Some roads don't even know where they end up.
There is always something or someone that can interrupt them, divert their path, change their appearance and their clay skin.
Sometimes they get lost in a hundred cycle paths, or drown in a river that has no intention of being crossed.
Other times, they surrender to a forest that resists the greedy hand of man, and increasingly often they encounter asphalt that evolves them, killing their ancient meaning.
Then, from a distant point on the track, someone always arrives.
That's when certain roads still get excited.
When they see women passing by with the heavy shadow of a humble life on their heads, like a crown that the world does not recognise but life does.
Children who want to walk to school barefoot, who have their shoes in their backpacks and have to wear them in class, but woe betide them if they ruin them on the red earth for ten kilometres there and ten back.
Swarms of motorcycles buzz around them, raising dust and thoughts of change, of fast times and practical needs and premature existences.
And even a few old, grumbling lorries, coughing up smoke and modernity, like a large animal at the end of its days that has not yet decided whether to continue feeding on increasingly indigestible grass or accept the morphine of fuel.
Certain roads, then, pretend nothing has happened.
Look at them there, lying like tired animals under a sky that changes mood more often than a Western man and tries to keep at bay the dark clouds that argue among themselves about which one will pour down first.
They seem to say “I'll carry on”, but in reality they are just waiting for someone to take them by the hand, or perhaps to leave them alone.
Which is not at all the same thing, but in Africa it often coincides.
These are roads that wake up every morning with a new clay wrinkle, a scar carved out by a wheel that is too heavy or by rain that is too sincere.
They tremble at the sight of a bulldozer that promises nothing good, and have new drainage arteries implanted to adapt their hearts to the needs of others.
Yet they resist, while the trees on either side do their best not to look old, even when their branches resemble rusty antennas searching for an impossible signal.
Fortunately, the birds still use them as makeshift control towers: they take off, land, announce departures that no one will ever document.
Yet it is when the road stretches towards the horizon, winding distractedly through the bushes, that it betrays its nature: it just wants to get somewhere.
But it pretends not to know, perhaps to feel a little human itself and dissolve into nothingness with the same grace with which a dream vanishes as soon as you open your eyes.
And as you walk, or drive, or simply exist on that strip of land, you realise that the road is nothing more than an excuse.
A cruel and wonderful excuse to keep looking for something you didn't know you wanted to find, like everything that never asked to be chosen.
Africa has always known this: you keep going like this, one step after another, letting the roads, confused, stubborn, poetic, decide what we will be when we arrive.
If we ever arrive.