Clouds come and go, like emotions. At the equator they are so low, so close that you feel they are part of the furniture that nature has decided to place on your veranda.
Tonight they have decided to dance in front of the sky and discover its immense starry vault. First, however, there was Africa at sunset. That moment is always too brief, as moments of true happiness are.
The earthly setting tells of a Mijikenda village on the outskirts of Malindi, home to one of the tribal communities most faithful to the traditions of past centuries. When the huts were wooden trulli and dry palm trees, without even the comfort of mud compacted like cement. One is for the women, with pots on the stove, rags piled up and cradles of banana leaves for the infants. The other is for the men, with sleeping mats, palm wine and the smell of tobacco for rudimentary pipes. The third is for the ancestors, the hand-carved fetishes coloured with animal blood and macerated herbs. Fathers and fathers of fathers to be invoked to grant wisdom and protection to the village. I returned to Kenya, where I spent my youth, seven years ago and since then I consider myself a full-fledged African. The Mijikenda community, one of the oldest and most mysterious ethnic groups in Equatorial Africa, welcomed me and treated me as one of their own. I have been renamed Mbogo (Buffalo) Kimera. Perhaps it is a chimera that I can become one of them for all intents and purposes. I will never be able to believe in their superstitions, idols and cult of the dead. But I participate and live with them.
One of the most important appointments is the initiation of a "mganga", the good witch doctor, who within the tribal community is considered at the same time a healer, a psychologist and one of the highest religious authorities, because he is able to interpret the will of the ancestors. It is the "elders", the village elders, gathered in prayer in the fetish hut, who begin the mganga. The ritual lasts for a week. The aspiring witch doctor must show that he has learnt to recognise and use medicinal herbs, to take hallucinogenic ones (inland from Malindi there is stramonium, but also the very powerful divine rum sage) and discard the poisonous ones. A whole day is spent wandering for kilometres under the scorching African sun and searching for the plants he will need over time. With a video-producer friend we film the whole day. The ceremony continues into the night, with tribal dances and prayers. Shamans dressed in colourful sarongs and warthog skins, with bird feather headdresses, steaming pots of cornmeal and field grasses, visitors and relatives from nearby villages bringing offerings and gifts: sweet potatoes with lime and chilli, coconut beans, tapioca and pineapple fritters, strange tubers fried in palm oil. There is always someone awake to do something. The next day, other trials await the aspiring witch doctor: he will cut the palm of his hand with a sharp knife without feeling pain, speak languages that do not belong to him, understand the illnesses of young women and finally face the sea at night, after walking thirty kilometres to reach it, and talk to the spirits. In the past, the mijikenda believed that monsters and evil presences hid in the sea. The mganga is able to come to terms with the "mapepo", the evil Muslim spirits who have been conquering the shores of the ocean for hundreds of years and first drove their people to take the indigenous population into slavery. Today, the villains and unbelievers are in the majority, the village elders know this and celebrate the initiation of a new mganga as a fundamental event in order not to lose their culture. The young gangs, who fear the mgangas because they hurl anathemas at them against dishonesty, the worship of false idols, drug and alcohol abuse, often launch punitive expeditions to beat (and in some cases kill) the good witch doctors. The police, in the hinterland, are rarely seen. The wizards of a certain age dye their hair. Those with white hair are at risk. The dances continue, on the last day the whole village is celebrating. The children run and breathe in misery and freedom, the women toil and hope that everything will remain the same, the elderly pray and go serenely to their fate. I am happy to be part, even marginally, of this society that defends its own culture and values, however light years away from those of my tired civilisation.
The rest is just something that comes with living. And believe me, the more you manage to live, the less you have to write about it.