we couldn’t organize the conference ourselves officially because that would expose us to considerable physical danger in the best hypothesis we’d be likely to find a pile of manure dumped outside our front door and so the conference was organized by the people from Neroenonsolo which means Black but Not Only a pro immigrant support group and so we decided to hold the demonstration in the little piazza in front of the main church of Casale di Principe which is also the market square and the piazza where local boys and girls hang out in the evenings then Chiara got in touch with the press and the television stations and all the news media that you could think of and on the day of the conference the little piazza was filled with television news crews and reporters from various national dailies as well as from the local press and each group made a speech from a little stage set up in the piazza in front of a big crowd that clapped and cheered and listened for the two or three hours that the conference lasted and each group read messages and the immigrants spoke as well

the publicity that the mass media gave to the demonstration forced the authorities to take an interest in what was happening so the Africans were able to return home but not that same day that is they had to leave town for a couple of days so that matters could settle down then luckily they were all allowed to return to their apartments and they did except for those few who once they left town decided they would be happier somewhere else and decided not to come back still though the atmosphere remained hostile toward the Africans in fact if anything it got worse more ferocious for instance one time they caught a Nigerian friend of mine in the street and poured gasoline on him but luckily they didn’t manage to set him on fire but I have to say that during this period in our area the Africans began to take part in criminal activities as well that is some of them started dealing strange substances peddling a drug to other immigrants a terrible drug called cobret which is a sort of chemical byproduct that induces the same effects as heroin or almost the same but is much cheaper and also much more dangerous

this cobret is produced in Africa and it gets here by the usual system that is concealed inside capsules made of a plastic strong enough to withstand stomach acid the immigrants swallows the capsules before leaving their country and then once they reach their destination they recover them by shitting them out and this traffic was invented by the Africans they run it on their own but the clan doesn’t like this traffic that’s not under its control and in fact the clan members start to kill a few African drug dealers and smugglers the Africans that the clan has identified as responsible for the traffic in cobret and the clan members start carrying out acts of reprisal in the streets against Africans in general that is they pick up a random African and beat him brutally or pour gasoline on him and try to set him on fire like that Nigerian friend of mine other Africans get the front doors of the buildings where they live burned as a form of intimidation and so on