This is a story.
And like every story, it is made of moments, instants, people, and places —
different from one another, yet bound together by thin, invisible, unbreakable threads.
It is not a tale about Africa, nor of Africa, but a story of Men — or perhaps of a single Man.
It is the story of an ancient tree whose gnarled roots — like the strong, weathered arms of an old woman — seek life deep within the river.
Or of a woman who casts those same roots towards the sky, as if to defy the laws of Mother Nature.
There is nothing in Africa that does not spring from the Earth, and nothing that is not lifted towards the sky that reigns above all things.
It is the story of a River that has flowed for millennia through a land forever struggling for its identity —
the same river that carries both life and death, end and beginning, the Alpha and the Omega of the world.
A river that can cradle, a river that can kill.
It is the story of many Men who set out in search of something for which they still have no name.
It is the story of a Colour, where all colours resemble one another —
the story of a flight towards faraway places drawn on maps of Red Earth, where all roads blend into one.
It is the story of that red earth that stains your feet and seeps inside you —
it soils your blood and sets it alight. And there is no washing it away at night: the red earth has marked everything you have, everything you are.
It is the story of a sickness for which there is no cure.
The story of a rain that comes from the silence of a brilliant sky and, with a single dry thunderclap, fills the village buckets and brings life.
It is the story of many other stories —
the story of those who live and are consumed by that Land,
and of those who are themselves consumed by it.
And it is also the story of a Mondele —
of the moment when, a stranger among the forgotten, he asked himself a simple question:
“What if I had been born here?”
And he understood the only possible answer:
I AM AFRICA.
