Lusaka 26th of July 2002

A man is getting near my motorcycle. Curious he asks me to start up the engine. Reluctant I satisfy him. A light pressure on the starting push-button and the little one cylinder motorcycle begins to run miraculously. The unusual customer, in this surrealistic market-place here I never toutght to improvise on the commerce, does not manage to get to dissimulate an expression of surprise and satisfaction, and after having looked for the kick starter in vain, he asks me to accelerate. Unwillingly I turn up the gas. A cavernous rumbler comes out from the exhaust-pipe eaten up wiht umidity, and reduced now to an useless ornament. The man, alluding to the rumble of wich he does not understand the real meaning, smiles with satisfaction. Exhaust made in Africa, I should like to say again thinking of the innumerable stones of the Ethiopian mule-track, that (those) have broken the bottom of it literally in many parts, luckily not evident to the inexpert eyes of my penniless clients. He asks me its price and I answer him at least 1300 euro, allowing of some margin for an imbrobable negoziation. Apparently the price is right, but the man says hallo to me and disappears among the crowd. The scene repeats itself with few changes by then many times a day, since, about a week ago, expelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo, I decided to sell my motorcycle without success and return to Italy. Zambia, 300 euro annual personal income, threatened with a heavy famine fated to become worse for the exaustion of the international aids, is not surley the best place to strike a bargain. The options are not many. I should have had to sell my motorcycle at Lubumbashi, DR Congo, perhaps, that somali who spoke Italian, too, or rather that bussiness-man, arrived from far Mbuji-Mayi, as far as there to buy four motorcycles. I should have been able to offer him a better price, but delighted with narration of the manager of the hotel where I stayed, that told tales about a mythical town, Mbuji-Mayi, a sort of El Dorado for the two wheels, bought by thousands euro, or exchanged in local products, such as diamonds, I had refused his offer unusually munificient. "Dirty money", I told to myself thinking about the civil war that opposes the forces of the dead president Kabila's son against those ones of the rebels of the Congo Rally for Democracy. A war in wich not only many contiguous states are involved, in support of the one or the other part, so that some historiographers defined it as the first African world war. A war for the control of the immense resources of the soil, that has caused already millions of dead men lugubriously accompanied by the indifference of the western states and the silence of our mass-media. A war that sees the completion of not imaginable horrors recalled by the tales of the survivors. Set aside the Angola alternative, probably way towards the northern Africa surer than that one running among the forests of Congo, I found myself in Katondo street, Lusaka, among sellers of cellulars, money changers, prostitutes, pedlars, mendicants and all that the poverty is able to produce, to sell my faithful travelling companion. It was not difficult to arrive here. Apart from the breakages of the frame that gave life to sleepy villages for some hours, the isolation of the alternator that cost me a night under the stars in the apparent nothing of the Namibian landscape, astonishingly crowed of jackals curious for my tent and its contents, and some intense attack of diarrhoea, all was regular. The crossing of Sahara too, though the motorcycle was not very qualified and not helped for the wear of tyres used already during my previus trips in Pakistan (1999) and in Nepal (2000), and replaced only in Cape Town, on advice of the local traffic police, solved without inconveniences in the astonishment of fortuitous travelling companion equipped with other good mounts. Almost six months and 27000 km across three continents and seventeen states: Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania (Zanzibar), Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, DR Congo and Zambia again. An heedless ride across the African continent with the companion of a multicoloured humanity that received me, satisfied my hunger, gave courage to me, rubbed, threatened, said hallo to me and its memory will make probably less hard my return to the absurdity of my "old" life. Months of trips that consumed what I have been, in a sort of daily reincarnation towards the desired nothing of a nirwana. Efficacious therapy for a suffered existence, such as a drug of I feel the first symptoms of habit, the trip led me on a point beyond wich I do not catch a glimpse of return. I would let me go, drive myself further; disappear without leaving traces in some lost corner of the planet, in patient wait of the final liberation. An undefinable instinct of surviving anchored at the "normality" in wich I was born, holds back me. I close my eyes and fell the warm wind of Africa that wraps up me as the breathing of an indivisible friend, and itseem to murmur "when you wish to come back... you will find always a friendly face waiting for you".

Published on Motociclismo, May 2003