SOWETO

In Africa, in the white-hot land of Kenya, there is a metropolis called Nairobi.

It’s a big city with skyscrapers, but this is only an aspect of the richest part of the city, of the world of the rich.

In another area of Nairobi an additional reality take place to the skyscrapers, a reality made of slums, red-hot in summer, ice-cold in winter, separated simply by narrow alleys, dirty and filthy. This is the world of Misery, the world of the poorest, of the Africanswho live in this slum: Soweto is its name.

There are two aspects that strangely live together: sometimes in this city suddenly comes a rainbow with all the colours of the Kenyan flag - black, white, red, white again and then green; a variegated scene that marks the border between richness and misery.

An African woman stands up; she carries two jars of water, one over her head, the other on her hand and in the meantime she keeps her baby secured to her side: she’s not ashamed of her condition because she’s proud and conscious of how she can guarantee the survival to herself, to her baby and maybe to other people who like her live in the slum.

But Soweto in not the only tragic feature of the world’s misery; poverty can enter in any culture at every latitude.

You can be white, asiatic, negro, and poverty won’t make race distinction.

When it comes and persists it could provoke sufferance, depression and sadness, while in the meantime it could reinforce solidarity among people.

Children faces belong to different human races, but for those who were born in the slum, there is always a detail that make them equal; their face without a smile…

Maybe for them the skyscrapers standing at the horizon are so far away instead of their brutal reality made of muddy barracks, the only witnesses of their existence.

Walter Storri

translator: Luca Pulitini

oil on canvas 50x70 (2004)