In going away I wanted to frustrate the stalkers and pesterers, to be unobtainable and not to live at the beck and call of emailers and phoners and people saying “Hey, we’re on deadline!” — other people’s deadlines, not mine. To travel unconnected, away from anyone’s gaze or reach, is bliss. I had earned this freedom: having recently finished a novel, and sick of sitting at my desk for a year and a half, I wanted to leave the house — and not just leave but go far away. “My purpose in making this wonderful journey is not to delude myself but to discover myself in the objects I see,” Goethe wrote in his Italian Journey. “Nothing, above all, is comparable to the new life that a reflective person experiences when he observes a new country. Though I am still always myself, I believe I have been changed to the very marrow of my bones.”
Africa drew me onward because it is still so empty, so apparently unfinished and full of possibilities, which is why it attracts meddlers and analysts and voyeurs and amateur philanthropists. Much of it is still wild, and even in its hunger it is hopeful, perhaps an effect of its desperation. “Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,” Thoreau wrote in “Walking,” “as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.” Travel in Africa was also my way of opposing the increasing speed of technology — resisting it and dropping back, learning patience and studying the world that way.
Africa had changed, and, ten years on, so had I. The world had grown older too, and the nature of travel itself had continued to alter and accelerate. It is said that the known world has never been so well known or so easily within reach. In 2011, the year I was on the road, Namibia had a million foreign tourists, and South Africa had almost twice that number. But these visitors stayed on safe and well-trodden routes. Many places in South Africa rarely saw a tourist, and in Namibia tourists kept to the game parks and the coast, seldom daring the far north, the inhospitable borderland of Angola. As for the hardier travelers, the backpackers and wanderers, I had yet to meet one who had actually crossed the border into Angola.
While the known world is well traveled and distant places appear on the tourist itinerary (Bhutan, the Maldives, the Okavango Delta, Patagonia), there are places where no outsider goes. The rich travel to remote airstrips in Africa in chartered planes, with their own gourmet chefs and guides. The rest go on package tours or randomly backpack. Yet there are places that are slipping from view, inaccessible or too dangerous to travel to. Many bush tracks lead nowhere. And some countries are closed until further notice. Somalia, in a state of anarchy, is on no one’s itinerary except that of arms dealers. Zimbabwe, a tyranny, is unwelcoming. And others — the Congo is a good example — have no roads to speak of. But even if roads existed, much of the Congo is a hostile no-go area of militias, local chiefs, and warlords, just as it was when Henry Morton Stanley traversed it on foot and by river.
In the course of my planning I kept reading that militant Islamists were busy killing unbelievers or raising hell in Niger and Chad, and in Nigeria the so-called Boko Haram gangs — Muslims who could not abide the sight of Westernized Nigerians — were killing any man who wore pants and a shirt, or a woman in a dress. These groups were looking for soft targets — backpackers, wanderers, people like you and me.
So I left on this trip with a sense of foreboding. A man who has been on the road for fifty years is an easy mark: alone, past retirement age, and conspicuous in a country like Namibia where the average life expectancy is forty-three. I consoled myself by thinking that the unlikely sight of an old man traveling alone in Africa meant that anyone who saw me would laugh me off as a crank. Dressed as I was in faded clothes, with a $20 wristwatch and cheap sunglasses, carrying a small, plastic $20 cell phone — how could I be worth mugging?
I also suspected that this trip would be in the nature of a farewell. For many older writers, and some not so old, a spell in Africa was a valedictory trip. The last serious journey Joseph Conrad embarked on, his twenty-eight days piloting a boat up and down the Congo River, formed the basis of the powerful novella Heart of Darkness, which he wrote eight years after returning from Africa, describing the book as “experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case.” After a lifetime of traveling, Evelyn Waugh spent the winter of 1959 in East and Central Africa and wrote an account of it in A Tourist in Africa. He died six years later. Both Laurens van der Post and Wilfred Thesiger spent their later years in African travel — van der Post in the Kalahari Desert, Thesiger in upcountry Kenya — and wrote about it. Hemingway’s ultimate safari, his last serious journey, was to East Africa in 1953–54, and though he shot himself six years afterward, his fictionalized version of the safari, True at First Light, edited by his son Patrick, was published posthumously in 1999. After V. S. Naipaul published his Masque of Africa, a lengthy interrogation of “the nature of African belief” through six African countries, he made it plain that it would be his last travel book.
Africa can be fierce, and some of it frankly scary, but as Naipaul’s experience showed, it can also be kind to an ailing and elderly traveler. You might expect people to say, “Go home, old man.” But no — in general, Africa turns no one away.
And so this, the greenest continent, would seem the perfect landscape for a valedictory trip, a way of paying respects to the natural world and to the violated Eden of our origins. “All the hungers of life are blankly stated there,” the English writer and traveler V. S. Pritchett wrote about Spain fifty years ago. But what he said could be an assessment of Africa too. “We see the primitive hungers we live by and yet, by a curious feat of stoicism, fatalism, and lethargy, the passions of human nature are sceptically contained.” In Africa we see human history turned upside down, and it is possible in Africa to see where we have gone wrong.
“Africa gives one back the necessary feeling that the world is vast, prodigious and noble,” wrote another traveler, and to this very region, Jon Manchip White, in The Land God Made in Anger. “In spite of what the pundits say, our planet is neither congested nor contemptible.”
All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be. There are many endangered countries, or places whose futures are threatened. I think of the radioactive Ukraine, or anarchic Chechnya, or the overburdened Philippines, or tyrannized Belarus. Each of them could use a helping hand, but when the celebrity or ex-president or glamorous public figure wishes to make a charitable appearance it is nearly always in Africa, for the sake of the exotic — or is it the drama of high contrast in black and white, or its being hypnotically unintelligible? In Africa the traveler’s license is unlimited, and Africa itself magnifies the experience in a way no other place can.
When I was following the spirited, fleet-footed Ju/’hoansi people through the low sunlit bush of Nyae Nyae, I knew I was where I wanted to be. And that kind of traveling was a way of recovering my youth, because as a twenty-two-year-old teacher at a small school in rural Africa I had spent some of the happiest years of my life — years of freedom and friendship and great hope.
If I had a sense of foreboding about this trip, it was because travel into the unknown can also be like dying. After the anguish of the goodbyes and the departure itself, you seem to diminish, growing smaller and smaller, vanishing into the distance. In time, no one misses you except in the casual, mildly mocking way of “Whatever happened to old so-and-so, who threatened to beetle off to Africa?” You’re gone, no one can depend on you, and when you’re only a dim memory, a bitterness creeps into the recollection, in the way that the dead are often resented for being dead. What good are you, unobtainable and so far away?