‘Come rain or come shine', whatever the weather, at 7am the market in the old city of Mombasa is already buzzing.
As often happens to me in Kenya, I feel I am entering the heart of a metaphor.
All the kibandas, shacks of wood and sheet metal held together by nails and ropes, have been set up by their daily handlers.
Many of them do not know if they will have another day, or make it to the end of the month. Others hold out for a whole season, a few are familiar faces for years.
Also because almost all of them sell items that one could easily do without but which poor people somehow feel they need: backpacks with cartoon drawings, imitation leather handbags, footballs and beach balls, ladles, bowls and strainers of all sizes but always and only made of plastic, pots with lids made by the Chinese devil, battery-operated radios that by now music and news are listened to on mobile phones, new Indian clothes that everyone now buys second-hand and European in suburban markets, rusty padlocks and ramshackle thermos flasks, football shirts with the inscriptions of retired footballers and posters of unknown Bollywood actors. With a side order of everything superfluous possible that the dragon of the Orient could bring.
There is no real bargain at the old city market, not a trepperdue, a special offer, a squealer waving four knickers or putting a stuffed monkey in your son's hand.
An earring salesman rummages through his nose looking perhaps for a cubic zirconia, an opulent woman dozes lying on Pakistani fabrics and lets a recorded voice speak for her: ‘Karibuni customers’, welcome customers, wake me up if you need me.
However, there is no need to demoralise or turn back: this is only the entrance door, the antechamber to the maze of streets, the hodgepodge of shacks and small shops, the cosmopolitan meeting of souls and the pungent clash of miasmas and scents that will unfold after this obligatory passage.
It is the necessary entrance, the metaphor of today's Africa, that one must have the patience to search beyond appearances, the hard crust of the new world order. Because all of a sudden, inevitable and overbearing, it always jumps out and fascinates you with its anarchic, ancestral, lively, engaging predisposition to the essential, bringing you back to the true nature of things and their meaning.