Let’s build a bridge

This article is published in number 40 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until October 5, 2021

Now that he is a candidate for the Turin city council, Abdullahi Ahmed he doesn’t really want to tell the beginning of his story: the handwritten letter to his brother before he escaped from Somalia in flames, a backpack with the bare essentials inside, the desert, a boat in the pitch black of the Mediterranean, the arrival in Lampedusa. But if he looks back and thinks about the road he has traveled up to now, he is moved. Especially if you think that the vote of 3/4 October coincides with the date of the Lampedusa massacre of 3 October 2013, when 368 migrants died half a mile from that same coast where he landed to try to be reborn.

Abdullahi Ahmed, 32 years old, prefers to focus on the present that has offered him a great opportunity: to enter the Turin Red Room from the main door. “I want to be a bridge for everyone, not only for those of foreign origin. And above all I don’t want to be considered the representative of blacks or immigrants because one cannot be a stranger forever», He immediately specifies for fear of being pigeonholed, ghettoized. “My program is focused on four crucial themes: youth policies, peripheries, inclusion, culture,” he adds.

Just a year ago he said: “When I think of so many young people with migratory backgrounds who make this country better every day, I would like to ask politicians: what else do they have to prove to you to become Italian citizens?”. For this reason he hopes to be elected (he presents himself as independent in the lists of the Democratic party) and become a boost “for those 123,000 foreign citizens still without citizenship in Turin, because you have to go back twenty years to find a foreign name in the municipal council of the city”. And twenty years represent a geological era for a society that today has to deal with three million under 35, children of immigration, who are gradually emerging in all fields. “When I arrived in Italy in 2008, I found a welcoming city that allowed me to grow, to work, to become a cultural mediator and to take the Altiero Spinelli award from the European Commission for creating the Festival of Solidarity and the Mediterranean. in Ventotene ».

Abdullahi Ahmed is not alone in the room. In this administrative round, for the first time, in the electoral lists of many cities there are numerous citizens with different origins, especially second generation, especially women. “I thought about it a lot before accepting the candidacy because putting my face on it is a complicated challenge in this phase in which mistrust in politics prevails”, he explains, “but then I said to myself: if I wait for the right time, it’s never the right time . I live in the suburbs and I do the election campaign at the terminus of public transport. I wait for people to come down, I approach and explain who I am, what I want to do, because democracy needs everyone. Even of the 40,000 citizens born abroad who can go to vote and do not ».

Abdullahi Ahmed in 2018 founded the GenerAzione Ponte association together with other refugee citizens, second generations and Italians united by the desire to be a bridge between different generations and cultures that has given them the opportunity to weave many threads. “I’ve been to a lot of schools. Once, with an amazing knowledge of geography, a small group of students asked me why I came to Italy and didn’t go to Botswana, ”he recalls amused. “After explaining that I came to Europe because there is democracy here and human rights are enshrined in the law, I was invited over and over again to schools and in the end I met thousands of students. For this reason I claim to be a bridge. A bridge that wants to build other bridges, necessary in a multicultural society ». Among his interlocutors, those to whom he addresses, there are obviously the second generations for whom he wants to be an example, “because if I manage to enter the government of the city, they can do it too. Everything I have done up to now I have built with my own hands and with the help of many friends; instead the outcome of an election scares me a little because it doesn’t depend on me, but on who has to vote for me », he confides. «I present myself as I am: different because I am different. And not because of the color of the skin, but because I believe that it is not right to continue to delegate decisions to others and then complain ».

In his autobiographical book released last year, Looking ahead. Somalia, Italy, my history (add editor), wrote: «I found many pieces of my story in what girls and boys have told me in these years of work as a cultural mediator, yet each time the description of their travels has struck and hurt me. I too was on those boats and vans in which you travel scared, and if now everything seems so distant to me I discover instead that in one thing I have remained the same Abdullahi of 2007: in the never-extinguished desire to keep my gaze ahead , aimed at what there is to be built and not the things that have been left behind ». And it must be for this reason that Abdullahi Ahmed is campaigning at the tram and bus terminus with the slogan #Torinoguardaoltre: “To create a piece of the future and help restart Turin after years of inaction”, but also to give hope to all those who can see in him the light of a changing Italy.

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