It always sounded strange to use the word "emigrant" to define an Italian in Kenya.
And yet, until about forty years ago, certain countrymen were Italian.
For characteristics, vocation for fortune, origin, social class.
Kenya has always been a territory for everyone: in the post-war period rich landowners, neo-industrial coffee and fruit and vegetable growers, nobles in the smell of decay, managers of the (then) large Italian companies and scions of wealthy families began to arrive.
Alongside them, often indispensable, there were the labourers who gave no less prestige to the Italian spirit abroad: electricians, plumbers, cooks or even willing and stubborn young people with no art or part but with a great desire to create a new life and economic stability, dreaming of one day returning to their native village.
Emigrants in Kenya.
Ennio Grasso, born in 1933, an Italian resident of Malindi who died yesterday after a very short illness, belonged to this category.
Those who go down in history when, as they say, "make a fortune".
But this one belongs more to lands of nuggets and real bandits like America.
Arrived in Kenya at the beginning of the Eighties from Sicily, Ennio remembered his origins by talking about when he was young, pulling nets and earning his first lira by selling fish.
Gaetano Grasso called Ennio has come a long way.
When he arrived in Watamu he soon became loved by the Grandi Viaggi family, thanks to his ability to adapt, to understand himself on the fly with the local population even with just a "fuck" at the right time. As a handyman for the nascent Blu Bay, Ennio imagined his own tourist village and bought the splendid land on the sea where his creature, the Barracuda Inn, still stands today. Guardacaso, name of a fish. In that name and in that INN, the international "inns" of the past, there were the two souls of Ennio, the attachment to the origins and the ambition, the will to dare.
Despite various contracts with agencies and tour operators, the Barracuda Inn was Ennio's home for years. One of the first to "retain", as they say today, the clients, to make them year after year friends who came back also to see him.
He was not an easy man, as one might say of many countrymen who often feel nostalgia for their country, the cut of their roots and have something inside them that pulls like a fisherman's net every day. Ennio vented these frustrations especially at the casino, "damned casino" as he often called it.
Times were changing and perhaps the desire to dare could not vent his frustrations elsewhere.
But then, starting from the mythical Bobby, that casino had become his real family. Italian-American, like real emigrants.
The other passion-work that kept him attached to our country was the import of food products. Not always first quality, not always first quality, but when you pinned it to him he would reply "and who's going to buy me a truffle here?".
The last time we saw each other was in the shop on Malindi-Mombasa that he had recently opened, opposite the airport. He invited me to sit down like he did for hours, in front of the entrance. In the way of the old men of the South, when they start chatting serenely waiting for the sunset. About the sun and life.
"Look at all this unsold stuff, but what do you say when the tourists come back?"
The tourists will come back, sooner or later.
Emigrants from literature like Ennio Grasso will be gone.