the first Italian one, initially made out of a container. Then he opened the ice-cream parlour "L'incontro" (nobody called it that, it was for everyone "Da Beppe il Capitano") where today there is the Stars and Garters.
It was the hangout for Italians in the late 1980s and up until 1990, when he sold the business to fulfil an old dream of his, that of buying a schooner.
It was anchored in Kilifi creek, and in the good old days of Malindi it did charters as far as Lamu, but in the end it was more about parties and excuses to invite friends.
Then, due to the dark years of hardship when tourism in Kenya declined, at the end of the nineties, when you least expect it, the Captain turned into an entrepreneur.
It was his idea to expand Jacaranda Bay, where he built the resort that became the current Jacaranda and some residential villas by the sea.
He didn't like to work, but he would never be a retiree.
He never spared himself, the Captain, who not surprisingly was "from Lungo Sorso".
When there was something to enjoy in life, to end the evening 'as if there was no tomorrow', he could not miss it. And always in a high, intelligent manner, never banal or vulgar.
Having Beppe for dinner, meeting him in any situation, going for a swim in the ocean or on safari with him, spending even just an afternoon listening to his beloved jazz and chatting, was a gift from an African God, and not only for me.
Having met him, known his lively eyes, his sardonic but always polite smile, his words never banal even when they were blunt to the point of pure cynicism, has enriched the souls of thousands of people who have frequented Malindi in the last 40 years.
Goodbye Captain, my captain, our Beppao.  Go back to sailing as you always did, the waves come and go forever and he who is made of the sea will never die.