The blood of Africa.  It flows in people who live on the great plains, along the lakes and mountains of the Rift Valley.  People who trek across the great desserts, tend their sheep on the highlands of Ethiopia and work in the vineyards of the Cape.  People who live from Cairo to Cape Town, on a continent of Happysadlands, where views of clarity meet those of confusion, where colors are bright and passionate, then slowly change to other hues that have different stories to tell.  It is in the pungent Khakibos when rubbed between my hands, and it’s in the cry of the Hadidah birds when they take off in anger from the veld.  It’s all around, even in the evening skies of purple-blue, and later, if you listen carefully, in the call of hungry Hyenas, somewhere out there in the dark.  It is true that some people call it the dark continent.  But our gods would not agree, and neither would the Jijidza witch bird, as she flies over us, dipping her silver wings.  No, the old Zulu witch doctor from Mtwbatuba would shake his head and smile.  He would wave his hands over his baboon bones and crocodile teeth and explain…  Africa is dark because it was made in a great black pot.  The big lightning storms around the wise old mountains and the white clouds that run before the thunder were mixed with a spoon made from the Mutsatsatti tree.  Stirred around in this big pot, where the sun beams of morning, and the blue of our skies and ageless repeats of setting suns.  Africa would be found in that great pot, cooked with fires made from the Mopani trees.  It would have all the food to feed the colors, the lightness and the darkness, the pain the laughter and the mysteries that have gone and are still to come.  

It was a cold morning in Cairo on January 14, 2006 when Rita and I was standing outside our hotel with 40 other people, ready to tackle the long road down to Cape Town.  What is our motivation to pack up and cycle through Africa for four and a half months?  Is it to be free from schedules, bosses, bills, traffic and news?  Free to burp and fart without apology, to ride a bike every day and pretend to be free from possessions and free from most social duties?  Is it to feel the ancient blood of Africa pumping through our veins?  We decided to find out if there were answers to these questions and traded our comfortable life for, what at times, felt like an insanely committed camping trip.    The trip spanned 120 days, taking us through 10 countries and across deserts, mountain ranges and lush tropical forests.  This is my take on our epic adventure – to read more about Rita’s take on it, click here.

Africa rocks, there is no other way of saying it.  The trip has lived up to all of our expectations and more.   At the beginning it was about the destination, just getting to Cape Town.   However, as you can imagine, as things progressed our priorities changed.  It became more about experiencing Africa and seeing things we wouldn’t have the chance to see again.   This altered our perspective somewhat and gave us a better opportunity to experience what some of the countries are really about.  Cycling in particular affords you the opportunity to see things better – almost in slow motion compared to driving a car or truck.  The trip instilled in me something I call the “Africa effect” – it made me less reliant on consumption, more attuned to the moment, more self-sufficient, a little braver and in less of a constant rush.

Although I was born in South Africa, experiencing other parts of Africa gave me more of an understanding of the continent.  To most people, this is the familiar Africa, a place of large families and high fertility, a continent in which societies are under extreme stress and where the young massively outnumber the old. Teeming, environmentally degraded, ravaged by poverty, hunger, HIV/AIDS and civil war, Africa appears the most plausible candidate ever to suffer a Malthusian disaster.  Or it is seen as a giant safari park. 

It is often said by travelers that have been to Africa that it gets into your blood.   I can certainly vouch for that.   Obviously we already had an interest in Africa or we wouldn’t have travelled there.   However, just being there and meeting so many wonderful people has created within us a deeper passion for Africa and Africans.   The people are so friendly, welcoming and hospitable it blew us away.   We never expected that.  In Sudan, and many other places, we were invited into houses of the poorest people in the world, happy to share their food with us without expecting any compensation.  I read a quote that said “the darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it.”   I think this is certainly true.   You don’t get many positive stories coming out of this continent and therefore it creates a biased opinion of things.   Many of my friends around the world, including South Africans, can’t believe where we have travelled.  Some of my South African friends say they would never travel out of South Africa.   When I point out that South Africa has the worst crime rates in the whole continent they shrug and say that it can’t be as bad as the rest of the continent.   We read the stories and assume that they must be true for the whole of Africa.   It is scary the amount of people that still think Africa is a single country.   It is a hugely diverse continent made up of 48 independent states.   That’s a lot of different places and views.   Our ignorance of it makes us scared of it.

There is certainly no denying that Africa has huge problems, they are well known to us and to a certain extent we are bored with hearing about them.   They are all the same: aids, hunger, poverty, corruption etc etc.   However, just because we hear about them regularly doesn’t mean they go away.   The West needs to get away from the mentality that money solves problems.   If you give someone with nothing huge sums of money to help others should you really be surprised when in many cases that money goes missing?   I think it stems from the Western mentality that money fix things.  In my opinion, what is needed in Africa is a combination of education and direct foreign investment.  By incentivizing foreign companies to set up businesses create jobs and also provides an incentive for younger people to get an education. 

The sad fact is that Africa offers little to the rest of the world and therefore most people only have a passing interest.   A great example is Zimbabwe.   Mugabe is just as much of a dictator that Hussein was.   Look at the genocide that Mugabe committed against his rival tribe the Ndebele.   It is reckoned that he murdered about 20,000 of them.   However, what does Zimbabwe offer to us?   Nothing is the sad answer which is why we grumble and moan about how bad he is but don’t actually do anything about it.   Is Zimbabwe was oil rich we’d have been in there like a shot protecting our interests.   If we really are this moral society we would be helping Zimbabwe out simply because it is the right thing to be doing.

How can we help Africa?   I don’t have all the answers what so ever.  There are a lot of NGOs and non-profit organizations that claim to help.  However, traveling through Africa you often see brand new Land Cruisers and the like driven by members of these organizations and expensive hotels occupied by the same people, attending a “brain storming” session on how to help the poor.  We have supported Plan USA and visited our “sponsored child” while in Malawi, only to realize that we are not sponsoring a child, but apparently the community the child lives in.  Nothing wrong in supporting the community, but Plan USA misrepresents the facts and it is clear that a lot of donor money goes into administration overhead.  I am therefore not convinced at all about the effectiveness of these organizations.  Hence my point about direct foreign investment, where market forces are allowed to drive the economy.  Obviously it is a complex situation and there are no easy solutions.

I am, now more than ever, totally in love with Africa and will definitely be coming back here to travel and perhaps even work.  Africa rocks!   Go give it a try and I challenge you not to be totally intoxicated with the place.

For a summary of all the stages of our cycling trip, distances and GPS data, click this link.