Time Out in Africa: Epilogue
Created | Updated Jun 24, 2004
Nearly a year after we first left for Africa, and having largely re-integrated Brussels work and life, what remains of the trip?
On a personal level travelling in that way and for that duration has certainly left a major impact. For both of us it provided a much-needed break – time to get some thinking done and time in which to take the right decisions. Independent travel anywhere is an excellent way to reset one's internal pendulum - inevitably, when you take work, television, domestic tasks and the other little things that fill up our lives out of the picture, you have a bit more time in which to reflect on what you are doing and the world around you. And you get a different perspective – the things that you like or dislike about your work and lifestyle become clearer when you're not doing them automatically every day.
As for what we learnt about the areas we visited – well even allowing for the fact that we deliberately chose some of the most stable and prosperous areas of the continent for our trip, and the fact that as a tourist you rarely see the whole picture, I returned convinced that the image of Africa we are given in the west is unduly bleak.
Although there are undoubtedly many things that we have in Europe that are absolutely not available to the majority of Africans, I think Africa also holds a mirror up to the way we live in western cities that shows us some of what we have lost. Time and space for sure, but also a certain sense of community. Time after time in Africa people went out of their way to help us, to give us advice or just to say hello and chat to us. Sure, this can happen when you travel in Europe, but it's not that frequent. In London, if somebody comes up to you on the street and says hello, ninety times out of a hundred it will be because they want something, generally money. In the countries we visited that would still be true about half the time, but the other half of the time we met some interesting people, the conversations of whom are often recorded in this journal. In order to profit from these encounters we learned not to brush people off the instant they came up to us, and to take the time to listen to what they had to say.
One of the things that struck me the most about the difficulties for the people we met in Africa, was the fragility of their lives, both on the individual level and at the country level. Whereas in the west most people assume, probably correctly, that they will continue to live in a democracy and that civil or religious strife will not break out, that level of certainty is not available to anyone living in the four countries we visited, despite these being some of the best run in Africa. Major challenges confront the people and governments of all these countries: HIV/AIDS, religious and ethnic tensions, transition from revolutionary governments to multi-party democracy, underemployment, crime. The seeds of all these issues are already present in the background – if badly handled any one of these factors could go wrong, plunging the country into the kind of morass that we see so regularly as the penultimate item on the news. Having said that, many of the people we met were confident about the future, I hope they are right, and on the whole think that there is a good chance that these countries will move in the right direction.
On the individual level, I noted a big difference between the cities and rural life. If you lose your job or get sick in the countries we visited, you can expect nothing or virtually nothing from the state. On the other hand your family and your community does provide a certain safety net. In the city, that safety net breaks down, the tribal framework is dislocated, and this means that if you can't find anything better than trying to sell a TV aerial at Dar airport, than even the small chance of selling one makes it worth it, because if you don't try something, for sure you won't be eating.
As for the trip - what marked us out from many of the travellers we came across was that we were lucky enough to have reasonable amounts of both time and money. We met people who were doing and spending a lot in two weeks, staying in very nice places, but inevitably missing out on much of what Africa has to offer. We also met people who had plenty of time, but were on such a shoestring budget that many options were also closed to them. The time we had probably made this different from any other trip we had taken before, completely changing the nature of our journey.
So, I'm very glad that we made the effort and took the small risk involved in making what for us is quite possibly a once in a lifetime trip, in the most literal sense of that expression. Although doing it younger or older would have been more normal, I think that this was the right time – old enough to handle the occasional obstacles of independent travel without panicking, young enough to cope with the (relative) rigours... When I read some of the travel books on Africa and look at the risks that those authors take, I have to classify our little adventures – hitch hiking in the Kalahari and the Rhino 'incident' as small beer, but wouldn't want it any other way really.
The French song writer George Brassens wrote a song called Happy like Ulysses, in which he stated how much he likes to travel, but also what a pleasure it is to come back to his home town. Well I'm still living 500km away and in a different country from where I grew up, but I think I can still identify with his sentiment – this trip to Africa was probably the most satisfying of all my travels, but it's also nice to come back to your own front door, your job and your friends! And on that note, giving that I'm beginning to sound like Bilbo Baggins, I think I'd better stop...
