I had to wait for close to two years after I purchased my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 2017 to read it because I was not ready. And when I finally was, in February 2019, the first lines of the book burst out from the page and floated in the air, forming a world of their own: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ 

For four days, I followed several generations of the Buendía family, from their patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founding the town of Macondo, to civil wars, love affairs, incest and massacres, up to Macondo’s final moment. The book’s spell on me felt like a fever dream with Macondo feeling as real as the world I inhabited. I read the last few pages while I was undergoing a writing workshop at Goethe-Institut, and I remember, distinctly, feeling an electric rush dazzle through my spine as Aureliano finally deciphered the manuscript left by the gypsy Melquíades, describing the entire fate of the town and Aureliano’s own death from the wind that was blowing through Macondo. By the time I was done, I had tears in my ears. It was the first time I had such a visceral physical and emotional reaction to a piece of literature. 

Years later, I wondered why I had felt this way while reading the novel. The book and I were so different and separate. Before I read it, my image of Colombia had been shaped by Hollywood, specifically the Netflix show, Narcos and the sprawling story of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug lord who led the Medellín cartel. Imagine my surprise when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude to see how familiar, not as distant as the Colombia I’d received through Hollywood’s filter, the book’s world, language and characters felt to me as an African who had grown up on the continent. 

The book’s language bent time; it appeared as if all of time were taking place together, that there was no difference between the past, the present and the future. The story felt like one told by older relatives about relations they had known throughout the years who, despite how much they tried to overcome their troubled life situation, had not succeeded. Some paragraphs were eerie because I was certain they could have been written by my maternal grandmother, who could not even write. My poor grandmother would, like Úrsula Iguarán—matriarch of the Buendía family and wife and cousin to José Arcadio Buendía—witness the deaths of her children (though not all of them) to affairs that were cyclical, regrettable and preventable. In my grandmother’s last days, despite her Christianity, she came to believe that she had been bewitched. I remember the sometimes sad and unbelievable stories she would tell me of her family, the distant look she had on when she finished a story, as if she could not believe how long ago those events had happened, and the solitude she came to embody before she died. Sometimes, because of the heavy morphine she was under during her palliative care, she said she saw visions of children whose identities she could not place. 

In Melquíades and the other gypsies who visited Macondo, bringing their scientific and worldly discoveries, I was reminded of the annual Agricultural Society of Kenya (ASK) show that I used to attend as a child. The ASK show featured things like a mermaid from the Swahili Sea, a headless person who could talk and acrobats who could swallow fire. As a child, I was fascinated by these wondrous things and believed that they were true. In the novel, when Melquíades comes back from the land of the dead to rescue Macondo from an insomniac plague, when Remedios the beauty with yellow butterflies around her ascends to heaven or when Pilar Ternera reads the futures of people in her cards, the language feels deeply true, as if it actually happened. Therefore, I did not experience the novel as something fictional, but as a historical text which had been lost and was now finally available to me.

In the year that I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo would arrive in Nairobi through a festival named Macondo Literary Festival, which was founded in 2019 by the German journalist Anja Bengelstorff and Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. The Macondo Literary Festival brought together authors from Lusophone, Francophone and Anglophone countries in Africa. I was enamoured by the festival and its subsequent editions when I saw so many different authors and books I had not known about and the many people who spoke of Márquez’s influence on their life and work, transforming Macondo not only into a place in the imagination but into something real and tangible.