Those who set out on entrepreneurial ventures in contexts very different from their own often cite “inspirational” books (adventure stories, essays on development, foreign poetry). Is there a book that pushed you to go, or that made you feel part of a narrative closer to your own ambitions?
I don’t think there’s a single book that pushed me to leave or that alone shaped my choices. I think, rather, that all the books I’ve read — ever since I was a child reading Salgari — helped build in me an adventurous and perhaps somewhat romantic spirit: the desire to seek out what isn’t ordinary, to get to know what is different, and to imagine a less conventional life for myself.
A scene from Beauty and the Beast comes to mind, one that struck me deeply when I first saw the film, in 1991, and that still moves me today. Belle is reading a book, and through books she is able to imagine a world far wider than the small French village where she lives, and she sings: “I want to live a life full of adventure.” In some way, I think that is what books have represented for me: the chance to imagine other worlds and, little by little, the courage to try to live them.
So I wouldn’t say that a specific book pushed me toward Africa, but that reading as a whole played a very strong role in my life choices: it taught me to see as possible what was distant, different or off the more predictable paths.
If I had to choose a single sentence that captures the way I’ve approached many of my decisions, though, it would be the one by the Nigerian poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo: “Start now. Start where you are. Start with fear. Start with pain. Start with doubt. Start with hands shaking. Start with voice trembling but start. Start and don’t stop. Start where you are, with what you have. Just… start ”.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has spoken of the “danger of a single story”: the risk of reducing a continent to a monolithic narrative. Did you read African authors before leaving, or did you discover them afterwards, once you were already living there? And if it was afterwards: how did reading Africa through the eyes of someone born there change you, compared with the image you had brought from Italy?
I have always been a keen reader, and before living in Tanzania I had already read some of the African authors best known in the West, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie herself. Living here, though, I discovered many more authors, many more books and, above all, a far wider range of points of view — even more so since I have been with Mkuki, who is a publisher and comes from a family with a tradition of reading and knowledge of African literature far richer than mine. Thanks to him I have had access to a great many books, often recommended by people who know those authors and contexts deeply. But there have also been the chance encounters in bookshops, the kind I believe in so much: the moment when a title seems to call to you and you end up discovering a book you were not looking for.
I have read very different kinds of work: more complex and demanding novels, like Wizard of the Crow by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and lighter, more narrative stories, like the series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, set in Botswana. I have gone from exploring the continent’s history and the human soul in the books of Petina Gappah and Lola Shoneyin to the science fiction of Nnedi Okorafor.
Reading Africa through the eyes of someone born there helped me understand not only its history, rituals and traditions better, but also all those tiny details that often really make up a culture: proverbs, humor, shared knowledge, the dynamics between men and women, everyday contradictions.
And perhaps the most important thing was discovering just how much we have in common. Sometimes the form, the context or the language in which they are told changes, but at the heart of it remain emotions, desires, fears, relationships — everything that makes us all, quite simply, human beings.
An Italian working inside an African company occupies a strange position: not the aid worker, not the expat at a multinational, not the entrepreneur-tourist. How did you present yourself and negotiate that position? And what does marketing in Tanzania tell us about its consumers, to a market that the West knows almost only through humanitarian campaigns?
I came in from an already fairly hybrid position. Before looking for work in Tanzania I had seven years in the country behind me as an entrepreneur, but in a particular form: my fashion company was based both in Tanzania and in Milan, so for years I lived straddling the two worlds. It was a fashion company, but with a strong communication and marketing component, and all the content creation was produced here, working with local photographers, videomakers and creatives.
So when I started looking for work at Tanzanian communication agencies about two years ago, I wasn’t coming entirely from outside: I already had concrete knowledge of the country and some of its creative and professional dynamics. I tried to combine the marketing experience I had built in Milan and the United States with the reality of the Tanzanian market.
It was a gradual process. At first I worked mainly with European clients in Zanzibar, so I knew the client’s mindset well, but I had to learn that of the target audience, often mixed, local and international. Today I work for a Tanzanian communication agency in Dar es Salaam, with Tanzanian clients and much more local target audiences.
There are differences from the Western market, but they are business differences. They have nothing to do with humanitarian campaigns or with that “single story” about Africa so often told in the West. It is about consumers, ambitions, positioning, purchasing, trust, competition, growth. And that is perhaps the most important thing Tanzanian marketing reveals: a complex, aspirational and contemporary market, far closer to people’s everyday reality than the image of Africa constructed from outside.
The training of those who work in marketing in Europe is built on certain assumptions: the consumer who optimizes, the brand as a rational promise, communication as a funnel. In Tanzania, do these categories hold, do they warp, or do they simply not exist? And if you had to rewrite the way you work, did the change come from local colleagues, from clients, or from an observation in the field, a mistake, a conversation that made you realize you were using the wrong tools?
I would say these categories hold, but they warp. The basic principles of marketing don’t disappear, and consumer psychology, deep down, isn’t so far from the European one either. What changes above all are the tools, the cultural codes and the way the message is built and received.
In Tanzania, for example, billboards and WhatsApp work very well, while other digital channels can carry a different weight than in Europe (for instance, TikTok and LinkedIn are used far less here, partly because the advertising features aren’t available on the same terms as in Europe).
Advertising language, too, is often more direct and less layered than what we are used to in Europe. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is less effective. A kind of communication that to a European eye might seem unrefined can instead work perfectly for a Tanzanian brand speaking to a Tanzanian audience.
The most interesting situations arise when these worlds cross: when a European brand has to speak to a local audience, or when a Tanzanian brand wants to address international tourists, clients or partners. That is where it becomes necessary to translate, adapt and mediate, without assuming that a language that works in one market can be transferred automatically to another.
Rather than completely rewriting the way I work, I have had to make it more flexible. In this, the exchange with my Tanzanian colleagues was essential; they were the first to help me read more clearly and deeply what until then had been mostly intuitions and impressions about marketing in this country.
Everyday work played an important role too: projects with small clients, pitches for more structured organizations, the questions I was asked, but also the moments when certain concepts weren’t immediately clear during meetings. These were all things that helped me understand how to modulate the marketing language and tools I had learned in Europe, adapting them better to the Tanzanian context.