SOULEYMANE

“And then I remembered what we were doing in Mali and I thought: this can be the turning point.” So says Souleymane, who left in 2007 and ended up in the nightmare of Rosarno during the January 2010 riots and shootings, after a hellish journey to Italy and months earning five euros a day for 14 hours of work. In his darkest hour, that of the deep depression triggered by exploitation and abjection to which so many boys like him were relegated, he invented Barikamà, the organic yoghurt company: handmade yoghurt transported by bicycle throughout Rome.

“The idea was let’s launch handmade yoghurt the way we do it, and see what the Italians think. There were two of us when we started, we were making 15 litres a week; after a year they became 150 and we were selling it in all the markets in Lazio.” A resounding success. A delicious and healthy product, entirely carbon-free transportation, and people are placing orders from all over the region. Souleymane, then, thinks big. He forms a cooperative in which young Africans and kids with Asperger’s syndrome work. He participates in a call for tenders and, in 2020, takes over the management of the bar inside the beautiful Nemorense Park, north of Rome.

But still “I don’t feel completely integrated in this society, in the end you are always an immigrant, an adjunct. ‘Good morning – they tell me when they come to the bar – can I talk to the manager?’ ‘Well, that would be me.”