SAD STORY
04-05-2024 by Freddie del Curatolo
If, as the Malian writer and philosopher Amadou Hampatè Ba said, 'In Africa, every old man who dies is a burning library', in the past few days on the banks of the Sabaki River, not far from Malindi, Kenya, millions of books have burned in a single moment.
The fury of the Sabaki's floods, which have been raging for days over Kenya, uprooted an almost thousand-year-old baobab tree, but above all one of the baobabs that is sacred not only to the culture of the Mijikenda ethnic group of the coast, but to the whole of Kenya and its history.
The baobab tree named 'of Mekatilili', in honour of Kenya's national heroine, the first to challenge the British Empire in the early 1900s, had withstood wars, epidemics, droughts and more than nine hundred rainy seasons.
But it could do nothing against climate change, already weakened by pollution and human neglect. Nature has done what man has not directly caused this time, despite being responsible for it. Yet the baobab of Mekatilili, planted today by us and by a few paladins of Mijikenda cultural traditions, is just one of the many thousand-year-old trees that are no longer on this earth. Felled to make way for buildings, or for more space in agricultural fields. Even sold to be transported abroad and displayed, when dead, in the gardens of Eastern European billionaires.
When one sees a symbol of eternity die, whose life once lasted at least fifty times that of a man, one feels even more mortal, as well as guilty.
To know its history, to have touched it, to have climbed on it and heard from the great poet Kazungu Wa Hawerisa the legends that have sprung up around this great giant that we hoped would be eternal, and to see it at the mercy of the muddy waters, is like seeing the very drift of humanity.
We have seen a lot, as we tried to map the historic specimens of Adansonia Digitata (this is the original name of the baobab) in the vain hope that the Ministry of the Environment would declare them national monuments and no one would be able to touch them anymore. Today is a sad day and we can only remember this beautiful sacred tree of Africa through the video images we have preserved.
FREDDIE'S CORNER
by Freddie del Curatolo
Western man is a peculiar animal, because he is capable of not believing what he...
EVENTS
by redazione
An event of traditional coastal music, folk dances and other activities in the shade of one of...
EVENTI
by Leni Frau
As every year in these days, the Mijikenda ethnic group of the Kenyan coast and in ...
EVENTS
by redazione
Today in Malindi is celebrating the popular heroin of Mijikenda Mekatili Wa Menza culture.
This is the most important traditional celebration of the Kenyan coast population. The Mijikenda ethnicity represents the nine tribes living north of Malindi to the border with...
CELEBRATIONS
by Freddie del Curatolo
The Kenyan coast has a popular heroine and she is a very important figure in the country's history, because as...
STORIES
by Freddie del Curatolo
On the coast of Kenya there is a silent, daily crime that does not concern mankind and is not linked to any...
ENVIRONMENT
by Freddie del Curatolo
That we wouldn't make it was almost written.
Only a...
EVENTS
by redazione
An evening of stories about Kenya and the Mijikenda ethnicity this Tuesday at Figino Serenza in the province of Como.
With free entrance, in the beautiful and elegant frame of Villa Ferranti, the headquarters of the municipal library, Malindikenya.net's director...
EVENTI
by redazione
Put the greatest poet of the Kenyan coast, the history of his homeland and its legends recited with passion. Add a songwriter that of the heart and true stories has made a way of life, even more than an artistic...
FREDDIE'S CORNER
by Freddie del Curatolo
If you are planning a holiday on the Kenyan coast or in its immediate hinterland, take my advice: plan...
SOLIDARITY
by Freddie del Curatolo
The Mijikenda is a small tribe, especially when compared to the large African ethnic groups, but those...
The world begins to discover the amazing properties of the African tree par excellence, the baobab.
The thousand-year-old ...
ENVIRONMENT
by Freddie del Curatolo
The story of the felling and subsequent export of eight thousand-year-old baobab trees from the Kenyan coast...
ENVIRONMENT
by Leni Frau
For us at Malindikenya.net it is now unthinkable not to combine the work of information and promotion...
EVENTS
by redazione
This year Freddie of the Curatolo chose children as a public to tell her stories of Kenya, between nature, solidarity and fun moments.
They are elementary schools, especially quarters and scenes, listening to stories that go from baobab to schools...