I had passed by to look for you, but you were no longer in your usual place, in one of the few masonry houses in the village on the banks of the ancient river that created the great inlet of Kilifi.
I thought it was also normal not to find you, after 12 years. 
That you were already of a certain age and that one never lives too long here. 
But I had some hope...
You were the "mzee ya kijiji", the wise elder of that cluster of mud huts and dry palm trees, of the green expanse of bushes of which you, more than anyone, but certainly less than your wives and sisters, knew the leaves, the roots, and their healing properties.
I was struck by your eyes, which projected light beyond every cornfield and every banana tree in the valley, the smile that embraced each traveller as if he were one of over fifty grandchildren.
It amused me to consider your resemblance to some actor from the French films of the 1950s, painted black, or to the Fernandel who played Don Camillo.
For that, perhaps, I do not remember your name and, in my memories, I always call you Don.
And they are good memories, during the Mijikenda peace walk that took us, twelve years ago, in the hinterland of Kilifi, along the paths that brought the ancestors of the nine tribes of the Kenyan coast from the Galla hills, on the border with Somalia, to the promised land of Godoma, where the present Kaloleni stands.
Of my meeting with you, apart from the splendid photos of Leni, your polished speech in Kiswahili will remain etched in my memory, culminating in short sentences, pronounced in English, to make me understand them even better and as a sign of respect (useless with me, but cultivated as a necessity in my colonial adolescence) towards the white man.
One of these remains a great lesson for me. 
There were those who that day lamented the albeit difficult situation of the present, of a world losing its values and the other things we know.
You said: 'It is in the present that one wakes up, every morning and goes to live. In the past no one ever wakes up, so it is not worth living in it'.
There, I came by to thank you for that, Don.
Because also thanks to people like you, I 'passed' but i'm not 'past'.