Journal — Portrait
The Man Who Searched for His Tibet in Latin America for Ten Years
Portrait of a man shaped by two continents who chose a third.
This article is different from the others. Not an article about Maison Esmeralda Dakar. An article about the man who founded it, and about the twenty years that made this choice inevitable.
“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
There is a formula I learned early, before I even knew how to name it: when an empire is at its peak, the countdown has already begun. The question was never if decline would come. It has always been when, and how fast.
That is not pessimism. That is map reading.
Ibn Khaldun understood this in 1377, from a fortress in what is now southern Algeria, watching Arab, Berber and Ottoman dynasties succeed one another around him. He called it asabiyya: social cohesion, the collective force that carries a group from the desert to power, and that dissolves precisely because it succeeds. The founding generation fights. The inheriting generation administers. The succeeding generation consumes.
The mechanism is structural, not moral. It is not that men become bad. It is that the conditions that made them strong disappear with the comfort they built. Hard times create hard men. Times that are too good create weak men. This is not an opinion: it is visible to the naked eye, then in thoughts, then in actions. Or in non-actions, which are often even more revealing.
Edward Gibbon said the same about Rome four centuries later: prosperity ripens the principle of decay. What Marcus Aurelius had known from the beginning, from the very throne of the most powerful empire the Mediterranean had ever seen.
The day I truly understood this, something shifted in the way I read the world. Not a sadness. A compass.
Two continents before adulthood
I was born in the Alemannic region of Europe, that part of the world where precision is not a value among others but the texture of the air itself, where silence is a form of respect and punctuality an ethic. That is where everything began. Not in warmth, in structure.
Then the north of South America. The contrast was not gradual. It was total. The streets, the noise, the human warmth, the way of treating a meal as an event and the family as an architecture. An entire civilisation organised around different priorities from those I had absorbed first. I did not choose this displacement. But I received it as a formation.
Having grown up in my earliest years as a bilingual French-German child, Spanish arrived as recognition rather than learning. One more Latin language, cousin to the French I already carried. I learned it by watching television for three months. Not in a classroom. In front of a screen, through total immersion, through absorption. That was the moment I understood that languages are not learned: they are caught, when you are sufficiently exposed and sufficiently available.
Then the south of Spain, a natural bridge between the two worlds I already carried. The Latin America I had left showed up again in a shared language, the same philosophy of public space, and that particular light of Andalusia that resembles no other European light: that charged, golden light which owes something to the continent across the water. Several times a year, the calima crosses the Mediterranean from the Sahara, wraps the Andalusian coast in an ochre haze and deposits a fine layer of African sand on every surface. The Sahara was already touching my life before I knew that Africa was waiting for me.
It was in Granada that all of this took on its fullest meaning. The Alhambra is not a palace. It is an architectural argument about what two civilisations can build together that neither would have produced alone. The light there changes with the hour and transforms the same rooms into entirely different spaces, a design that refuses the idea that a place can be fixed, definitive, exhausted.
The hydraulic network running beneath the gardens and through the walls is fourteenth-century engineering that many contemporary systems do not surpass in elegance. And above all of this, a history: 1492, the last Arab sultan hands over the keys of Granada and leaves Europe by the south. That same year, Columbus reaches the continent that would become part of my own formation. One civilisation closes a door. An entire world opens another.
Ibn Khaldun had written about the fall of the Arab dynasties of Andalusia from his own era. He had seen coming what the Alhambra would become: the last wall of a civilisation at its peak that could only decline. I was walking through the physical demonstration of his thesis without having read a single line of him.
Then the return to Switzerland, the European loop closing. France in between, with its intellectual tradition, its particular relationship to the right word and the well-built idea. Switzerland again, the most demanding: Helvetian rigour, precision as daily discipline. But this time with layers underneath: South American warmth, Mediterranean instinct, French clarity, that the first European childhood could not have produced alone.
