I've been thinking of The Traveler's Africa; the view from the Torrid Zone. Some readings beyond Equiano's Travels taken from my bookshelf (oh, and a playlist...)

Classics of the Genre

• The Modern Traveller by Hilaire Belloc
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley
• Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh
• Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene

From savage satire to the impressionistic to the documentary.

Hilaire Belloc's satirical eye is sublime. Nothing escapes his immaculate rendering of the essence of thousands of travel narratives. From antiquity to, say, the great explorers tomes (Mungo Park's travels in the interior) to near-contemporaries like Stanley and Livingstone. All that and more are highlighted in The Modern Traveller.

He dismantles the kind of writing lionized in the prose of empire by Kipling and others. Where we'd now say God, Gold and Glory, Belloc straightforwardly put it as Blood and Sin in vicious light verse. The cover by Basil Blackwood is apt. All the tropes of travel writing about Africa are outlined, the mystery at its heart, and all that made it evocative. Writing at the height of empire in the wake of the British victory at the battle of Omdurman in 1898, there is much to deflate in Victorian triumphalism and he sets about it avidly. The Modern Traveller is his early masterpiece.

The Journalistic Impulse

The journalistic impulse weighs heavily on travel narratives and Africa gives great material for the genre.

The travel writer ofen emerges jaded from the encounter with Africa despite the initial optimism. The people steal your heart but also destroy you. You might start to merely document but hallucinations often follow, such is the burden of the heart of darkness. Joseph Conrad, of course, had great influence on popular perceptions of Africa, and for good reasons: metaphors and urgent storytelling will always strike a chord.

It would take more than half a century and Chinua Achebe's own urgent storytelling to begin to change the perspective and to show that African voices need not be drowned out in the travel narratives and treated as mere backdrop. Indeed, they can lead the way.

A Burnt Out Case is probably Graham Greene's most focused entry, a lush hatchet job of the Conrad template, but Travels with my Aunt is his purest distillation of travel writing. An entertainment, perhaps, it captures the fecklessness and the roving eye. The kind of observed behavior that Evelyn Waugh savages with vicious fun in Black Mischief.

Contrast with the relatively sober yet similarly roving eye of Mary Kingsley. Hers is rooted in her search for botanical specimens but there is a richness to what she uncovers in the process. She was genuinely interested in the place she traveled to and the culture of the people she encountered. Her observations make for a treasure trove for historians and sociologists alike.

In a more literary bent in the 1920s, consider André Gide's Travels in the Congo and a delightful memoir Then I Saw the Congo by Grace Flandrau. The book covers tend to follow a distinct pattern.

• The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński
• Report in Africa by Oden Meeker
• Call Africa 999 by John Peer Nugent
• Stringer by Anjan Sundaram

(I hesitate to brand Kapuściński as a journalist, he was so much more. The journalistic impulse is, rather, what I'm getting at when it comes to the tenor of his writings. Denis Johnson in Seek treads much of the same terrain as Kapuściński but with a stronger punch).

How to take to the tropics is a delicious survey of travel writing in Africa by Oden Meeker. His and John Peer Nugent books are recent discoveries, wide ranging as befits these restless souls. Anjan Sundaram's Stringer follows Conrad by way of investigative journalism, archetypal of the mold of journalists that have had to report on conflict (e.g Fergal Keane).

African Perspectives

The Wife has long taught an African Travel Narratives course; we, each, have our favorites and trade new finds as we discover them. Our modern canon:

• An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie
• By the Sea, Desertion and Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah
• Everyday is for the thief by Teju Cole
• A Stranger's Pose by Emmanuel Iduma

A semester length course will cover readings in many styles and from many perspectives. The ones we tend to find most engaging highlight the African perspective. And things do change once African voices are in the mix.

An African in Greenland is revelatory, Tété-Michel Kpomassie's story is so engaging, he grabs you with the force of his personality, his curiousity and his drive.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, of course, in his brilliant body of work inverts the perspective and the frame that Conrad may have set and, with this freedom, makes it his own. I've lost count of how many copies of By the Sea I've had to buy as I keep recommending and gifting it to others. I'm thankful that the academy have rightly rewarded him and I no longer need to be on the street team.

