Today is ‘Remembrance Day’ all over the world, but in Africa, and here in Kenya, few know what it is. 
Memory is of no use in these parts and the day barely bears the weight of itself.
Forgetting is an exercise in self-defence. There would be so many sorrows, perhaps not as great as a holocaust (but ask Rwanda, for example...) to remember, that every day something should be celebrated. 
There are many holidays in Kenya: all the Christian ones and several of the Muslim ones, from this year also the Indian ones: there is Independence Day as in America, Republic Day as in Italy, the birthday of the first president of the Republic as in Papua, the birthday of the second president as only in Kenya.
After being elected, on 30 December 2007, Mwai Kibaki declared 31 December a national holiday, ‘post-election day’.
A happy insight, what happened in the following days, not exactly a holiday, seems already forgotten.
Punctually someone, during the 2017 elections, tried to reintroduce the themes, and foment riots, stirring up thugs and desperate people.
The forces of law and order have not been outdone in repressing them. 
In 2017, between elections, counter-elections, nominations and parades, there was a record number of national holidays.
But none lived with transport, identity and attention to meaning. 
Our unforgettable Prime Minister Silvio was right: too many holidays are bad for you.
But ‘Remembrance Day’ in Kenya, especially in rural Kenya, is an unknown thing.
Here, people live by the day, at most one can dedicate an hour to Remembrance. 
In Watamu or Malindi, for example, one could institute the ‘Forty-Five Minutes of Remembrance’, between a quarter past noon and one o'clock.
Then everyone eats and drinks, and the Muslims pray.
‘Do you know what Remembrance Day is?’ 
I ask the owner of the fruit and vegetable stall next to the Italian bar.
‘Do you want arugula? It came very fresh.’
‘Remembrance day?’
‘No, I don't have any. Write it here and I'll try to order it’.
I try the phone card hawker.
‘Remebrance?’
‘No, but I have the weekend rate if you want.’
I get a shrug and an astonished look even from a bank security guard and the fake masai who has the bead stall in the middle of the mall.
Not much would change, even if I asked for details or dates of the terrible massacre in Rwanda, or the revolution in South Sudan.
Here memory, in the sense of recollections, only becomes such when you leave the country.
Then memories become emotions, recalling nature, experiences, moods.
One tends to remove everything else. 
It is natural that Africa does not remember the Shoah. 
‘Some people have heard of the Holocaust, but that was a long time ago and concerned the Germans and Israelis,’ a Kenyan-born Indian who studied in Mombasa tells me.
As Fossati sang about Argentina, memory in Kenya is bad and close, very close. 
It is the memory of the day, of every day in which people sweat for bread and fight for that sweat. 
In Africa they continue to kill each other in a barbaric way, in northern Kenya for land and cows, today between Congo and Uganda and in Sudan, and every day for thirty years in Somalia.
Under the guise of ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘power play’ the worst war is being waged, that of the poor. 
No showers or mass graves, no gas chambers.
Here, machetes and knives, torches and petrol are used. 
Power, the real power that doesn't play games, doesn't move a finger, this is the real ‘cleansing state’.
They tried it with democracy, with capitalism.
No, it is not for Africa, for the kingdom where the lion has always fought with the gazelle, the leopard with the warthog, and there is no battle.
Democracy has taught the lion how to fight the leopard and, what is worse, the gazelle how to kill the warthog. 
Why?
What is the point?
Who needs it? 
From Remembrance Day onwards we are used to thinking that behind every massacre, every purge, every war, there are economic, political, social reasons. In Vietnam for opium and China, in Iraq for oil and fundamentalism, Venezuela for cocaine.
In the rest of the world it's just sporadic lorries thrown into crowds, occasional shootings, random stabbings, bombs here and there...wars, no those are something else, bigger, more important. And the first to have no memory seem to be those who honour it most on this day.
In Kenya, it seems absurd to reduce everything to lobbies of rich Africans who want to rule, or to tribal brotherhoods of power who in years past, after having challenged each other and caused thousands of deaths, shook hands smiling and went back to making inroads like in the rest of the world.
Yet this is how it is.
After all, we are in the land of ‘No Why’.
Today, ‘Remembrance Day’, more innocent people a few thousand kilometres from my home have been murdered and there are so few of us down here who carry the burden of so many days alive.