Several countries. Many back-and-forths. From a very young age I understood that the art of adapting to one’s environment was not a competence among others: it was the foundational competence. I learned early to feel at home where I am, at the moment I am there, without feeling the need to return to where I was born. Without that sensation of being far from my land, because the very notion of a fixed land had ceased to make sense.
Every place has its own magic. Every place has its beauties: you just have to look for them where nobody else is looking. Rarely in the points of interest everyone knows. Almost always elsewhere.
I also had the involuntary good fortune of moving through several educational systems: the Alemannic first, rigorous, methodical, built on the discipline of thought and respect for form. Then the Latin American system, where constraint produces a creativity that abundance does not generate. Then the Spanish, with its Mediterranean intellectual tradition. Then the American system, which profoundly helped me see another reality: the permission to question academic authority, the culture of concrete results, the idea that failure is data rather than shame.
Each gave me something. None was enough.
What I took from all of them goes beyond any curriculum: the capacity to educate oneself continuously, ahead of the rest of society, is the only competence that does not expire. Diplomas describe what one knew at the moment they were obtained. Permanent self-education describes what one is capable of becoming.
I am not a polymath in the classical sense. The polymath is interested in everything, excels in multiple domains, accumulates knowledge the way others accumulate countries visited. I understand the appeal. But that is not my nature. I am not a narrow specialist either: one domain, one expertise, one angle of reading the world. That is too limited, too fragile, too dependent on a single system that can crack.
What I am is someone who goes deep in several directions chosen with intention. Not everything. Not just one. Several, selected according to criteria that belong only to me, and worked through to mastery.
I have always had absolute clarity about what interests me and what does not. Where I put my energy, I put it entirely: to the point of obsession if necessary, until the objective is reached. This is not stubbornness. It is coherence between what one says one wants and what one is prepared to do to obtain it. Where I do not put my energy, I do not put it at all: not from lack of curiosity, from discipline.
Time is the only non-renewable resource. Dispersing it on what does not correspond to one’s own direction is the gentlest and most widely accepted form of waste.
This selectivity is not closed-mindedness. It is design.
This way of inhabiting the world also produced something unexpected: I have no motivation to travel in the recreational sense. Holidays as a purpose have never interested me. If I move, it is with a precise objective. A clear goal. Movement without intention does not attract me.
Dakar was not a travel destination. It was a decision.
Zurich, Bellevue, and the end of an illusion
I climbed the corporate structures with this method without always knowing I was using it. Zurich arrived as a logical conclusion: Bellevue, view over the lake, the best-positioned spot in the city. A role I had spent years earning, taking the world’s most complex technologies and making them readable for millions of people. Interviews on national television channels. Conferences across Europe. Global teams across multiple products simultaneously. A company that counted among the world references of its sector. An audience that numbered in the millions.
The perfect country. The perfect city. The perfect job.
Too perfect.
That was precisely where something broke, or rather, clarified. Not a crisis. Not fatigue. A quiet, slightly cold clarity, like understanding the fall of an empire not through books but through the physical sensation of a system that has reached its ceiling. Ibn Khaldun had written this seven centuries before that moment: prosperity ripens the principle of decay. What I had believed was an arrival was in reality a ceiling.
We are all visitors on this planet for a limited time. The real question is not whether you have succeeded by someone else’s criteria. It is whether you had the courage to define your own before it was too late.
That day, beside the lake, I stopped working for other men.
There was a second clarity that came with the first, less comfortable to name. I had adopted social media early, before most people understood what they were. And I had observed, first in myself, what they do to the ego when used without precise intention: they transform a life into a performance, a reflection into a signal, a conviction into content.
From this I drew a simple rule I have applied to everything I do since. Every act must have a reason to exist that is its own. What cannot answer that question deserves to be abandoned, not optimised.
This principle applies to social media. It applies to projects. It applies to the cities one chooses to live in.
Ten years to see clearly
I sold what I had to sell and left for Latin America. Not as a tourist. As someone who was settling, truly, administratively, socially, in successive countries, with the paperwork, the local bank accounts, the neighbours, the crises to navigate from the inside rather than from a hotel room.