A novel like Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North contains a lot travel observations but doesn't read as a traditional travel narrative and indeed there is far more sophistication in it.

Our blog era has produced two perfect little books in the genre. Teju Cole aims for close observation in Everyday is for the Thief while Emmanuel Iduma goes for the poetic in A Stranger's Pose. They are both lyrical writers with dauntingly sharp eyes.

It's fun exercise to contrast, say, The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami with Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden. The one written from the ground up and periphery, the other taken with main character energy.

And the narratives ripped from archival material carry a heavier burden that the typical travel dispatch, I'm thinking of The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi by Arthur Japin or say Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Manu Herbstein - there's no lightness to be found in the slave trade or the earlier patterns of exchange in the colonial era.

I never quite got into the former Peace Corps memoirs although I keep reading them for what they reveal despite themselves (and George Packer's clear-eyed Village of Waiting - and Central Square which I loved, doesn't excuse his later hubris see: Iraq war).

Still I much prefer Packer over Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari. And in the same vein, I favor Graham Greene over V.S. Naipaul.

I also can't resist missionary and explorer narratives, even as I read them in the same vein, mostly for what is left unsaid or for the people that linger in the background. Sometimes, however, you find gems in second hand bookstores: Cowboy Boots in Darkest Africa by Dr Bill Rice is an all-time favorite. But that one, like Belloc's Modern Traveller, deserves its own tale.

There's all that and more in The Traveler's Africa. And to close, a cautionary note to the would-be readers of travel narratives; not all is as it seems:

T
for the Genial Tourist, who resides
In Peckham where he writes Italian Guides

Moral
Learn from this information not to cavil
At slight mistakes on books on foreign travel

— A Moral Alphabet by Hilaire Belloc

What are your favorite Africa travel narratives?

African Travel Narratives, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Traveling by Burning Spear
• Africa by D'Angelo
• Traveling Miles by Cassandra Wilson
• Vasco Da Gama by Hugh Masekala
  The chorus goes "He was no friend of mine"
• Congo by Amel Larrieux
• Torrid zone by Nucleus
• River Niger by War
• Explorations by Lonnie Liston Smith
• Africa by Toto
• The natives are restless tonight by Horace Silver
• Afrodisia by Kenny Dorham
• Africa by Abbey Lincoln & Max Roach
• Travelin' light by Shirley Horn
• River Niger by Roy Ayers
• Tropical zone by Angel David Mattos
• Columbus by Burning Spear
  Cheating here perhaps, but one can never have enough Burning Spear
• Torrid zone by The Afro Soul-Tet
• Great explorer by Louis Smith
• Torrid zone by Andre King
• Dr Livingstone, I presume by Moody Blues
• Torrid zone by Timmy Thomas
• Great explorers by David Burns

Bonus beats: Searching by Roy Ayers




See also Types and Faces and The Stereotype

File under: travel, writing, storytelling, literature, review, appreciation, culture, observation, perception, Africa, history, Observers are worried, toli

Writing log: November 2, 2025

He had cloaked himself with his layan zana
Touched the soft leather amulet with its coil of goat hair
The few grains of paradise and base of shea paste and kaolin
The talisman that worked to render him invisible to adversaries

Skimping on protection, he was mindful of what many forgot,
That, for greater effectiveness of camouflage, one also needed baduhu
But you take what you get in these foreign lands, what have you
Moreover these were inflationary times, you made do with what you could afford

Still, you had to be careful when sitting to not show your soles
Avoiding also that the leather bag would touch water - taboo
Worn close to the body, he whispered thrice the name of the jinn
Spirits alighted and settled next to this Cartesian thinker

He could never understand those who closed the door to the unseen
Was it the faint hope that the invisible would pass them by? Hubris
It was a wonder that otherwise intelligent folk would speak mockingly
Of naive superstition, countering with harsh words and disbelief

A full grown man, degrees and all, steeped in the best of western education
In his business, he dealt with derivatives and complex financial transactions
A weariness overcame him, for he knew that even with the best preparation
It was touch and go with the spirit world, the strength of his protection

