The deserted customs building at the border between Rwanda and Tanzania. The Hotel Excelsior, the Wild West-style shack-inn in Biharamulo. A Maasai woman, with her baby at her chest, haggles over the price for the coveted gasoline cans she has stored in her hut. Silent spear-wielding nomads are thrilled at the sight of a Polaroid. Traditional huts, with mud walls and palm leaf roofs, along small settlements in the middle of nowhere. Itinerant vendors spread out their cotton fabrics to attract the clientele of the steppe. The menacing Manyatta who perpetuate a macabre initiation ceremony with homicides. Ngorongoro, the world's largest extinct volcanic crater. The slums of Kinshasa. The famous Schweitzer hospital in Lambaréné. The baobabs, the colossal trees of Africa, the favorite refuge of spirits, shadows, and ghosts.

For eighteen consecutive years, the great Italian writer and journalist Alberto Moravia (1907-1990) traveled in Africa, in the heart of his own "black" Africa and its inhabitants. Along with his partner, writer Dacia Maraini, and distinguished friends such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas, he wandered far from the tourist attractions of African metropolises, in a landscape of pure, wild beauty, dominated by primal fear, ineffable mystery, unpredictable harmony, and searing sensations. He captures this "other" Africa in his diaries, with the sincere recording of a sensitive traveler.