This is Kinte, one very handsome household buddy. He has been our lovely companion for over 5 years now growing healthier and bigger by the years. What inspires me most about Kinte is her story into existence.
Kinte’s mother, Kunta, was one of those rare misplaced cases that left her relocated to Tanzania instead of a comfortable hot-water heated middle German house in Central Germany. At the busy Frankfurt airport, Mr. Günter Schmidt, a dear friend to my uncle, was about to board his flight when he erroneously picked up a brown duffle bag that completely resembled his own bag at the airport lounge where he was sited having a hot cup of milchkaffee. Having already gone past all necessary security checkpoints, Mr. Gunter had no cause of alarm as to the contents of the bag and so he went on to board his flight, placing the bag on the overhead compartment above his seat and strapping himself in for the 9 hour flight to Kilimanjaro Airport.
As soon as the plane came to a halt at the Kilimanjaro airport and the “seat-belts on” sign went off, the jetlagged Mr. Günter quickly got on his feet, removed ‘his’ bag from the overhead compartment and was in the terminal building in no time. Squatting next to his bag just after going through customs and immigration, he quickly unzipped to check on some of his belonging and that’s when the shock of his life came to him. Staring from inside the bag was a Siamese cat with sharp blue almond-shaped eyes, a triangular point colored head, large dark brown ears, an elongated, slender, and muscular body.
After leaving the airport, still a bit shaken, he narrated the whole story to my uncle who had picked him from the airport and on arriving at his place decided to give the cat to my cousins as a present. In a harmonious honor to Mr. Günter and the initiation of the cat to the African family, she was named Kunta. A few months later, she interbred with a local feline and gave birth to our adorable Kinte. Though Kunta passed on a few years back from old age, we still miss her, as she was the only exotic cat around the hood. We are always left to wonder though; what happened to Kunta’s original owner…and what happened to Mr. Günter’s bag??
