Africa

I am not a person who has travelled through Africa. I’ve briefly touched it. But that was more than enough.
She will always be a source of hope and poetry. Of fight. Of some otherworldly beauty.
A place where people can create the purest form of music in their thoughts, music that goes beyond space and time.
Africa consists of two airports for me, Casablanca and Cairo. Yes, the most incredible spaceports in the world. With variety, but with no fear.
Africa is a female cab driver – wearing her headscarf and being brave. Endless cab races through Casablanca. Despite everything.
A hidden dark compartment of a supermarket where you are able to buy two beers.
A nightingale’s song at dawn in the orange forest.
Africa is a stoned salesman in the Marrakech medina, as if taken out straight out of Star Wars.
Africa is Cairo and the lack of traffic lights. Big crowds gathering in one place with one sole purpose – crossing the street. And the barricades on the bridges going over the Nile.
And the same eternal beauty that everyone keeps running towards.
When 15 years ago we were flying to Morocco, with a naïve bravery – everything changed. In Africa life has a different price. And it goes by much quicker, more colourful and full blooded, as it looks. As if it will all end tomorrow.
Years later at the airport in Cairo there was the same universal omnipresence. And you somehow forget about fear and you just live in the moment.
You realize how small you actually are and how apart from you there’s millions other souls in the world. Beautiful souls.
This text is for all these other beautiful souls. Because they are there. And they are living.
Africa is music. Poverty and joy out of life, traffic and contrast.
Every person that ended up in different parts of Africa would say that there’s a different Africa. This is mine – beautiful and brave.
Africa is poetry. Africa is rhythm, the music on a kora and a female voice.
And also the genius album by Aldo Romano, Louis Sklavis and Henri Texier from 1995 – Carnet de routes – one of the most beautiful songs in the world.
And here a little side note – nothing can paint a picture of life better than music.
March 2019
Photo ©MA