Translator: Almundena Otero Villena

Heike Behrend defines his book as an ethnographic account, but also as a "story of entanglements, rather unheroic, and cultural misunderstandings". It is also a story that gathers the experiences and words of the peoples of East Africa.

Cute, buffoon, witch, spy, evil spirit or cannibal. These were some names that the local population used to refer to Heike Behrend during her field research in East Africa. Over time, he understood the meaning of these qualifiers: they were forms that the peoples studied had to refer to the strange, to what is alien to the community. Specifically, "mona" was the name with which the inhabitants of the Bartabwa village in Kenya, with whom she lived for a while, referred to her. Far from being a derogatory word, with it they designated children, because they come from apes and are in the process of becoming men. Discovering this allowed the author to perform an unprejudiced analysis of human groups, while exploring another way of knowing herself.

Heike Behrend defines his book as an ethnographic account, but also as a "story of entanglements, rather unheroic, and cultural misunderstandings". It is also a story that collects the experiences and words of the population studied, which are part not only of a scientific story, but also of the author's own biography.