I did not visit. I did not follow the classic circuits or the over-referenced points of interest. I explored in my own way: each country as a system to understand, each city as a different version of the same Spanish language, each market as a lesson in what has value when institutions no longer guarantee anything. The local cuisine, the countryside, the neighbourhoods the guides do not mention. Several countries. Several administrative identities. Several versions of myself tested against realities that Zurich would never have produced.
There are things that this Amazonian decade teaches that books cannot transmit, because they pass through the body before reaching the mind.
I learned to identify the sound of a rainbow boa in the vegetation before seeing it. To recognise the symptoms of a mosquito-borne fever that nobody around me took seriously until someone fell. To move through narco-mining zones where the rules that govern the rest of the world: contracts, institutions, legal recourse, simply did not exist.
In those territories, value is not abstract. It is negotiated at gunpoint, by machete, or through the reputation of the man beside you.
I survived multiple armed robberies. Each time, the same lesson: what you believe you own belongs to you only within the systems that decide to protect it. Step outside those systems and property reverts to what it has always been: a social convention, nothing more.
It was during those same years that a Chinese investor I met in the field told me something I have not forgotten. Doing business in Latin America cost, in his view, three times more than in Africa. Not because of infrastructure or distance. Because of the cost of corruption.
In Africa, he explained, corruption is direct: visible, negotiable, locatable. In Latin America, it is systemic. It is embedded in the very structures supposed to regulate it: contracts, tenders, institutions, the relationships between elites and the state. It never presents itself as what it is. That is precisely what makes it so expensive.
Ibn Khaldun would have recognised the diagnosis. A civilisation that has reached its level of sophistication no longer corrupts out of necessity. It corrupts by architecture.
The German Heinrich Harrer had gone to Tibet to distance himself from the Second World War and seek an ascent. He returned transformed by a world that his European categories had not anticipated: a world where social cohesion had not yet been devoured by history. I understand the principle better than most. I had my own Tibet: not in the Himalayas, but at four thousand metres on the Bolivian Altiplano, and a few hours lower, in Rurrenabaque, where the Beni begins its long descent toward the Amazon basin and where the forest reclaims all its rights over the silence of men.
Between those two altitudes, I learned what neither Zurich nor any boardroom could have taught me: that the most apparently solid systems are often the most fragile, and that life resists where no one thought to install guardrails.
What the Amazon taught me about antifragility, Nassim Taleb formalised in his books. But I had the result before the theory. A man who has survived vipers and gold miners develops a relationship with risk that board meetings do not produce. He learns to distinguish real danger from performed danger. To know when to hold and when to bend. To understand that robustness is an illusion: what cannot absorb the shock will always end up breaking.
It was in those years that the vision of Maison Esmeralda Dakar began to take shape. Not despite the instability. Because of it.
The variable no one puts in the rankings
There is a data point that quality of life indices almost never include, because it is difficult to monetise: the demographic vitality of a place. How many children are born. How many generations live under the same roof. Whether the street still has elderly people and pushchairs, or only solitary adults moving between meetings.
Europe is ageing. Japan is slowly disappearing into its own statistics. The United States holds its numbers through immigration, not through the birth rate of those who have been there for generations. This is not a moral judgement. It is a demographic reading. And that reading says something precise about what a society has stopped believing: that the future is worth investing in biologically.
There is a consequence of this erosion that indices do not measure either: horizontal trust between members of the same society. Not trust toward institutions, that one we know how to measure. But trust toward the neighbour. Toward the stranger in the street. Toward the person with whom no contract has been signed but on whom one depends all the same.
In the regions of South America affected by the narcotrafficking crisis, this trust has disappeared by successive layers. Violence did not only kill people. It killed the possibility of trusting someone one has not known since childhood. Mistrust then becomes a permanent way of life, not a one-time precaution. It erodes the social fabric, facilitates everyday corruption, and feeds the insecurity it claims to avoid.
