Guinea makes a triumphant entry at MASA with the Tinafan circus company. Entitled « Faso kagnin », in French, aka »Home is better », the show is a mirror of the trials and tribulations of immigration, and an invitation to improve things back at home.

By Fortuné Sossa

The decor is sober with a virtual tableau of sand, then a forest supplanted by bird calls and sea waves. These images suggest that the subject to be dealt with by the athletes is immigration. Indeed, the show opens with a scene of migrant massacre. Many young sub-Saharan Africans, who set off across the Mediterranean to find themselves, cross deserts, mountains, and valleys at the risk of their lives. They are cheated by smugglers, assaulted and even murdered. Sometimes it’s the sea that swallows them up, with the complicity of violent winds or savage, racist coastguards.

They take to the desert and the Mediterranean in search of El Dorado. But « home is better », because there are plenty of opportunities for local success, including the circus. In this new situation, the show becomes a confluence of efforts to create beauty. The performance is heavy with emotions that make the heart leap out of the ribcage.

Children, girls and young people make up the athletes and performers who bend, stretch and twist their way across the stage, to Mandingo rhythms. They’re so flexible, you’d think they were boneless beings, shellfish in motion. This show by the Guinean company is proof, once again, that Africa has incredible talent. What’s more, the circus is indeed « an opportunity for local success », which also offers outlets for legal conquest of the world.

Daouda Camara, manager of the Kéita Fodeba acrobatic arts center and thus of the Tinafan circus, confides: « The children tour, they go wherever they want legally and come back to invest in the country. A center for the reintegration of young people in difficult situations, Kéita Fodeba has trained over 200 hundred young people in two decades, and they now tour with some of the world’s leading circus companies. These young people have won several trophies, including « L’Afrique a un incroyable talent » in the very first season, « Afro super talent », and more.