He'd heard the arguments about proof, reproducibility and evidence
That the signs and wonders we'd all witnessed were mere chance events
They'd plead so-called logic, rational they'd say, appeals to authority
And dismiss known cases as one-offs, charms that spoke to religiosity

And it was not even a matter of African electronics
Rather it was an unearned fealty to methods scientific
Oh well, he'd keep his juju close to his heart as if for safekeeping
As the proverb went, you can't convince someone who's sleeping

Juju, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Eri Okan (Conscience) by King Sunny Ade
• Afro Juju by Sir Shina Peters
• Iba F'Oluwa/Ajokodabi Ile by Ebenezer Obey
• Ja Funmi by King Sunny Ade
• Afro Juju Center by Sir Shina Peters

See previously: Articles of Faith

File under: superstition, tradition, Africa, culture, observation, perception, faith, religion, poetry, toli

Writing log: January 21, 2023

Abraham Lincoln rode home from Washington in December 1849, with what looked like the end of his career packed into his luggage. He'd served one term in the House, alienated his constituents by opposing the Mexican War, and lost his shot at a federal Land Office appointment.

He went back to Springfield to practice law, a near-broken man. And, for nearly 5 years, he barely participated in national politics.

He rode the Illinois circuit, argued patent disputes, and taught himself geometry from Euclid by candlelight in coach inns. He read newspapers obsessively; he read Shakespeare and the King James Bible until he could quote either from pretty much any starting point.

The folks who saw him in those years said he looked...tired.

When he returned to the spotlight, in October 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had cracked the country open. Lincoln walked onto the stage at Peoria and spoke for 3 hours straight. The man who'd been a country lawyer that morning was a national figure by midnight.

Six years later, he was president.

Lincoln's lost years are the part of the biography American children skip past in school; they get the rail-splitter, the beard, the debates, the war, the emancipation, the address, the assassination.

But the 5 years we skip over are the whole ballgame.

They rebuilt the instrument.

The English writer Katherine May coined the modern usage in her 2020 book Wintering, but the idea is older than the word. Russian peasants called the long quiet stretches between harvests zima and treated them as a season for weaving, sleeping, repairing tools, and telling stories. Japanese Buddhist monasteries built whole liturgies around rohatsu sesshin, the seven-day winter retreat that closes the year. Foragers like the !Kung and the Hadza, spent something like 4 hours a day on subsistence and the rest on…rest.

Productivity is a recent invention; wintering is not.

Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian in 1985 to a shrugging response. The New York Times reviewed it in a single column. He'd been writing in El Paso for years, broke and largely forgotten. Friends thought he'd peaked. Then in 1992 All the Pretty Horses came out, won the National Book Award, sold half a million copies, and the back catalog got reissued. McCarthy hadn't been recovering. He'd been finishing something the culture wasn't ready for in 1985 and was ready for by 1992.

He'd been wintering.

Daniel Day-Lewis stopped acting in 1997 and apprenticed as a cobbler in Florence. He came back, played Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, and won an Oscar. He stopped again. Came back. Won another Oscar. Stopped again, and by all reports has actually stopped this time, though I wouldn't bet on it. The cobbler years were how he reset the instrument.

In the long winter, organisms route metabolism inward.

Trees pull resources out of leaves, drop the leaves, and push the sugars down into root systems. Bears don't sleep, exactly. Their core temperature drops a few degrees, their metabolism halves, and they cycle slowly through fat reserves while their kidneys learn to recycle urea into protein. They come out in spring with their bones still mineralized and their muscles roughly intact, which is something no human has yet figured out how to do. What the bear performs is one of the most metabolically sophisticated tricks in the animal kingdom.

The Romans understood that a field left fallow for a season produced more in the next cycle than one worked continuously. Norfolk farmers in the 18th century made it a four-course rotation: wheat, turnips, barley, clover, with the clover restoring nitrogen the wheat had pulled out. The land that looks unused is doing the most useful work.

People who winter well are doing something analogous. They route attention inward and downward, into the parts of the system that don't show up on the surface. They read, they revise, they take long walks they can't account for, and they think the same thought 400 times until it cracks.

Most of what gets published, shipped, posted, and announced is washed off the rocks within a quarter. The people doing it are running on a treadmill that resets their position to zero every Monday. They have to keep producing to stay visible, and visibility is how they earn the right to keep producing.