Ibn Khaldun had put it differently: when asabiyya collapses, it is not an institution that falls. It is a society’s capacity to hold itself together.
Dakar is not a social paradise. Nowhere is. But the basic trust between people there is still real: visible in the street, in the markets, in the way a stranger shows you your way without being asked. For someone who spent years in environments where that simple gesture had ceased to exist, this is a fundamental data point.
Civilisations that stop reproducing and stop trusting each other do not lack money or technology. They have lost the conviction that the future concerns them.
I have a name above the door of this house. That name is three years old. The question of where she will grow up is not a question of cost of living or school quality in the administrative sense. It is a question of social structure: in what environment does a child naturally understand that the family is the foundation, not one option among others?
Dakar has one of the highest fertility rates in West Africa. The median age barely exceeds twenty-five years. Multigenerational households are not a returning trend. They never left. The street here looks like what a street should look like: children, elders, noise, continuity.
For someone who has moved through European capitals where children’s parks remain empty on weekdays, this is a data point as relevant as the crime rate or the internet connection.
I did not come to Dakar despite this human density. I came partly because of it.
What I had not anticipated
What I had not entirely anticipated is how familiar Dakar would feel.
French first: not the French of Paris, cold in its precision, sparing with warmth. The French of Dakar is alive in a different way, it carries the cadence of West Africa, it stretches where Paris contracts. For a half-French man raised between Castilian and Swiss-German dialect, it is a language that comes home through an unexpected door.
The architecture next: reinterpreted colonial concrete, interior courtyards, façades that tell a story of contact between continents without needing to explain it. I know this architectural grammar. I have moved through it in Cartagena, Valencia, Granada. Dakar is an unexpected and more honest version of it. As in the Alhambra, what two cultures built together here exceeds what either would have produced alone.
The food. The table as central place, not as nutritional function. The thiéboudienne that takes hours and does not apologise for taking hours. The same philosophy as the sancocho from the north of South America or the cocido madrileño: a meal is a collective act or it is nothing.
And the social values. The family as the basic unit, not as a lifestyle choice among others. Elders respected, not shelved. Children integrated into adult life, not separated into their own managed spaces. It is the South America of my childhood, in Sahelian form.
I did not know I was coming home. Until I arrived.
The bamboo
Bruce Lee said: be like water. I understand the principle. But I spent ten years planting bamboo in the soil of the Amazon: thousands of culms, four tropical food forests, a territory I learned to read season by season. Bamboo does not resist storms. It bends. And when the storm passes, it returns to exactly its position, stronger for the tension it just absorbed.
This is not passive flexibility. It is active antifragility. The capacity to strengthen precisely where rigid systems break. The Pantheon has stood for two thousand years. The Atlantic Wall bunkers are crumbling. The difference is not in brute force. It is in the design.
A man born in the Alemannic region of Europe, bilingual before having chosen to be, shaped between the north of South America, the south of Spain, Paris and Zurich. Who moved through several educational systems without fully adopting any, and understood that permanent self-education is the only competence that does not expire. Who walked through the Alhambra and understood before words what the encounter between civilisations can produce. Who left the summit: the interviews, the conferences, the global teams, the lake, at the precise moment when everything was perfect. Who spent a decade between the Bolivian Altiplano and the banks of the Beni in Rurrenabaque, moving through systems in crisis to understand what holds and what gives way. Who survived what the Amazon reserves for those who cross it without caution. Who chooses Dakar not as a tourist destination but as a place of foundation: for himself, and for the name above the door.
This man is not running away. He is applying the bamboo principle: bending voluntarily to resume in the right direction.
Empires decline from their summit. Families are built from their roots. The rest is a matter of timing and map reading.
And I have been reading maps for a long time.
What twenty years of movement taught me about empires, families and places that hold, I did not keep to myself. It is the invisible architecture of Maison Esmeralda Dakar.
Maison Esmeralda Dakar opens its doors in 2027. Dakar brings expatriates back home. Me too.
If this reading has given you the desire to learn more, the waiting list is open.