"Life goes on, and with it the tenacity of the reporter. And that is why I wanted to remember these journeys. I did not tell a powerful story, but only a story that was intertwined with other stories. Maybe I am deluding myself, but I do not want to give up. I don't know how it will end. But I am there and I will continue to tell the story of Africa as long as I have the strength to get on a plane and leave, to hold my notebook and camera."
With these words, entrusted to the back cover of his most recent literary effort, one of the greatest Italian connoisseurs and storytellers of Africa and its less investigated and visible folds, one of the few who in so many years have managed to be simultaneously lucid geopolitical analysts and touching authors of journalistic reportage, opens to us a treasure chest of painful intimacies combined with stories so human that they immerse themselves in the continent that one cannot say one loves without having investigated it with an open heart.
A story of life and the will to live that meets others in a continuous and throbbing web of journeys, revelations, tragic implications and hard-to-accept realities, but also of encounters that ennoble having chosen Africa as a metaphor for a just and necessary existence. Always and to the end.
Every other word, for me who is not only a colleague of his but fortunate enough to have become his friend, will never be more profound and full of belonging to a salvific and passionate ethic as the pages of this book. Everything else, Angelo explains in this talk in Watamu a few days ago. Because every now and then things go the right way, especially when we listen to each other and care about each other.
Angelo Ferrari, "I don't know how it will turn out." OgZero Editions.