It's a closed loop, and it generates very little compound interest.

The winterer is off the loop. They aren't maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain.

In the short term, you pay dearly for it.

People forget you exist. Calls dry up. Old collaborators stop replying. Younger versions of you lap you in the standings.

The benefit is that you can do work that takes longer than a quarter, and longer than a year, and longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.

Charles Darwin came back from the Beagle voyage in 1836 with the rough outline of natural selection in his head. He published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The intervening 23 years included long stretches when he wrote almost nothing in his theory notebooks, partly because he was sick, partly because he was writing 8 volumes about barnacles, and partly because he understood the case had to be airtight. When he finally published, the argument was so heavily fortified that the church spent the next 50 years trying to find a hairline crack and failing.

If Darwin had published in 1840, he might be a footnote. His 23 years of comparative silence were the moat.

Robert Caro started his Lyndon Johnson biography in 1976. He's published 4 volumes of an intended 5. He's now 90. He moved to the Texas Hill Country to live among the people Johnson grew up with, because he thought he couldn't write about a man without inhabiting his weather. Each volume took roughly a decade. The publishing world treats him as a slow eccentric. Anyone who's read the books knows he's running a different clock, on a different scale, and that no one currently working at speed is going to produce anything close.

Plenty of people stop and produce nothing. The graveyard of failed comebacks is large, and wintering is dangerous as a strategy because most attempts at it collapse into actual stagnation.

The difference between the two is invisible from the outside, until the end.

The reason the wintering few register as dangerous, when they re-emerge, is that they have something the still-busy don't have: a center of gravity. They've spent enough time alone with a single problem to develop actual opinions about it, opinions that don't move when other people push on them. In a culture optimized for constant repositioning, conviction is a structural advantage. The market doesn't know how to price it.

The winterer has been watching while you weren't looking. They've watched the consensus shift, watched the mistakes pile up. When they come back, they come back with reads you can't get from inside the swirl, because the swirl makes you stupid.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, writing in The Life of the Mind in the 1970s, described thinking itself as a form of withdrawal. You can't think and act at the same time, she said, because thinking pulls you out of the stream of ongoing events. She was suspicious of people who claimed to do both at once.

The British psychiatrist Anthony Storr, in Solitude (1988), made the case that the most original work of major figures often came out of long isolated stretches. Newton in plague-year Cambridge. Wittgenstein in Norway. Kafka in Zürau. Beckett in his Paris apartment with the curtains drawn. Storr wasn't romanticizing it; the isolated stretches were often miserable, sometimes pathological. But the work that came out of them had a density that wasn't available to people doing it part-time.

Any culture that systematically punishes withdrawal is going to lose its most concentrated thinkers to either burnout or invisibility. The modern knowledge economy, with its ambient pressure to post, ship, and stay in the conversation, is a machine for producing exactly that loss. The people we'll wish we had in 15 years are, right now, being shamed into producing slop they don't believe in, because the alternative is to drop out, and dropping out reads as failure.

The winterers who survive this will be those who can tolerate looking like they failed. This is a real and rare psychological skill, and most people don't have it. It requires you to be okay with the wrong kind of silence around your name for years. It requires you to pass on small wins that would re-establish your position. It requires you to bet that what you're working on is worth more than what you're giving up, when the only person who can evaluate the bet is you, and you might be wrong, and you'll only know in 7 years.

Lincoln didn't know in 1851 that he was wintering.

He thought he was finished.

He told his law partner William Herndon that his political career was over, and he believed it. And then his country produced an emergency that demanded exactly the kind of mind he'd been nurturing, and he was the man of the hour whose hour had finally come.

The people who appear to have stopped, in any given year, are mostly people who have actually stopped. But small fraction of them are doing the other thing.

Our world produces emergencies on a reliable schedule; when the next one comes, watch who walks out of the woods.

Beholden to temporary conveniences
Like Darwin's notion of species
The seductive appeal of idées fixes
Coinages that supplant varieties

But labels, with their simplifying shorthand
Are but an instrument in the hands of a searcher
The tool should not be mistaken for reality
It is a confusion to fall prey to appearances

...

