For Italians, patience is no longer a virtue but an anal lubricant.
They get stunned by playing the impatient fake, threatening unconventional actions, only to return to the dear old frustrations of the past.
In Africa we return to a visceral, less neurological and more material relationship with the small misadventures of everyday life.
It may be because here one feels the challenge with Nature, with the ancestral rolling of things that we are the ones who wanted to change first. It is normal that little by little, with the influence of centuries-old plants and clay dust, magic formulas of sorcerers who get lost in the air mixing with the smell of boiled corn, they change us.
Patience is the first symptom of Africanization.
Understanding the primary needs of the local population and comparing them with our passion for the superfluous, accepting the animism and unloading the soul of your own mortar, knowing how to wait for it, that here Godot does not come to us for sure, there is no need to wait for it either.
Take it. "I'm taking it", we use to say.
It is an abstract concept, for heaven's sake, but it should still imply an end, an object, a mode.
In the Western world, taking it (from someone) has lost the original meaning of a claim, or reprimand to assert one's own reasons, a wrong at once or one's own will.
Today it is only the outburst of a repressed person, the subdued cry of an aphonic eunuch, the cowardice of a nobody hidden behind a keyboard.
Here, on the other hand, "taking it" has the same sense as always, a sense of passivity.
I take it in that place.
Because everything else, freedom, truth, emotion, beauty... life, are not things you take, but with patience and a mind free of fears, preconceptions and Western shit, they come by themselves, and by themselves they let themselves escape.