I remember the first time I set foot in Tezo, more than 30 years ago.

The first thing I thought was the paradox, as an Italian, of that name pronounced with a soft zeta, Teso.

There was absolutely nothing "tense" about that place, along the Kenyan coast smiling and dozing in the sun.

The people were much more "pole pole" than in Malindi, the clusters of mud huts and makuti were realities on eternal pause in the shade of the palm trees and the many cashew trees.

There was a shed where they piled up the fruits of that wonderful tree as patient as they were and cleaned them with such "phlegm" that I could not imitate it except by falling into a trance-like state.

And there was a man beside the shed who was cutting thin slices of a cassava root with even more imperturbability, then frying it.

I stayed with him chatting and eating that popular delicacy, like the stories he told me.

At the end of the day, the workers in the shed would spend a good part of their pocket money on palm wine at the bar, and there were also rooms that were about as spacious as the locker rooms in a municipal swimming pool in Italy, where they could hang out with girls of dubious but almost obligatory morality.

Today that village on the dusty Kilifi-Malindi axis is an industrious suburb traversed by trucks, and dozens of buildings with stores of all kinds line the once-poor road: hardware stores, greengrocers, dealers in auto parts, cell phones and gas cylinders. Plus cafeterias, small restaurants and other diminutives of business to the public.

This place, unlike others, gives you the idea that there are people working.

Even the cassava man works, in his own way. He has white hair and is a living advertisement for what he sells, as he eats a fried pastry of his product with gusto.

I approach and discover that incredibly he is the same person I knew back in the day. I would never have figured it out on my own; he is the one who remembers me, as is often the case around here.

Not many white people stop, especially with my hair.

He is one of the old souls of the country, telling me that at one time the shed stood exactly across the street from his stall and was part of one of the farms where cashews were shelled.

There would be much to sit and discuss about how even here in thirty years we have gone from cashews and whores to motor scooters and free porn sites.

Then going back to smashing coral stones in quarries near the sea because cashew factories, one of the prides of Kilifi and environs, have closed and wild construction instead has increased exponentially, along with transportation.

Kenya Kambia, I used to say in a song-monologue of mine, with the K highlighting the (they say necessary) distortions of this society.

Fortunately in Africa it will take a few more lifetimes to see all the damage realized. In the meantime, I, even if I am a little "tezo" from time to time, do not tire of going around looking for other places as Tezo once was, and meeting other cassava lords.