For many years he was one of the pens and voices of the Italians in Kenya.
Often a voice out of the chorus, that of a Piedmontese who preferred to be rude in order not to be false but who had the courage of his own opinions.
Franco Nofori died at the age of 75 in his "infected Italy", as per the title of the blog he had started to direct a year ago, after the death of his dear friend Massimo Tumolo, another unabashed critic.
Kenya and especially the coast had been his "battlefield" for more than thirty years, since 1983 when he arrived in Mombasa as a representative of Iveco.
After the decline in the activities of the Turin-based company, Franco did not lose heart and rather than return to Italy, he started a business selling and servicing Italian generators.
Since he was a boy, Franco had cultivated a passion for journalism, writing in student magazines in high school and in newspapers in his region, Piedmont.
In Kenya in 2000, he founded the first magazine for Italian "expats", entitled "Out of Italy", which brought together good pens and experts on Africa.
"A person who was always consistent, full of initiatives and passions - remembers him the former consul of Malindi Roberto Macrì, who together with him, Ugo Troiani and Gianni Graziosi created the first association of Italians in Kenya - I remember his battles against pedophilia and corruption, courageous investigations. Unfortunately, his physical problems, increased by the cursed habit of cigarettes, forced him to have a liver transplant and they never gave up on him, to the point of advising him, before the pandemic, to return to Italy where he would have been better followed. It was the strength of continuing to write that made him live even beyond his possibilities".
Shuttling back and forth between Mombasa and Malindi, where he had many friends, Franco was also for years an important reference point for Comites, as the person responsible for Mombasa and a member of the board of directors.
He lived in a beautiful house by the sea in Kikambala, a place abandoned after a terrorist attack in the late nineties, which appeared a bit decadent and lonely, but where he was fine until another tragic event touched him closely, the assault on a couple of Italian pensioners who were his neighbors, culminating in the death of the woman and the wounding of her husband.
In addition to dozens and dozens of online articles, in recent years Nofori has also published two novels, set in the Turin he has always loved, like his Juventus. "Il giustiziere" in 2016 and "Piccolo mondo infetto" in 2020. He leaves behind an African wife and a daughter who brilliantly graduated from Turin. To them the condolences of Malindikenya.net.
I would be disingenuous and disrespectful to Franco's memory if I said that he and I were friends.
We have often disagreed on many issues of Kenya and Italy, but we have always had respect for each other's professional ethics and he himself in 2005 asked me to collaborate with "Out of Italy", just to show me that he valued me and that he also accepted ideas not aligned with his "editorial line".