listen to africa

I’ve been procrastinating for days over writing this introduction; explaining what we’re doing means also having to explain why we’re doing it, which I find strangely tricky.

The ‘what’ is easy: Listen to Africa is a cycling expedition from the UK to southern Africa, leaving on March 5th 2009 and ending up in Namibia around 18 months later.

The route will take us through France, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania and Senegal. From Senegal, we haven’t set our route in stone (a lot depends on visas and on changing circumstances) but we hope to more or less follow Africa’s West coast until we reach The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We’d like to cross DRC by boat, and then carry on cycling down East Africa, into Southern Africa and finish our journey in Namibia.

All along the way, we hope to visit people and projects whose work or writings or ideas we admire, and record audio interviews with them to publish here. We’re hoping that some of the people we meet will want to record and produce their own stories, interviewing their own friends and families and talking about what matters to them. As well as talking to people, we will also be recording the sounds of wildlife and music.

The ‘why’ is harder to explain. I’ll give it a go:

Why Africa? The French have a name for it: les fous d’Afrique. In short, we’re smitten. In long, we both have a love of the continent, which encompasses the people we’ve met, the big skies, the teeming wildlife, the colours, the music, the sounds… I’ll stop there to avoid further generalising about this amazingly diverse continent.

Why cycle? Both Huw and I have done our fair share of cycling expeditions before, including across Africa – myself from North to South in 2001 and Huw from East to West in 2006. While neither of us are Proper Cyclists in the UK (I’ve probably cycled a total of 20 miles since 2002), it’s our transport mode of choice for travelling. There’s the independence, the relaxed pace, the fascination of crossing countries slowly (I’ve never had culture shock when arriving in a country by bike). And a bicycle makes you uniquely approachable; there’s no shortage of conversation starters. Then there’s the living outside for months at a time and the total immersion in the world around you.

Why audio? For a while, we considered the low tech, pen-and-paper approach (the temptation to disappear from a Facebooked world…). In the end, we decided to make communications the heart of this trip; as I’ve written already, this is a continent with a lot to say and audio seems a powerful way of communicating some of it. And personally, it’s not the faces and landscapes I remember best from previous trips; it’s the conversations, the stories, the laughter, the debates. As Neil Walker writes in the Royal Geographical Society Expedition Handbook (pdf):

Few people would ever go travelling without packing a camera. It would be unthinkable to travel to the most beautiful place in the world and not be able to capture images to remind yourself later in life. And yet, if you just take a camera, you get only half of the picture. Without a camera you are blind, but without an audio recorder you are deaf.

At the expense of our bulging panniers and creaking bike frames, we’re taking both, and we hope to use them in a way that does some justice to the people and places of this magnificent continent.