Africa Orientale Italiana
‘Where did you get those glasses?’ a stylish Italian gentleman asked me, gesturing at the acetate L.G.R. frames I wear for my myopia. I said Nairobi. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I make them.’ Luca Gnecchi Ruscone and I then had a conversation that brought back fond memories of adventures across the Horn of Africa, all focused through a history of spectacle lenses. Astigmatism and short sightedness has been with me since I was 13 in England, when I was forced to start wearing those heavy, black-rimmed NHS 524 specs. The singer Morrissey later made them seem cool, but I remember always taking them off to stumble blindly around at school dances so as not to frighten the girls.
‘Human blood is so corrosive to paint,’ said the rebel commander to me from behind his Persols
As an undergraduate I fell in with men who wore corduroy jackets, smoked black tobacco and rarely ate food, so circular metal-rimmed eyeglasses went with the gaunt Bohemian style. As a foreign correspondent in Africa, I stuck with the metal frames, until one day the police beat me up during a democracy riot on the streets of Nairobi. A large-fisted officer bashed my glasses into my face, so that the nose pads and metal wires ripped into the skin. Thereafter, I opted for plastic-framed glasses and ever since, during riots, interrogations and bar brawls, this has turned out to have been the right decision.
Around this time, when the Berlin Wall fell, several horrible African conflicts that had long been fuelled by West and East spiralled into state collapse. In Somalia, clan militias raced around in Landcruiser pickups mounted with anti-aircraft guns they fired horizontally at infantry, levelling the old city around the ruins of the cathedral and Umberto di Savoia’s grenade-spattered arch.
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