First, I came to Africa through music. At just 19, I saw Bob Geldof and the Live Aid festival. Soon after, I devoured every groove of Paul Simon's Graceland album and learned of Mandela's South Africa in prison. I fell in love with artists like albino Malian Salif Keita, South African Miriam Makeba, barefoot lady Cesaria Evora, Yeke Yeke's Guinean Mory Kanté, or Senegalese businessman and politician and mbalax king Yossou NDour.
In 2001 my life was turned upside down. Fragile wooden boats full of women, men, children and babies were arriving in the Canaries. Some died in less than two metres of water. In the middle of the night, tossed about by the ocean, Fatiha Nadir gave birth to Sheima on the patera, Tina Osazee who survived in Nigeria selling pumpkin leaves, the almond-eyed Ivorian Salimata Sangare, Taylor climbed into the wheel well of a huge cargo ship because she admired and wanted to meet the footballer Messi, El Hadj Sano and the mummified castaways of Barbados and many more opened their hearts to me, in my eleven years as a correspondent for El País, told me their lives, and their terrible stories planted in me the need to understand and meet their families, smell the ripe fruits, the smoked fish and taste their marvellous beers in sunsets of a thousand shades of orange.
They inspired the reports compiled in Héroes de ébano (Premio Ernesto Salcedo, also translated into French and Wolof, Ediciones Idea), the emotive work of Finca Machinda (Canarias3puntocero Ediciones) and my latest work, En este gran mar (Gaveta Ediciones, distributed by Interleo). In Rabat I set foot on that special land for the first time and I didn't want to leave the continent.
Reverte, Kapuscinski, Sami Nair, Chimamanda, Soyinka, the chronicles of Nicolás Castellano and Xavier Aldekoa, the example of Chema Caballero, but, above all, two good friends, the legendary EFE correspondent Saliou Traore and my dear professor of Spanish literature at the Cheik Anta Diop University in Dakar, Amadou Ndoye, taught me to understand and see Africa as if my skin were darker. And so, I feel that each country I visit or set foot in for the first time welcomes me as one of its own. I have travelled around ten countries in the neighbouring continent and I hope to have enough life and strength to continue learning.
And in the maturity and much more serenity of my career, it was my turn to take another step forward. Welcome Africa was born out of a personal commitment to a new way of understanding the continent, of listening and learning. It does so from the Canary Islands, one of the most topical places on the planet due to the arrival of boats and the tragedy of the search for a better life and the many lives that are lost in the attempt. We are morally obliged to get to know our neighbours better.
The journalist and digital producer Javier Zerolo inspired and accompanies me in this adventure.
I hope that in a short time it will turn from a personal project into a global media, in three languages, with knowledgeable voices, natives and descendants that I hope to find in Europe, Africa and America, and that every day we can count on more collaborators and sponsors to make this adventure viable. Welcome Africa is not an ngo, but a new media that comes to occupy a practically empty information space.
No clichés, no hoaxes, no fears. No good-natured neo-colonialism or neo-colonialism. A lot of mirroring and learning. Just mutual knowledge and interest. Many positive things happen and this can be a good platform to spread it.
I look forward to your support.
Welcome to Africa.