The man in the red shirt claps his hand on the bench signalling me to sit down.
The bench is a wooden plank smoothed by the many asses that have sat on it and it sits on two logs embedded in what must have been a pavement.
That piece of earth and concrete that used to be The pavement sits at the side of the road that cuts through Likoni and starts where the ferry touches the bay.
To my right the sky is still purple, to my left and in front it is already painted midnight blue with the full moon of mid-October resting on the corner of Total's totem pole.
Below and all around, the world explodes.
On that bench I sip a Swahili coffee before going home, busy trying not to burn my tongue with the coffee and my feet with the embers that have been boiling it for hours.
As always when I sit in these contexts, the looks around me are mixed and confused. A man walks by and shouts to the café boy: ‘huyu ni mzungu kweli?’ - is this really a mzungu? - and I reply ‘kabisa’ - certainly - only turning three quarters of the way and stretching the final a a a little, which goes like this ‘mtu wa pwani’, one from the coast.
Someone sneers, someone laughs, others click their tongue twice on their palate.
I continue my coffee and think of the disaster and wonder that is Likoni.
It is no doubt convenient to name it the outskirts of Mombasa: it simplifies the geographical location.
It is not inconvenient to call it Suburb: it clarifies its hierarchy with the city. However, Likoni is neither suburb, nor suburban, nor even a neighbourhood. Likoni is tragedy and possibility, brake and motor.
One need only look a few centimetres below the surface.
I put the half-full glass cup to my lips and on the road, safari Land Rovers with tourists on them whizz by one after the other. They do not meet my gaze, they do not see me but I see them clearly. Their cars run fast as if they want to avoid the sight of that hellish corner, trying to connect them to the beach from the safari. They, however, watch voraciously, I see them fill their eyes with all that noise, those ‘dala, dala, kiberiti kumi, charger mia moja, karibuni customer’ shouted from ramshackle loudspeakers, leaning their fingers on the windows of the jeep to grab those piles of fifth-hand clothes that may have been theirs a few seasons ago, opening their mouths in amazement as if to swallow that river of cattle and men returning home after the day's exertions.
I look at them and I look at myself and I feel so privileged to have knowledge of this place that for them it will be nothing but an explosion of questions between the impeccable white of the sand and the violent red of the Tsavo. There is no insignificant place on this earth and even if it sometimes costs effort, it will always be possible to assign a history and therefore an identity to every corner of the world. For one thing, at the end of the 1500s, the Zimba, a nomadic and predatory cannibal tribe that was instrumental in determining the fate of the people of Mombasa during the Ottoman-Portuguese conflicts of the time, stopped at Likoni.
Beneath my feet sipping hot coffee with cardamom, cinnamon and ginger, someone might have enjoyed a barbecued Portuguese shoulder or perhaps a Turkish tartare.
Being aware of this, even though I feel a taste in my mouth that mixes horror and curiosity, changes my perspective on this land. For me, Likoni is no longer a putrid place that engulfs vegetables and fish destined to rot, synthetic drugs, alcohol of dubious and dangerous provenance and prostitution.
It is no longer just the place where many of the children I follow for work have their childhoods trampled on amidst neglect, rape and beatings. It is no longer just the place where you hold on to even your organs for fear they will be stolen. It is all that but first and foremost a place that generates questions and the desire to look under that carpet of dust, syringes, despair and filth. To find there a land that has been abused and consumed, relegated to being a place of passage, glorified as a place of ill-gotten gains, whose beaches have been despoiled of little interest and whose soil has been eaten away by coral to pull up resorts and villas. Mombasa would die without Likoni's human strength, and Likoni would collapse without Mombasa's opportunities. Without a bridge connecting them - at least for now - the two are each other's altar and sewer.
And Kenya today is also Likoni and Likoni today also makes Kenya and my love for this nation can only build also in my loving Likoni by hating it. Never again could I say I am in love with this country without including and admitting to having enjoyed that spicy coffee drunk on the edge of hell.

Michele Senici, 1993. Educator, teacher, project coordinator. I opened Casa Hera in Diani because I did not know where to continue my life. Have I realised this now? Certainly not, but that's OK, at least I observe, I think, I write.