It may suit you to doubt my intentions
Out of concern for a supposed naivety
Discarding words and ascribing fictions
Still, the state of the world is not what you think

Admittedly, base motives drive the human animal
Urges that render us no different from beasts
Disguises abound, badges of the sensualists
But the plain truth is my love is forever

Temporary Conveniences, a playlist

Dwele lays down the soundtrack to this note. His live performances were the highlight of my years in the Bay Area, he always seemed to have something to prove in Oakland. Wit in the vein of funk. The poet laureate of modern soul. (spotify version)

• Truth
• Open Your Eyes
• I Understand
• Find a Way
• Going Leaving
• What's Not to Love
• What Profit
• I Think I Love You
• Vain
• Travelin' Girl

File under: life, love, culture, observation, perception, relationships, obsession, poetry, toli

Writing log: January 21, 2023

Militias, in Africa as elsewhere, have long meant pain and suffering
Intimations of blood and sneering menace underlie their extortion
The through line from self defense units to neighborhood gangs
The stuff of protection rackets imposed by outright thugs
In Haiti and the Central African Republic currently,
In Sierra Leone and Liberia memorably,
In Congo perennially, militias are a blight

If the area boys were initially benign
Touts, they now traffic in grim violence
Bodies for hire, their labor is all too physical
Offers you can't refuse, resolution by any means necessary
In the background, rivalries and monetary interests
Underlying conditions that motivate these predators
Apt to cut you for a nothing, some violation, a perceived slight

The bulk of their ranks, per the analysts, are the lumpenproletariat
Ever changing boundaries, uniforms and unspoken codes of conduct
Territory fiercely protected, lines that the unwary shouldn't cross
Space, the world shrinks down to corners, claustrophobia
The menace of the long walk past them, the unbearable scrutiny
Grudging respect for their power, glad you made it safely home today
Cold comfort, for when in their grip, all that matters is might is right

Protection Racket, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• The Militia by Gang Starr
• Trouble by José James
• Shake you down by Gregory Abbott
• Protection by Massive Attack
• Get Yourself Together by Young Disciples
• Gonna Make You and Offer You Can't Refuse by Jimmy Helms
• Trouble by Stanley Turrrentine
• Code of the Streets by Gang Starr

[Update March 2024]

Ten months after writing the above, I note that Haiti is descending into paroxysms of gang violence. It strikes me that this note still has a couple of years to go before being published. I'd rather be wrong about what I write.

File under: militia, gang, social, culture, observation, intimidation, groups, violence, perception, crime, poetry, toli

Writing log: January 21, 2023

Alright, there's a music to the voicing
Words tumbling out not quite deliberately
A mere good morning from her... Sigh
It lifts you out of melancholy
Togetherness, to dance to her conversation
No matter the topic, it feeds your soul
To hear her. Heaven on the ground
And that's alright with me

...

Alright, a faint thread runs through this thing
Marking moods, as it does, across the rich seams
Hard to understand, but I made my peace early on
Undulating rhythms, I confess, leave me confounded
Chalk it up to underlying conditions
And that's alright with me

...

Alright, the broken strings of your heart will eventually mend
It's a healing process and I fear we must be patient
As to commitment, I'm sated with the stolen moments - intense
Restlessness is your privilege
And that's alright with me.

...

Alright, a passing of the baton
The burden of responsibility
Amidst capricious fortune that we face
Navigating across uncertain terrain
Failure is not an option they say
And that's alright with me

Alright, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Alright by D'Angelo
• Fine by Omar
• Alright by Janet Jackson
• It's Gonna be Alright by Ruby Turner
• It's Alright by Van Morrison
• I Was Doing All Right by Louis Armstrong and Oscar Peterson
• It's All Right by Sam Cooke
• That's Alright by Etta James
• That's All Right with Me by Esther Phillips
• It's Alright by Chante Moore
• Alright by Ledesi
• It's Alright, It's Ok by Shirley Caesar and Anthony Hamilton
• I Was Doing All Right by Dexter Gordon

File under: culture, observation, perception, strategy, obsession, poetry, toli

Writing log: January 18, 2023