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The last thing I heard about Cerutti was that he’d died (which is, of course, the last thing we hear about anybody). In Africa, or more precisely, in Kangala. I knew the country — and Malabo, its capital — personally and had run into Cerutti there in late 1982. His death, reported without fanfare in the international section of Le Monde, made me remember him from campus days. His wanderings, though, ran in the opposite direction: from the university to the savanna to the teletypes and then to that report in Le Monde with the photo of his body stretched out in a room in the Malabo Palace on the day Mokoena’s victorious troops entered the capital to establish socialism — or whatever it was — in the Soviet or Chinese style, depending on whichever side Mokoena was leading at the time.

We had met back in Chile, at a big campus assembly during the time of tear gas and wild street demonstrations. I remember getting along well with him from the start. There was talk about a revolution that…