Nell 'collective imagination has always been America the land of opportunity, of hope, a receptacle for all manner of adventurers, and low cut loafers d' Europe. From the Mayflower to the early Quakers misfits century, when many of the dirtiest Caprio less bohemian and the film version (but a bit 'lucky ones, of course) went to swell the ranks of the desperate in the metropolis of the New World. It is no coincidence that even now North America is the only place on earth where you can acquire the residence through the lottery, a sort of certification of 'American way of life seen as a last resort of those who have nothing to offer the world, if not a little 'luck or chutzpah.
And while you created the myths and rituals of American immigration, el 'collective imagination takes shape on the images to Don Vito Corleone, but until you get to Mike Bongiorno Bad Spencer & Terence Hill, who was African in the European imagination? Or rather, who was the European who lived in Africa, in the European imagination? Why is Africa you know, you know the time when rapivamo them to send them to work across the ocean, and even thanked us who found a job in times like these. Baluba are, that if I am not lazy I'm bad, and if they are not bad guys are too good, ranging from the 'noble savage image of the Friday that Robinson Crusoe did not watch because he has the time, the Rwandan genocide that cannibal mercedes in turn, torture his subjects and eats his heart. And in the midst of these extreme human lived an equally grotesque specimen of white, living in slums or in the colonial villas, the priest hero, the martyr nun both overflowing with enthusiasm and love for the next cold or the diamond-merchant of weapons-medicine-coltan that goes with girls and shoot the last specimen of white rhino, left in a sort of bond between human types.
were that simple, that discounts the underdevelopment of Africa as a pledge to double its soul too naive or too ruthless and white because there's either too good or too bad to watch and all. Getting to Kinshasa
it means to be amazed that the human variety can be found, some women who seem to emerge directly from an oil painting of the century, surrounded by Europeans held in khaki safari hat, alongside men in suits and ties that go unnoticed on the Paris Metro or the London. And yet the majority of children, persons who are neither businessman but even wizards of some tribes to the chagrin of the Europeans to pass with ethnographic ambitions, but simple boys living soul contemporary African art, made of mobile phones and the evil eye, syncretism Christian and animist dreams of foreign travel in the West.
But the human variety is also found between the Europeans, not just priests and sandals with the Tao or left merchants with wives who love black and redone, but rather 'a frankly astonishing amount of human types, to the point that one wonders, given the great wealth and progress that they should lead, because the results so disappointing. By cooperating with white jeep and satellite dish that even an expedition to the pole until the people of the United Nations that infest restaurants and supermarkets, the paunchy men of a few companies rigorously Belgian mobile phone to your belt with double legs and pale in the Bermudas, until the Lebanese affairs in their hands the trade of the country, is suddenly left the mediocrity that all have in common. Ong
dizzy from the budgets managed by graduates in work experience; congregations with facilities that you need a car to turn them over, with fleets where you can lose your account, where they live buried four nun who run a clinic or sacred tailoring of clothes, and even directors of charities with the purse strings are always open but the professionalism at least questionable, engaged in a shower aid but found some strange problem: the mountain that gives birth to a mouse, and sometimes not even that.
Personally I went directly from the unloading luggage at Malpensa at the governors dinner, the meetings at the embassies, the personal friendships with presidents and chats tete a tete with the bishops, and all this avoiding the supposed honor. Give yourself the least to do a bit ripulitevi 'and turn a folder: Africa does not expect you to entrust funds and responsibility that in Italy no one dreams to give you. Mal going there will be some waste, but we know that the mission is not easy for anyone, that Africans are crooks, that anyone who does not wrong: a pat on the back and start again. When Conrad told his
Congo in Heart of Darkness, immediately warned readers: there would not have found a powerful demon of human passions, that which can result in large enterprises as absolute evil, but rather lazy, soft, and of greed ' sloth, mediocrity as background noise. Years later, the picture is not very dissimilar, and yet this' corner of Africa so, it is still a land of find everything, a novel for those in Europe, America and a man nobody can not afford the driver, the friendships with the secretary of the embassy and to give all of you.
E 'this is often the recipe for Africa sickness: nausea is the return of anonymity, where no one calls you master, and if you have money you have to answer for how they spend, where you are only important to the local coffee shop.
Africa, a land of opportunity: for the Africans, the 'wasted again.
