Can Everyone Travel? What it Means to Travel the World as an African

I was just a tourist, and a black one at that.
—Ọlábísí Àjàlá, An African Abroad (1963)

In a picture from the 1960s, Ọlábísí Àjàlá, a Nigerian journalist, travel writer, actor, and socialite, poses on his scooter in New Delhi, India. The inscriptions on the vehicle are most likely written with paint or marker and include places such as Japan, Africa, Paris, Warsaw, Bulgaria, China, Ghana, Yugoslavia. They follow the shape of the body of the scooter, perhaps symbolizing Àjàlá’s wandering style of travel. Behind him, two Indian men walk away from him, but their heads turn away from their bodies, facing toward the camera.

Around the time of this photo, Àjàlá, as he writes in a 1963 book of his travel experiences, An African Abroad, “like many others, was detained on the Indian side of the border for a good six hours and for no apparent reason.” While he protested the long delay, “the officials sat down, leisurely sipping tea.” Later, the officials performed a detailed examination of his baggage and the clothes he wore. Àjàlá explains, “Even my scooter was stripped down, including the engine.”

His experience, even as a notable prolific traveler, exemplifies how an African is not expected to travel. Travel writing about Africa generally has not been the affair of the people who live there and historically has been dominated by white voices who used Africa to reflect upon the building of European empires. This does not reflect, though, that the African does not travel; rather, their travel is subjected to humiliation and violence, and their tales have not been considered narratives worthy of publication. Travel writing traditionally lumped Africa together as one country, laced with dark, hungry, unintelligent people. Much travel writing about Africa is only about deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs, and people who have no voices in the narrative or the text. Borders created by white colonial empires of the past often shackle the African traveler today, even within the continent. The richest man in Africa will need 35 different visas to travel across the continent, for example. As a result, these borders reinforce a barrier in travel writing by largely excluding African voices from the genre, which consequently perpetuates a trope that has painted Africa for hundreds of years as an opposite evil to the West.

Travelers from Africa therefore carry the twin burden of redefining what it means to travel and of producing travelogues from and about the continent. The act of providing African experiences in travel writing requires a particular type of effrontery, an audacity to go against colonial borders guarded by stringent visa regulations. It requires facing infrastructural deficits for road travel and financial hurdles for air travel, since airfare within the continent is more expensive than that outside the continent. Writing about Africa and providing an African perspective on life outside of it means going against Western clichés and stereotypes about it as the dark continent.

The act of providing African experiences in travel writing requires a particular type of effrontery, an audacity to go against colonial borders guarded by stringent visa regulations.

Ọlábísí Àjàlá’s An African Abroad and Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose (2018) notably counter Western narratives by acting as a cultural exploration and critique of the world in which an African traveler finds themself. These invaluable travel diaries depict two different periods of post-independence Africa from a Nigerian worldview—straight out of the shackles of colonialism in the 1960s and the “Africa rising” period of the early 21st century, respectively—and reveal how travelers from Africa navigate their existences both outside and within such colonial experiences spread across decades. Àjàlá and Iduma follow no rigid or strictly mapped routes. Àjàlá went “into India-Pakistan with no special destination in mind” nor any plan to meet any “special group of people.” Iduma traveled with a rotating group of photographers, visual artists, and writers; sometimes he traveled alone. These two African writers, who traveled about half a century apart, are not guides to a reader about untold wonders of the new world or the “dark continent” and don’t provide sightseeing recommendations or warnings about people or tribes: they simply write of the border politics they encounter; of romance, and of the beauty and dangers of places they inhabited without glossaries or detailed maps.

Àjàlá traveled across Asia, Africa, and Oceania on a Vespa scooter between 1957 and 1963. He wrote about visiting India, the Soviet Union, the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Germany, and Australia. The journey attracted the attention of world leaders; Àjàlá met and conducted short interviews with Jawaharlal Nehru, Golda Meir, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Shah of Iran, and Nikita Khrushchev. Àjàlá’s extensive journeys outside of Africa made him a pioneer of modern African travel writing; today, well-traveled Nigerians are called “Àjàlá” after him.

The attention that Àjàlá’s travels drew is particularly clear in an image of him with Jawaharlal Nehru, then Indian prime minister and a longtime anti-colonial nationalist. Nehru poses next to Àjàlá’s scooter; his demeanor is shy, his gaze away from the camera. Beside him, Àjàlá leans toward the scooter and Nehru like a protector, his face beaming and genuine, his eyes barely open, his teeth all bared.

Àjàlá writes not only about the politics of the Middle East or of Asia as homogenous political entities but also about love and romance, global conflicts, trauma, and how a Black body navigates borders unrestricted by a single postcolonial lens.

