In 1973 I went to Africa for the first time and visited the parks of Kenya and neighbouring Tanzania and fell madly in love.
The time of photography was still far away (after all, I only got into it about ten years ago) but what I experienced – with all my senses – was so strong that it imprinted itself in my memory forever.
At that time, there were at most two rather spartan lodges in all the parks. In the following years I returned many times to Tanzania, each time witnessing changes that often proved fatal to the entire complex ecosystem.
For fifty years I did not return to the Kenyan parks that had so enchanted me. Surely the lodges and tented camps will have increased, as much as has happened in neighbouring Tanzania, to accommodate an increasing number of tourists. Tourists who, in my experience, and I state this with conviction, are mostly deprived of the necessary vision to grasp the importance of those places.
In recent months I have felt an overpowering desire to return to retrace those paths, starting in Nairobi, where my adventure began, with the heart of a then 20-year-old full of dreams and hopes for the life ahead.
Returning.
I have decided to embark on this journey now before starting a therapy that I do not know how and where it will take me. When I look back, I know what is then left of the young woman I was then, but returning to those places will also be a way of closing accounts with my past and, perhaps, finding peace with the dreams and ambitions of that time.
Since 1973, I state with conviction, Africa is my home, the place in the world where I feel most balanced and, if I may say so, ‘alive’.
I am fully aware that I am in front of a time, yet unimaginable, in which I will have to live the difference between memories of so many years ago and the present, the present reality, perhaps a completely different reality, in any case one to be lived to the full.
It’s desire and fear at the same time as the challenge I am facing with the disease I am about to fight with all my might. The only security is my love for that land, an unconditional and continually reciprocated love, with the total and welcoming embrace of that ancestral root of life for countless creatures and mankind.
