At first sight, the trees of Takaungu seem to project a 'fantasy' scenario to the traveller.
They clamber up the ancient stone staircase that rises from the landing of fishing boats and other vessels that carry salvaged souls from one side of the inlet to the other.
Women in colourful, iridescent robes that stand out against the blue of the ocean, fruit and vegetable sellers who go to the market, hoping for a few coins or barter to survive, students who have no other way to dream of a future other than that of their fathers, of a few coins and barter, than to climb onto a raft every day. On board they will find priests, peasants, women in labour, sick old people and traffickers.
There and back, every day, on the same boat and then up the same staircase.

In reality, the stone staircase was built more than seven hundred years ago for another reason, and many of the people who live there know it: in Takaungu, a few kilometres south of Kilifi, in the middle of the Kenyan coast, there was one of the most active and bloody slave trades.
Climbing the steps corroded by salt, sweat and blood, one arrives at the ruins of the slave market and, despite the fact that almost all history in these parts is not valued and is experienced as a foreign shame and not as a lesson to be learnt from, searching well among the brambles and brushwood one finds the wells into which the young, muscular Mijikenda were lowered, to be hoisted at the auctions of the rich Omani traders of Zanzibar, who came on purpose to buy them.

Those who did not resist in the pit were not valuable items for sale, and were left to die in there, if snakes or disease had not already thought of it.
That is why the trees, who have seen it all, would not want to be involved in the stone and ungodly plots of Takaungu's story and step aside, leaving the way clear for unsuspecting and lucky people to live in other times, when slavery hardly ever throws in the wells and does not sell your body directly, but settles for your soul in instalments.
That is why, carved on the trunk of a thousand-year-old baobab, we seem to see the terrified, imploring face of one of those captive souls, imprisoned in a time that man has been able to erase but that nature, much wiser and more aware than us, will remember forever.