Readers of An African Abroad witness the complexities Àjàlá navigates at borders the world over. Here he is, relating the risk he took when crossing from Jordan-controlled East Jerusalem to Israel-controlled West Jerusalem:

From my hotel Israel’s Jerusalem was five minutes’ walking distance. On my scooter it would take less than two minutes. I had no exit visa from the Jordanian authorities, nor an entry visa into Israel. I was determined that somehow I must get across the border and reach Israel, no doubt under a hail of bullets if I defied the warning of the authorities. It was a gamble with death, this much I knew. I was willing to take my chance.

We also follow him as he breaks a security cordon to shake hands with Krushchev in Berlin and to request a visa to Moscow.  Àjàlá explains that he had “discouraging experiences of blunt refusals for a visa by the Soviet consulates in Washington, London, Bonn, Paris and Brussels, where in each case [he] was told [he] could not be issued with a visa to travel.” In Germany, he recounts, “Before I set foot on Polish soil a German immigration officer and a woman Customs officer stripped me completely naked for Customs examination.”

Iduma’s A Stranger’s Pose, half a century later, depicts difficulties like Àjàlá’s, this time of an African traveling within Africa. A Stranger’s Pose, which includes a travelogue, memoir, and photo essay, traces Iduma’s travels across Africa through a series of photographs and vignettes, divided into 77 episodes. From Accra to Casablanca; to Addis Ababa and Nouakchott; to Lagos and Dakar; to Abidjan and Benin City; to Abuja and Lokoja and back again. In his travels, Iduma does not write about Africa as a monolith, as often depicted in Western narratives, but approaches Africa as an individual from within it. He describes the continent not from an outward gaze but through the situations he endures on his journey.

Half a century after Àjàlá’s travels, Iduma exemplifies how the African traveler continues to be restricted by colonial lines even within the continent. Iduma and his group intended to travel from Lagos to Sarajevo. Mauritania served as a border to Morocco, which is the last African barrier before Europe. As such, he struggled to obtain a Moroccan visa from Mauritania for himself while others with an American or European passport proceeded visa-free. Iduma writes:

I go with him to a visa preparation office, which bore “Formalite Visa— Maroc-Espagne-France” above it. White Mauritanians oversee would-be applicants as they gather required documents. Many of these applicants will fail to get visas.[…] Six persons in my group require Moroccan visas. In the months before now, E. and I have attempted several applications for the Moroccan visa—in Abuja, Bamako and Dakar—without success.

In addition to struggling to obtain a visa, Iduma experiences that his audacity to travel is laced with fear of his limits in the colonial languages. As a Nigerian, he is a native speaker of English through the influence of British colonialism, but traveling within Africa also means navigating other European languages in addition to various African languages. He expresses his concern, stating: “All my yeses were indicative of a larger paranoia, that of being marked as a clueless stranger. What the hell was a person who didn’t speak French or Arabic doing in Morocco?”

Spanning a period of 55 years, these two books show that colonial borders remain a constant impediment for the African traveler. Àjàlá traveled with a British passport, and Iduma, with his Nigerian passport, experienced the same struggles; the resemblance emphasizes how the world does not expect Africans to travel and even hinders African travel.

Despite the struggles of travel, Àjàlá’s narrative is optimistic, and he expresses pride in the birth of his new nation, Nigeria, which became independent from British colonialism in 1960. The same cannot be said of Iduma’s narrative. That once-new nation has been transformed through a civil war, military juntas, and a fresh democracy, so there is a sadness to his narrative—a particular kind of mourning in travel. Like a photograph passed down over the decades, there is a sameness, a finality to the situation of the nation and the traveler. What An African Abroad becomes for A Stranger’s Pose, then, is a museum of sorts, affording a glimpse of travel from the past.

What An African Abroad becomes for A Stranger’s Pose, then, is a museum of sorts, affording a glimpse of travel from the past.

Iduma’s sorrow is perhaps captured in a photo from the book that shows him in the middle of the road, somewhere in Nouakchott. He wears a white daraa with a turban, his face half-covered. The wind tightens the daraa around his body like an embrace while some part of the daraa trails behind, floating in the air. On the wall behind him is an inscription written in duplicate, balanced to his left and right: J. B. R. J. B. R. In the background, a person driving a scooter with a helmet swishes past.

An African Abroad helped to birth African travel writing in its modern form, while A Stranger’s Pose, instead of ending the journey, dared to continue the navigation. Africa and Africans have long been exoticized through travel writing, but Iduma and Àjàlá take the genre in a different direction by owning the narrative of the African traveler and African travel, shifting away from that exotic gaze.

Combined, the two accounts’ contribution to the travelogue genre is not only that they narrate journeys across Africa and the world but also that they document firsthand experiences of what it means to be an African traveling: resisting categorization and pre-conceived tags; braving obstacles and barriers placed in their path; sometimes having to become daredevils.

At the same time, these two writers do not write as a means of countering a white narrative or as a guide on “how to travel as an African”; instead, they allow readers to wander together with them in these journeys. In the end, we might get to understand what the world is—to the Africans who could not navigate it in the 1950s and to those facing the continued barriers that still exist in the 21st century.