Giuseppe Ungaretti, who was born in Africa, called it "the hour that clouds and dismisses".
Karen Blixen distinguished it from dawn for that extra hint of melancholy, of the annunciation of the mysterious and treacherous night.
In Kenya, along the line of the Equator and particularly on the coast, the brief moment from sunset to darkness is a magical moment that makes one think of the wonder of being in this place.
The sky and its colours, the majesty of Nature that for a moment resumes its contours, the truer and less artefact connotations of sunlight or of being just the scenery of working days or a spectator of whole hours of leisure and holiday.
The sunset in Kenya is not only the fireball that lights up in red, orange and all their nuances, it is not a beautiful photograph in the savannah or the striped clouds that you seem to be able to touch them.
It's the real thing to live.
It is the acrid smell of human sweat mixing with that of the cooling earth and cornmeal in the pots, with the smoke of charcoal and burnt rubbish, the scent of spices and the smell of seaweed by the sea.
From six in the evening, for about forty minutes, Africa calls and for those who know, it is a wonderful moment.
This is what I wrote in the last pages of the novel "Safari Bar" (GVE Editore).

A moment comes when Mother Nature is tired of watching and listening to the pettiness and paradoxes of those small, grotesque beings that populate the Earth.
In this way she envelops the houses with good tiredness and tranquillity, she limits the traffic of cars, the noise of work and the clamour of moving around.
She wants silence and tries to obtain it, then exhausted she gives up and moves out of the inhabited centres, away from the streets and shops.
She seeks peace, now overwhelmed by the habits of the big talking insects.
Despite her discouragement, she still knows how to make herself visible: she lights up atmospheric lights, paints a different colour for each element, invents new shades, gives new fragrances of wind, adds depth to the sky and makes the sea shine.
It seems to make everything what it really is.
Natural.
It makes the moon grow and the sun die.
Always has been.
Every day for a few minutes.
In that lapse of time it can happen to realize how everything is relegated to the fugacity of dreams, to the realm of fantasy and the principality of imagination; to understand that the time that is worth preserving is the result of many real, real moments.
Natural.
There are those who do not understand, those who do not notice, those who knew it but have forgotten it.
Some are afraid of it, others hate that moment.
All the others thank goodness for being in Africa.